Should China Be Hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics?

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

You ask me if China should be hosting the 2008 Olympics based on China’s issues with human rights, pollution, and bad press. To keep it real, I don’t think this is a good question to ask; to want me to give you a yes or no answer. I don’t think that the China issue has to do with all this hoopla in the news about whether China is morally or environmentally fit to host the Olympics. I believe that the powerful nations of today (which are nations that are majority white) are just jealous of this new non-white superpower that is emerging. It seems to me that the numerously powerful, white majority nations of today are finding reasons to bad mouth China to take away from their accomplishments. China is a growing nation, and just like growing nations they have their problems.

As I recall the United States hosted the Olympic Games in 1904 in St.Louis, and the nation had its own issues of human rights, pollution, and restrictions on the media. While our great nation was hosting the Olympics, my great-great grandparents, Nathaniel and Alvenia Tillman, were living in utter poverty and facing racial hatred as African Americans in the Deep South. Human rights issues were rampant then in the United States. Just as the 1904 games were going on, black people around the nation were being lynched, jim crowed, mentally abused, and being exploited by this system called sharecropping, which is a system that the last three generations of my family have been a part of. Also, we can mention the imperialistic acts that the nations of Europe and the United States were involved in during that time. To mention a few we have the United States occupation of Cuba and the Phillipines. England was causing many problems in India, and all of Europe was raping Africa of its resources. But the majority of the host cities of the olympics were in these powerful nations.

China has just started seeing significant economic growth, particularly in manufacturing. Though economic growth is good we know that there are side effects: pollution. How do we know? Because during the Industrial Revolution pollution was a problem as well to the nations of Europe, The United States and Canada, and Japan. It didn’t take these nations a few years to fix their pollution problems, and these nations still today have pollution problems. Some people criticize China like they have been involved in massive industrialization for hundreds of years. Critics should give China time to fix the problem. It’s like getting mad at a person for double dribbling, and they just learned the game of basketball. That is not constructive criticism, that is player hating; and that is what these powerful nations are doing.

As for China’s restrictions on its media/press, I don’t know too much about that to talk about it. I do know that the powerful nations have had restrictions on its media/press. The United States has not always kept its promise of the first amendment, and I could guess that it wasn’t wise for a person to speak negatively about the imperialistic ways of European nations during the latter half the 19^th century and the early half of the 20^th century, especially in Nazi Germany.

To answer your question whether China should host the Olympics, I say yes. The reason why is because I think they deserve it for their accomplishments. The economy is growing 8-10% a year compared to other developed nation’s 2-4%. That is great, and for the Olympics committee to consider having their games hosted in your country is an honor. It reflects on how well China has done. They deserve it. Other nations do not have the moral high ground to criticize China, because those same criticizing governments had or still have the same problems as China. As stated before it looks like an attack upon an emerging non-white nation to me; but that’s my opinion.