The Bitter Truth about the Olympics

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IV Online magazine : IV403 - August 2008
China


The Bitter Truth about the Olympics

Workers and peasants are the main victims

Phil Hearse


So the Beijing games are nearly upon us. There is no public event,
other than perhaps the soccer World Cup, that is so universally
approved of as the Olympic Games. An orgy of TV time and newspaper
columns will whip up passions about what are, after all, minority sports.

How many of the two billion or so people who will watch on TV could –
before the event – name the world pole vault champion, the world
archery champion or the Tai Kondo champion? About 0.0001 per cent.

But never mind the sheer dreary boredom of it all, it’s really all
about promoting the ‘spirit of the Games’, isn’t it? The international
harmony so evident in the opening and closing ceremonies which
seamlessly blends national pride with internationalism, the once-in-a
lifetime meeting of thousands of young athletes from around the world
and thousands of (mainly well-heeled) spectators from many lands. Who
could disapprove of an event that so evidently promotes international
harmony and understanding?

Contrary to this fairy story, the truth about every Olympics is that
behind the fake internationalism the Games are a vehicle for
mobilising officially approved national chauvinism on a mass scale,
asserting ‘national pride’ and above all a mammoth publicity
opportunity for transnational corporations, especially ‘official
partners’ of the games (like McDonalds, Rolex and Coca Cola) - but
also those who are sponsors of national teams.

Part of the cost of the Olympics is paid by the huge fees put up by
television companies for the rights and from the sponsorship of the
transnational corporations. But a large part is also paid from the
local or national taxes of the host country, as Londoners will
increasingly experience as we move towards 2012.

In the case of Beijing the whole operation is being conducted in a way
that directly victimises and impoverishes large sections of the poor
of Beijing and workers from all over China; and is leading to the
construction of hyper-expensive facilities that will after the games
be mainly privatised and only ever used by the wealthy elite.

Building the Olympics sports facilities and transport facilities has
cost a huge sum. The main stadium, the ‘birds nest’ designed by Swiss
architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, cost about half a
billion dollars. The National Theatre cost $350 million; the National
Swim Centre $100m and the Beijing Wukeson Cultural and Sport Centre,
incorporating a hotel and shopping mall, another $543million.

Associated with the holding of the Olympics is the Beijing airport
third terminal designed by British architect Norman Foster, coming in
at a cool $1.9bn and the new headquarters for China’s central
television network, CCTV, that cost another $600 million. And these
are just some of the major projects. [1]

The private sector is involved in the building of these facilities,
and despite their public funding, the private builders will become the
operators of these new facilities for a 30-year period. In other
words, huge amounts of Chinese state funding is being used to
guarantee the profits of Chinese companies for years to come.

In order to clear the way for these new prestige projects, that will
project Chinese power and influence on a world scale, 1.25 million
people have had their neighbourhoods and homes demolished or their
land confiscated. The many people who have complained or organised
protests about this have been silenced by jail sentences or violence –
not surprising in a country that has one of the most corrupt, violent
and repressive state apparatuses in the world.

A famous case is that of Ye Guogiang, who on China’s National Day in
October 2003 tried to kill himself by throwing himself off a bridge in
the Forbidden City in front of hundreds of onlookers, in protest at
the forced demolition of his family’s home and restaurant. But he
survived and was sentenced to two years in jail for ‘disturbing social
order’. His family continued to protest and were continually harassed
by the Chinese authorities. There are many similar cases.

While the cost of the Olympic-related construction projects is
enormous, outside China it would have been vastly more. What China had
at its disposal was huge amounts of cheap labour. Construction
workers, typically migrant workers unable to find work on the land,
were usually housed in barracks on the construction site, paid an
average of $4.7 a day and forced to work seven days a week. Many of
these workers are employed by subcontractors and late payment or no
payment of wages is common. The Chinese government itself estimated
unpaid migrant workers’ wages in 2003 at more than $12bn.

This is then the main pattern of the Beijing games. Endemic features
of Chinese state capitalism – land evictions with little or no
compensation, ruthless exploitation of migrant workers, and mega
corruption by party officials to promote their own companies, families
or cronies – have been used to create a spectacle of wealth and power
that is designed to impress people across the globe.

This plan of course has had some little local difficulties, not least
the pro-Tibet demonstrators’ attempts to disrupt the carrying of the
Olympic torch in London, Paris and San Francisco. But then came the
Szechuan earthquake which mobilised international sympathy for the
Chinese government, as it appeared to carry out a speedy and efficient
response to the earthquake catastrophe – something that obscured the
fact that many of the dead perished under poorly constructed
buildings, a direct result of the corruption that has allowed
cheapskate jerry-building on a mass scale, in return for appropriately
large bribes to local officials from the building companies.

The Olympic Games celebrates not the ascent of a classless abstraction
called ‘China’, but the rise of a vicious and corrupt ruling class
that maintains its power by the ruthless use of violence and
censorship – and where the state intrudes directly into people’s work
and family lives on an Orwellian scale.

I won’t be watching, I refuse to go to any pub that has it on a TV
screen, I don’t care how many (actually how few) medals Britain wins
and I’ve never been for a moment glad that the Olympics are coming to
London in 2012. Perhaps more than at any time since the 1936 Berlin
Olympics, these games are designed to promote the image of a truly
despicable regime. The left and the social justice movement shouldn’t
fall for it for a single moment.

-Phil Hearse writes for Socialist Resistance in Britain. He is the
editor of Marxsite (www.marxsite.com).

http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1512

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