Welcome to Beijing! Remove your scruples before entering

Pete McMartin, Vancouver Sun

Published: Thursday, August 21, 2008

To Beijing, or not Beijing? Not, decided our prime minister, for reasons that remain perfectly unclear, though the excuse given was "scheduling conflicts."

Perhaps he was getting his nails done that day, I don't know. But to publicly decline the Chinese government's invitation -- as I had hoped he would -- because it's a thuggish autocracy so disdainful of democratic values that it must even disguise its true face by having a kewpie doll lip-sync in the opening ceremonies? Alas, no. Nothing that idealistic. Tibet and Darfur are on their own in this one. Stephen Harper passed on Beijing because he had a scheduling conflict, not a moral one.

Which is, I have to say, my problem, not his. If Harper wants to give Beijing a pass for whatever reason he wants, that's his right. No mea culpas needed. After all, he has in the past demonstrated an admirably vocal and wholly un-Canadian-like resolve on the issue of China's abysmal human rights record. As for prime ministerial snubs, Paul Martin gave Athens a miss in 2004, and as I remember, there were no editorialists fretting then that Martin's absence would jeopardize our supply of imported feta.

But now?

Oh my, the wails of the accommodationists. Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae accuses Harper of suffering from a Cold War "hangover," with no advancement in human rights to show for it (as if that were Harper's fault and not the Chinese). Then Jean Chretien blasts Harper not only for jeopardizing the Liberals' years of careful obsequiousness to China, but for alienating the Chinese by having the audacity to bestow honourary Canadian citizenship on that international inconvenience, the Dalai Lama.

Ah, if only Chretien had showed that same diplomatic sensibility when dealing with our closest friend -- by which I mean, if you had forgotten, the U.S. No matter: If he were still prime minister, Chretien thundered, he would have gone to Beijing. Then again, if he were still prime minister, many would have asked him if he would please not bother coming back.

The press? Harper has had lots of editorialists across the country tut-tutting his no-show, including, I should point out, at this newspaper. The tone of these comments, generally, has been the usual well-reasoned, liberal-democratic touchy-feely niceness, only this time it was superimposed over an underlay of realpolitik disdainful of what was considered to be Harper's woeful lack of diplomatic sophistication. We shouldn't alienate the Chinese, they argue, because if we alienate the Chinese, they'll only be more repressive, not less. So let them hold their Olympics and let the world get to know them and let them get to know the world and one day they'll be just like us.

And, oh? By the way? Not incidentally? Pissing them off will be bad for business.

But what if the Chinese are not interested in becoming just like us? What if the political evolution the West hopes China will embark upon -- that is, toward what we blithely believe to be the obvious superiority of a liberal democracy -- does not happen? What if the Chinese have a different evolution in mind, and want the rest of the world to evolve toward their idea of government?

If that's the case, the International Olympic Committee has just given China the world's biggest stage to prove its point. Forty-three gold medals and counting. An efficiently run system of dazzling venues. A meticulous, if humourless, attention to detail. The astounding engineering of sporting excellence in athletes as disparate as beach volleyballers to divers to 13-year-old . . . excuse me . . . 16-year-old gymnasts. And all of them raised and moulded and paid for by the State.

And to top it off, the fastest growing economy in the world.

So what if the emergent nations of the world, and even some of the more developed nations of the world, look upon what is happening in Beijing and think, hmmm, there may be something to this mix of capitalism and autocracy? What if governments hungry for more order begin to think, hey, we might be able to have our Prada and political repression, too? What if they see Beijing, and not Washington, as a template for success?

Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan worried about that very thing in his 2008 book The Return of History and The End of Dreams. The Cold War hadn't ended, Kagan argued, it had only gone into temporary hibernation. (And has fully re-emerged, hungry and angry, somebody should tell Bob Rae, with the Russian bear's mauling of Georgia.)

Wrote Kagan: "The liberal international order that emerged after [the Second World War and the post-war triumph of democracies over communism] reflected the new overwhelming global balance in favor of liberal forces. But those victories were not inevitable, and they need not be lasting. Today, the re-emergence of the great autocratic powers, along with the reactionary forces of Islamic fundamentalism, has weakened that order and threatens to weaken it in the years and decades to come.

"The future international order will be shaped by those who have the power and the collective will to shape it."

The Chinese have certainly shown power and collective will in Beijing.

Here, we fret that our prime minister didn't go pay homage to it.

pmcmartin@vancouversun.com