The activist in me was, er, activated when I was about 13. A vile gym class teacher had decided that the day's torture would entail all the boys sumo-wrestling each other shirtless. Naturally I objected to this humiliating ritual. I was a fat, prepubescent teenager, and the idea of having my swathes of fat ooze all over the floor in front of the class was like being commemorated in the Museum of Lard. So I decided to stage a protest. Finding a few other like-minded friends, we pretended to crucify ourselves against the back wall while loudly accusing the gym teacher of being a pedophile. It worked, and later that night as I ate my chocolate macaroons and cheesecake out of a tub of fried Mars bars, I decided that activism was the best thing since white bread (wrapped around a piece of fried chicken with a generous spoonful of mayonnaise on top).
Recently, I seem to have changed my mind. I'm not sure if it's the Anya Hindmarch non-plastic bag frenzy or the Feed The Children Of The World version that marked the beginning of the end, but I'm pretty certain that the rich designers and corporations who designed them have ticked "care about the world" off their to-do list, right after "buy that expensive caviar," "have decadent party" and "line Miu Miu the cat's litterbox with hundred-dollar bills." I'm irritated by people who think they can buy a pair of shoes and contribute to AIDS research at the same time, while buying local produce that reduces food miles and subsidizes Farmer Jones who continues raking in the green (never mind about Farmer Gandhi or Farmer Mandela, who rely on exported crops). I loathe it when celebrities talk about saving children's lives and eliminating poverty in the world before returning to their one-tenth-of-the-world's-resources houses to watch "The Hills."
I'm already veering off track, so here's the point of my enervating laundry list of despair: The protests over the 2008 Olympic Games have really begun to annoy me with their hypocrisy. I'm certainly no fan of authoritarian dictatorships: Having lived for quite a while in one, I've already pledged my allegiance to democratic institutions and human rights. And among authoritarian dictatorships, China has a human rights record that's a little like handing in your spelling test blank with your name in hieroglyphics. So, yes, China hasn't done too well this century.
But neither has any other country in the developed West. It was only about 50 years ago that the sun still never set on the British Empire, which had been sustained through violent suppression of peaceful, legitimate claims to self-rule and a few massacres, from Amritsar in 1919 to Northern Ireland in 1972. Let's not forget either that the French cold-bloodedly killed thousands of Vietnamese and Algerians civilians in the process - if it should be called that - of decades of unwilling decolonization, later handing the torch of fighting Vietnamese insurgents over to America (who promptly burnt down My Lai). Even Japan, the civilized jewel of Asia, has about 300,000 skeletons in its Nanking closet. Sure, things are different now - but official recognition of many atrocities has always been less than forthcoming, some of them coming as late as the nineties. Compared to the English, the French and even the Americans just a few decades ago, when they were far more developed than China is now, China has shown quite a bit of restraint in Tibet.
Having the Olympics in China is really the same as having it anywhere else; it's a classic case of "do as I say, not as I did." When French president Nicolas Sarkozy says he might boycott the Olympics, I'm tempted to point out the plank - no, the maison francaise in his eye. When others get all riled up about Tibet, I wonder if they've forgotten about Guantanamo Bay with its little boards and buckets of water in their backyard.
I suspect it's a little of the activism bandwagon and a lot of the China-is-a-scary-dragon rhetoric. It's like the summer I went to Germany trying to discover all the great things I had heard about German culture only to encounter well-educated racists who, among other things, pointedly told me that Germans are "superior to Asians." In German. I felt like saying, "Hello there? This is the kettle. You're living under delusions of cultural superiority." In Chinese.
Johann Loh is a philosophy major from Singapore who is studying abroad this year at Oxford. He can be reached at loh@princeton.edu.
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