allAfrica.com: Nigeria: Welcome Back From Beijing (Page 1 of 2)

WITH the unacceptable human rights record of China, particularly the situation of Tibet, one should wonder why the United States, as the leading nation of the West, agreed to the choice of China to host the recent Olympic Games

It would have been consistent with the former stance of boycott, to stay away as they did from Moscow in 1980. But times have changed and so must attitudes and strategies, even if policies are thus somewhat abraded.

In the past three decades, China has continued to loom large into the consciousness of other nations with bold, brash steps of a country that has truly arrived. The evidence abounds in the latest area for assessing human advancement, and that is IT - Information Technology.

The West has had to accept that there is a new player in the field, who has claimed its own patch and cannot be ignored as a rival. And yet, so little is known about that contestant apart from its awesome size and the topside of a monumental past shrouded behind the inscrutable face of its antiquity.

The thinking of the West might have been that in hosting the Olympics, China would; at least, reveal an appreciable amount of her hidden parts like, for instance, the motivations of her philosophy, or the projection of her ideologies. Well, the Beijing Olympics have come and gone, as they say, and what have we discovered?

Well. If you ask me, nothing! Oh, there was confirmation of some firm perceptions, but we were favoured with no discoveries. We were already aware of the highly regimented system of life and living in a country of more than one-third of humanity, a real world of its own, which not only survived, but also thrived in more than three decades of isolation in which it reveled before shouldering its way out to face the rest of the world, when it was good and ready.

We already knew that there was development of an untold intensity in technology and science, which probed into and improved the ancient stock of knowledge rather than impair its integrity. Thus we expected, though we were almost stunned all the same, by the grandest fireworks display the world has ever seen, both at the opening and the closing ceremonies.

The Olympic Games was named after the mountain in which the Ancient Greeks believed their gods resided. That is where your heart rose at the beginning of each Olympiad occasion -way up high on a mountain of expectations and speculations.

It stayed there through the breathtaking moments of elation and disappointment, and the tide of astonishment or vindication. It did not matter whether you were involved at no higher point of participation than that of a grounds man in an arena, or one of the army of technicians, or hordes of media men.

The excitement sat on your shoulders more, of course, if you were a competitor or an umpire, a referee or a judge. But it is all a matter of the intensity of your involvement. There was the commonality of interest, if not objective, that brought you together with other people during the day, and the social meetings in the evening. You embraced new friendships and experienced the fresh vistas related to different climes of distant peoples, suddenly made familiar by contact.

The Games thus transcends the physical contention in the arena. It becomes a contest of policies and postures, in which ideas compete with ways of life. The Chinese have done rather well, all considered, and it seems to stick in the craw of the Americans.

That is why there have been all those snide remarks about the child who sang her way into the hearts of millions at Opening Ceremony but, we are informed, using another child's voice. Who cares? Whose voice sang in the award-winning movie,

"My Fair Lady"? And all that noise about a fourteen-year old winning the Gymnastics title instead of a sixteen-year old and above, could have been hailed as an example of a prodigy exposition if the champion had been an American. All the same, the mud-slinging of the Americans was interspersed by their grudging admission of the magnificence of the Chinese presentation.

The Games has always been a platform for the advertisement and campaign for new products, new plays and even new political movements in the olden days. It still is today in some ways, and China washed the eyes of the world in colour mingled with panache. Someone once said Africa appreciates colour, but the Orient understands it.

The Beijing Games showed off that knowledge. If even the host had won just a modest number of medals, the spectacular quality of the show would have been enough to remember, but the haul of medals grabbed by China left all other nations panting far behind.

Of course, we are talking here of Gold medals, the number of which normally determined the position of the competing nations, before the other medals were taken into the reckoning.

But as China's Gold medals increased, so was more emphasis placed on the over-all number of medals in which the United Sates led the others.

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