"You have to ask: Where were these security men last week? Beating up people in the villages of China, no doubt.”

Maybe, maybe not

Over the past week, the Olympic torch wound its way through the streets of the free world en route to Beijing, host of the 2008 summer games and seat of perhaps the world's most prominent autocracy. Citizens of France, Britain, and the United States, accustomed to voicing their opinions in the public square without governmental restraint, took the opportunity to criticize the Chinese government for its deplorable record of political repression and human rights abuses, highlighted by a recent crackdown against protesters in Tibet. They jeered as the torch passed, surrounded by a phalanx of Chinese security goons, and a good number of them broached the divide between protest and outright civil disobedience, clambering over police barriers and attempting to extinguish the flame altogether. Indeed, crowds were so disruptive that in Paris the torch was loaded into an armored police carrier, and in San Francisco, it was sent on a different route than previously announced in an effort to forestall an incident altogether.

The Chinese government, unaccustomed to public displays of displeasure at home, has reacted with much pique at those abroad. According to the New York Times, Qu Yingpu, a Chinese spokesman condemned the London demonstrations, saying “This is not the right time, the right platform, for any people to voice their political views.” This phrasing is interesting, because it reminds one that in China, the government decides which platforms and times are "right" for people to "voice their political views" - in fact, they even decide what types of "political views" may be voiced. Indeed, Mr. Qu's remarks are more than a little risible, considering that the Communist Party has welcomed political statements and actions in the context of the games that bolster its prestige both domestically and internationally; this seems to be the entire point behind China's bid to host the Olympics. Not that this is shocking or unusual: host countries always use the Olympics to boost their own agendas. Autocracies are more apt to indulge in this nationalistic chest-thumping than most; not having legitimacy conferred upon them by popular mandate as in a liberal democracy, they manufacture their own. Hence the nauseating spectacle of Adolph Hitler turning the 1936 games into a grotesque validation of his perverse eugenic fantasies; hence China, which has thus far had the good taste to confine its Gestapo tactics to its own population, using the Beijing games as a cudgel against internal opposition.

All of this is not to say that I necessarily endorse boycotting the Olympics; such symbolic gestures are only likely to buttress the regime and alienate the Chinese population, most of whom look forward to hosting the games as an affirmation of their national success. Isolating a country with 1.8 billion people and the world's 2nd largest economy is a fool's errand, and America's long record of failure when it comes to diplomatic disengagement (Iran, Cuba) augurs against trying it. At this point, damaging our relations with China will not hasten the liberation of Tibet or the rise of democratic institutions - indeed, it will only cement the tenuous bonds in place between China and other autocratic nations, like Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Myanmar.

Yet, as the Chinese have made the officially apolitical Olympics an implicitly political affair, I would argue that it is incumbent upon those citizens of the free world who disapprove of China's policies to make it an explicitly political one. Demonstrators should feel free to disregard Beijing's opinion on the propriety of using the Olympics as an occasion for protest; indeed, they should seize their chance to draw intense international scrutiny to China's shameful record on human rights. Let China's system of cruelty and repression compete with the imperfections of liberal democracy in the marketplace of ideas. Or, as Chairman Mao said, "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend."