WASHINGTON -- The ongoing spy plane crisis is triggering American
opposition to one of China's deepest desires -- being selected to host
the 2008 Olympic Games.
|  | | A Chinese military police officer guards the U.S. embassy in Beijing on Monday. As the political impasse over the collision between a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese military jet continues, the U.S. is attempting to block Beijing's bid to host the Olympics. |
Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey and others last week added
their voices to the 100-plus bipartisan members of Congress who are
calling on the International Olympic Committee to deny Beijing the
honor of being the site of the 2008 Summer Games.
"I think this is precisely the time for us to go all out to stop
the Chinese from getting the" Olympics, Woolsey said. "China needs
to understand that when they pull this sort of strong-arm tactics with
the United States, they make things worse for themselves, not
better."
China has embarked on a furious effort to finally win the
international plum of being an Olympics host, an honor it believes it
deserves as the globe's most populous nation but which it has been
unfairly denied for nearly a decade.
Woolsey, Reagan administration arms-control chief Kenneth Adelman
and other China hard-liners say the communist giant has given itself a
huge black eye with its intransigence in holding 24 U.S. airmen and
women and their EP-3 spy plane after an in-air collision April 1
between a Chinese F-8 fighter and the high-tech reconnaissance
aircraft over the South China Sea.
Until now, China had generally been ranked as neck-and-neck with
Paris as the most favored city to win the nod of the International
Olympic Committee when it announces the site July 13. Other cities in
contention are Toronto; Osaka, Japan; and Istanbul, Turkey.
Thanks in part to U.S. criticism of China's harsh treatment of
political dissidents, Beijing in 1993 lost its bid to host the 2000
Summer Olympics to Sydney, Australia. That loss still rankles China's
leaders, who view winning the Olympics as tantamount to finally
receiving the respect it deserves as a great world power.
"It's very, very, very, very important to them," former U.S.
ambassador to China James Lilley said this week. "It's a matter of
'face,' international prestige, plus all the show and glamour and
attention that comes with it."
Other experts say a quick resolution of the current standoff should lessen any negative impact on the
Olympic committee's deliberations.
But if it drags on, or if other American objections increase, the
committee might snub Beijing in fear that if it didn't, the United
States might boycott the games as it did the Moscow Olympics in 1980
in protest of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the experts said.
"That would be disastrous and they do not want that to happen
again," said American University professor Mitch Hammer, an expert on
Asia and crisis response.
Even before the latest incident, opposition in the United States
was growing. More than 100 House Democrats and Republicans had
endorsed a resolution decrying China's human-rights record,
particularly its crackdown on members of the Falun Gong spiritual
movement. A similar resolution is gaining steam in the Senate.
China has blasted such criticism as not only wrong but misplaced.
"Politics should not be mixed with sports," Beijing Mayor Liu Qi
told reporters recently. "We are a sports superpower of 1.2 billion
people who passionately love the Olympics movement but have never
hosted an Olympiad." Send this story to a friend | Most sent stories |
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