China Racing Insurrection, Corruption, Pollution to Hold Olympics Before It Fall Down

China had wanted the 2008 Olympics in Beijing to be a showcase of its power, accomplishments, and its civilisation. Instead, China's brittle hold on its empire is being shaken at three points of the compass. To the East, Taiwan represents a constant thorn in the side of the petty Beijing autocrats, and acts as a blockade to the PLA's deep water navy. To the South, Tibet rebels against the oppression and injustice of Beijing's foreign invading army. To the West, Xinjiang is in constant insurrection against the brutal CCP invaders.

Inside China proper, a few decades of poorly administered industrial development has left the air, water, and soil of China damaged for centuries. 300 million Chinese live daily in desperate poverty, and discontent is common among all but the fortunate and connected. How long can China survive, much less prosper?

Beijing is trying to put its best foot forward in anticipation of the XXXIX Olympiad to be held in Beijing in August. From the Chinese side, the authorities have put their whole prestige and even more, their hopes, on the Games in an almost mystical way. The Games, awarded to Beijing over the protests of human rights activists the world over who compared it to Hitler’s Olympiad in 1936, were supposed to anoint “the rising China”. They were to be an accolade for a China which after several hundred years of coma after its bitter encounter with the industrial West was again taking its place as one of the world’s oldest and most important civilizations. Everything is being done that Beijing can think of – from employing the world’s chicest architects to mobilizing tens of thousand of collie labor to reinforcing its control apparatus – to make the games "a success”.

But the Chinese capital is perhaps one of the worst places that could be chosen for competitive sports. The climate, the encroaching desert which ladens the air with sand, the incredible pollution created by rapid industrial development that has ignored all environmental standards, a police state that demands the participants and the millions of guests behave according to rigid standards alien to democratic societies, plus all the problems of staging such an event, have made the Beijing games problematical from the beginning. Now the Chinese will be under increased harassment from human rights activists around the world and calls for boycotts.

Whether real or a subterfuge to use as a pretext for repression, the Chinese have identified another threat to the games. They recently reported discovery of plots by the Uighur nationalists in their westernmost province of Singkiang to stage terrorist events at the Games. The Uighurs are a Turkish people, perhaps as many as 10 million, twice the Tibetan population, who came under tenuous Chinese rule only in the late 18th century when the Han Chinese themselves had been conquered by the alien Manchus. every effort has been made by the Chinese to colonize Tibet – after stripping away half its historic territory from the so-called Tibetan Administrative Zone – by encouraging immigration of ethnic Han Chinese to swamp the indigenous population. Lhassa, the traditional religious and political capital, may well have a Han Chinese majority now. It was, after all, China’s President Hu Jintao, as gauleiter of Tibet, who put down with ferocity the last Tibetan resistance to Chinese rule in 1989.

The bloody repression, shielded from the world for the most part by elaborate censorship and suppression, and propaganda exploiting the misery of the Han Chinese victims of the Tibetan mobs, will continue. But it is unlikely that the “national” movements in either of these three appendages of the Chinese empire will be quiescent forever. ___WorldTribune

China's leadership has not lasted as long as that of the late, unlamented USSR. Time is running out for the corrupt autocracy.