BEIJING — Remember the "Genocide Olympics"? Remember all the talk that China's anxiety to let nothing spoil the Beijing Games had left it vulnerable to demands for a change in its dealings with the outside world?
After a barrage of pressure from actress Mia Farrow, film director Steven Spielberg and a band of Nobel Prize winners over its policy on Darfur ahead of the Games, China appeared to bend, and its critics crowed that they had hit a raw nerve.
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| Children from supposedly 56 Chinese ethnic groups cluster around the national flag during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, on August 8. Children from China's dominant Han population were used in a key part of the Olympics opening ceremony, not youngsters from all 56 ethnic groups as claimed, an official said in comment published Friday. (Photo: AFP) |
But what price did China really pay for its day in the sun?
In foreign policy terms, not much.
"I don't see them changing their policy to get Western approval," said Andrew Nathan, professor of political science at Columbia University. "They have no need to change anything they do in foreign policy to make themselves look good."
Even on the eve of the Games, when one might have thought the pressure to toe a Western line was greatest, China vetoed a UN resolution slapping sanctions on Zimbabwe's government for alleged election rigging and intimidation of the opposition.
Indeed, the Games are much more likely to change the way China is perceived from outside—resurgent, confident and proud—than the other way around.
It is true that there was some policy movement on Sudan from China, one of Khartoum's top oil customers and its biggest arms supplier, and it came after shrill criticism that Beijing had failed to use its sway to end bloodshed in the western region of Darfur.
China backed a UN resolution authorizing a hybrid UN-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur, it nudged Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir to accept the force, and it contributed its own engineers.
Andrew Small of the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Brussels said the meshing of China's Sudan policy with the Olympics was an unexpected jolt for Beijing, one that challenged bureaucratic resistance to a more accommodating approach.
"Once it was in the air that the Olympics could be affected by these issues, they had to sit down and think much more concentratedly about each of them," he said.
Shi Yinhong, professor of international security at Beijing's Renmin University, said the Games also encouraged China to be more public and pro-active on its hitherto discreet Sudan policy.
Sticking to principle
However, there was no u-turn moment that transformed China from a Khartoum ally to a follower of Western policy on Sudan: its policy was, and still is, much more nuanced.
For instance, in 2005 China abstained from a UN vote that authorized the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor to investigate Darfur, angering Khartoum, which wanted it to use its veto.
