The China Saga

After seeing all the protests in London the other day, and everyone sporting Tibet flags, it was tempting to be involved in some way. It's hard to stay out of this one.

I can't help sympathising with the Tibetan cause, even though I think the Chinese are right to say that Westerners butt in without really understanding the situation too well. I mean, we take no real interest in Chinese politics except to show pictures of their military propaganda and then to criticise their foreign policy without having much knowledge of how it works or why. Admittedly it's a bit hard to understand it when they don't allow foreign journalists. But it's important to acknowledge, most of us criticise the policies without any clear idea of what's going on.

Two things are clear to me. Firstly, that you can't dissociate sport and politics in this whole Olympic affair, the way people like Steve Redgrave call for. The Olympic Games are political one way or another, however much sportspeople would like to live in a fancy schmancy world where they're furthering the cause of sport without playing to anybody's agenda. The protests are countering another political agenda which is China promoting itself through the Games, they're not "politicising" it, as many would have it. Let's lose the rosy glasses if we're going to be realistic athletes.

The second thing is that whatever way you look at it, the Tibetans are drawing attention to the sores in Chinese government policy, which somebody needs to do. Whether this is territorial in-fighting or - what seems blindingly obvious - a superpower determined to crush a legitimate people's right to self-determination, the Chinese have no right to keep everybody out of their "internal politics" if they want media attention for how wonderfully developed their society is. You can't have your media cake and eat your Tibetans.

Not that I'm an expert on any of this, but it certainly brings it home when you've got friends on either board, or when somebody comes up to you in the street asking how much the Dalai Lama is paying you to take his side. Literally, a host of Chinese students were convinced down to the hilt that the only reason these protests were taking place - and that idiot Westerners were getting involved - was financial gain. They simply couldn't accept it was on moral grounds.

I for one will make a point of boycotting as many Chinese products as I can at this time, if for nothing else to make the separation between the government and its people, which is all to easy to conflate in this situation. After all, I wouldn't like to be amalgamated with Gordon Brown's appearance on American Idol just because I happen to live in the UK...