Human rights are a tricky one. A concern for them is one of the most essential and profound points about being human, and yet a sentence like, ‘Chinese workers are dying every single day’, read on p191 of a Human Rights Watch book, will mostly elicit a groan. The unfortunate truth is that Chinese workers have been dying every single day for many millennia. The striking thing about current times is that a fair number of Chinese workers are getting richer every single day.

The trouble with human rights is that beside the portly realities of money and power, they can very easily look dinky. The ‘dinkification’ of human rights is frequently seen in the pursuit of corporate profits and (seldom unconnected) actions of authoritarian states. More sinisterly, human rights are used as fig leaves for interventionist policies; most often they receive lip service from international bodies more interested in something else. Such is the case with the Olympics. The Olympic Charter states:

any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement

A fine sentiment, yet hard to see in the history of the Olympic Games. China’s Great Leap, reads less like a book about human rights achievements and is more a series of excruciating gaffs. The 1936 Berlin Olympics is a howler, as is the 1980 Moscow Olympics, which opened shortly after the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan. The 1968 and 1988 Olympics were both hosted by countries (Mexico and South Korea respectively) which, at the time of selection, were run by authoritarian regimes. This is perhaps unsurprising when the presidency of the International Olympic Committee has been dominated over the last 50 years by an unrepentant Nazi sympathiser (Avery Brundage), followed by a proclaimed Francoist (Antonio Samaranch).

What the Olympics has to do with human rights is even less clear when put in a political context that reveals the Olympics as an unreservedly nationalist competition, based at heart on a kind of sublimated warfare of national champions. Never in recent decades has this aspect been so prominent as with the Beijing Olympics, where China’s determination to top the gold medals table is an outright expression of the end of the ‘sick man of Asia’ image, and the termination of the last 150 years of foreign oppression (notably that of Britain and Japan).

So, it’s perhaps unsurprising to see a fallout of human rights abuses in relation to Beijing 2008. When there is little to suggest congruency between human rights concerns and Olympic efforts, picking out human suffering associated with the Games is relatively easy. Common targets are:

1) the tens of thousands of Beijing families that have been relocated to make way for Olympic stadia and infrastructure;
2) the millions of Chinese migrant construction workers enduring heavy hours and abysmal conditions to erect all this grandeur;
3) the billions of US dollars directed toward the Olympic project rather than domestic spending on education or health care.

China’s Great Leap treats these at some length. A rigorous investigation of whether the Olympics is ultimately profitable, whether ticket sales, broadcasting rights, sponsorship money and related tourism and economic fizz cover the terrific costs of hosting, is sadly absent. A consideration of the increased transport amenity that infrastructural improvements, catalysed by the Olympics, have brought to Beijingers, is missing. Mostly omitted too is a deeper understanding of the extent to which migrant construction work, hazardous and demanding as it is, represents a desirable alternative to unemployment and grinding rural poverty.

The book isn’t weighing up the positives and negatives of the Beijing Olypics for the Chinese people, but uses the global spotlight of the Games to draw attention to regrettable aspects of China’s human rights behaviour. It repeatedly points to China’s position as the world’s no.1 state executioner, and time and again cites evictions, inadequate compensation, lack of unions, the existence of slaves and child labour, non-payment of workers, worker injuries, and so on, as evidence of poor performance. This repetitive quality is in part a product of the text’s structure: 23 chapters by different authors, many covering similar material in what are relatively short and slightly introductory essays; and part a product of the lack of evidence that might allow more in depth analysis. China does not release figures about a host of human rights issues. Moreover, the legendary disjuncture between central government and local officials, operating in concert with highly effective media controls, means that more often than neither Beijing nor anyone else actually knows what abuses are being carried out, and on what scale. Some instances of slavery have come to light, but how many have not? How many construction workers really have died building the Bird’s Nest? There is no answer. Information on human rights in China is inevitably anecdotal and highly atomised.

That the lack of transparency in China is almost as much a problem for effective leadership and management as it is for human rights activists is a point the book makes well. There are a number of problems involved. Firstly, the central government’s ability to implement directives across China is severely impeded by the sheer vastness of the country. Moreover, the Chinese Communist Party has a penchant for opaque terminology which leaves considerable flexibility of interpretation (often proscribed activities are simply described as ‘illegal’). This is good if you want to retain the option of arresting whomever you please, but it does devolve the majority of decision-making power to local arbitrators. The local arbitrators thus do as they please, and the lack of journalistic freedom, together with the tendency for whistleblowers - even when proved right - to suffer harsh penalties, means that upwards information flows are severely impeded. What local officials do often doesn’t come to light until problems have reached a certain disaster-threshold. The result, aside from endemic cor-ruption, is that consequences such as national and global scares over food contamination, fake medicines, faulty goods etc, play out much more painfully than they might have done had there been freedom of information from the start.

So what is the Olympic effect on efforts to convince the Chinese government to move toward a freer press? An important concession detailed by the book is a law allowing foreign journalists to interview Chinese people without explicit state permission between 1 January 2007 and 17 October 2008. However, the expiration date alone rather dinkifies the law, as does the fact it doesn’t apply to Chinese journalists or translators, all still subject to harassment and imprisonment. Again, in spite of the Olympic Charter’s stated commitment to free reportage, in practice the Olympics doesn’t seem to be achieving much. In fact, the most striking media revelation to emerge from the Chinese point of view has been the Western reportage of the torch relay, which provoked wide outrage in China at what was seen to be an anti-China bias. Far from highlighting the deficiencies of the Chi-nese media, the Olympics has served to confirm the Chinese distrust of Western ‘free’ media.

A far more significant story to the development of freedom of speech is the coverage of the 2003 SARS incident. The initial diagnoses, true to standard Chinese suppression, were covered up, allowing the SARS outbreak to spread. But in a few months, a text message reading ‘There is a fatal flu in Guangzhou’ was being sent tens of millions of times a day. The information was spreading rapidly via email, internet chat rooms and bulletin boards, eventually forcing the government acknowledge the prob-em and start effective action. Crucially, the improvement in information dissemination had nothing to do with the Olympics or human rights campaigners, and all to do with technological advancements. The ownership of mobile phones and access to the internet was made possible through economic gains.

China’s foregrounding of social and economic over civil and political rights is one the authors of China’s Great Leap are aware of. For the most part though, they choose not to explore the holistic implications for human rights these economic benefits have achieved. Profit-driven foreign direct investment and the general growth of business has been a huge driver in China for improve-ments in standards of living, which in turn have facilitated the technological progress that is ef-fectting real impacts in terms of the movement of information. As much as this is facilitating awareness, it is pushing change. China’s Great Leap is an effective expositor of quite how dinky human rights are next to the Olympics. The larger truth however is that the Olympics are rather dinky next to the progress of human rights.