Acting like western bulls in a China shop

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD

OPINION: I can't remember an Olympics with so much underlying bitchery about the host country.

Is this what happens when you get a mob of visiting media people less keen on sport than on peering under rocks to see what's wriggling there?

There are always nasty things under rocks but it's somehow easier to spot them when you're in a foreign country. It helps that China's industrial might is starting to rattle people.

Last week it was a tiny gymnast, He Kexin, who drew flak as she won a gold medal. Is she really 16?

Had she previously been reported as being younger? Have the Chinese, in sinister fashion, sneaked two other children into Olympic events?

You need only to ask such questions to give them a degree of credibility. She is just 1.42 metres tall, or 4 foot eight.

One of my grandmothers wasn't much taller, and I've seen many equally small people overseas. It's not fair, are we supposed to think, for athletes to have perfect physical characteristics for their chosen sport? Look at basketball players, where extreme height is an advantage, rugby players, who need speed and bulk, or sumo wrestlers, who can't possibly be thin.

We see the world, even if we're gun reporters, through the prism of our own culture, and the West's track record with China has always been unattractive.

In Shanghai, I saw a presentation of the city's history which made that pretty clear. Westerners were portrayed as crafty opportunists in bad suits and it's hard to argue against that.

European nations once ruled sections of Shanghai like fiefdoms and what are we to make of people - people like us - who famously kept Chinese out of public parks in their own country with signs that read "No Dogs or Chinese"?

We also coined the term "yellow peril". And we still think we know better than China how it should run its own affairs. We like democracy.

It should too. Why? It's instructive to see how China's English language newspapers cover events. News about Chinese in other countries rates high - a reminder of our own appalling record at Asian farming, when we brought so many Chinese here to study and then took no responsibility for their welfare.

What we did didn't go unnoticed - as it wouldn't have been the other way round.

We fixated on He because of her size - we who are so obsessed with body image that we've created a culture of anorexia among young women; we who are chomping and slurping our way into collective obesity.

Still stranger is our shock that the child who sang at the opening of the games was miming the words because she was prettier than the real singer.

Who are we kidding? We're obsessed with girlie prettiness and cuteness ourselves and we don't hold back from teaching little girls the harsh lessons that spring from that.

Do we object to China selecting athletes and performers like He in childhood and training them rigorously for international competition?

We have private schools where the children of the rich and privileged are sent in the expectation that they'll be trained to follow in their parents' footsteps and we can't claim that all children here get the chance to develop their full potential.

We've been obsessed with pollution around Beijing - and rightly.

It's terrible there. But the West created the industrial revolution that began making the planet filthy and kept it up in earnest until yesterday.

London's famous pea-soupers, which lasted into last century, were air pollution that was probably even worse than Beijing's.

We're pious about that now that we've made our wealth, and now we want to lecture developing countries who are the world's new industrial base. Should they stay poor to satisfy our new-found conscience?

Protests about China's occupation of Tibet persist, and this has been an ideal time to draw the world's attention to what's happening there.

Yet is the western military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq so fine and dandy? For that matter, how might other cultures view our own recent police terrorist raids?

And do China's lavish Olympic facilities look a little tacky to our superior western eyes?

That would be rich coming from the folks who invented Disneyland. And if you want tacky, how about there being 313 branches of McDonald's handy to the site of the former Nazi concentration camp at Dachau?

The Chinese may eat cats and dogs, but we have the stomach for anything.

- © Fairfax NZ News