Okay, obviously the writers over at NotTheNation.com have their tongues firmly placed in cheek with this bit. But it's true that Beijing has gone all out preparing for these games. I mean allll out. How many cities basically quadruple how long and useful their subway system is to host this show, and do it on time? Not many. How about building two national athletics arena more ambitious in scope and design than anything the country has ever seen, and with a high likelihood of not leaving behind a municipal disaster for the locals to clean up for decades to come? Literally unprecedented (if still so-so) accessibility of facilities being put in and training of employees to show respect and understand the needs of visitors with disabilities? A Great Leap Forward-esque level of nationalist fervour?

That last point there is the most revealing to me. Not just about these games but about modern China as a whole. Since the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party has done a laudable job (if it's the kind of thing you're inclined to laud) of moving itself into the public consciousness as essentially synonymous with Chineseness. Unswerving allegiance to distant, authoritarian rulers has a rich and storied history in China; the Communist Party's place in the middle of this solar system of paternalism is in many ways just its modern manifestation. And they've certainly capitalized on the filial piety-glorifying legacy of Confucianism - Father knows best, or at least, Grandpa Deng and the gang do anyway.

Why is this relevant? In large part because it's as much a face-gaining event of unprecedented scale for the Party as much or moreso than it is for the citizens of China. Most people in Canada of my generation probably think of the massacre in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989 when they think of this government. Older generations might remember the brutality of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap forward more vividly. The picture's more complicated than this, but the connection is worth making. Especially when the question comes up of whether an international boycott is merited - be it in viewership, attendance of political leaders, or participation of athletes

The Communist Party today is just as oppressive, brutal and secretive as it was in 1989, if not moreso - albeit with better international PR. They've killed 'terrorist splittists' left and right this year in Xinjiang and Tibet, and are definitely responsible for propping up some pretty brutal regimes in Sudan, Burma, and other places where unsavoury governments commit similarly heinous crimes on their own citizens. It's absurd that the government and many many others are fooling themselves into thinking the Olympics aren't a political event. They might just be the most dramatic political event a country can host, short of an extraterrestrial landing or something.

The Communist Party is definitely banking on good publicity from a showy, expensive, tightly controlled games going off without a hitch - a long way from the images in the West, at least, of families in Mao suits riding bicycles down leafy avenues to their tiny brick homes where everyone's eating porridge for three meals a day in destitution for the good of the nation. So with all of that in mind, yes, a boycott is a good way to undermine the credibility of the regime, credibility they're desperately trying to drum up with this thing. It's a powerful political tool, although it would be moreso if the Canadian team, for example, just wasn't going, rather than trying to encourage a mass viewing boycott.

But on the other hand, Chinese people have invested a lot emotionally into the hard work of hosting a really incredible show - every city of any size you go to in China has had Olympic-related athletic events and memorabilia on sale for years already. The overwhelming majority of people there are expecting to gain a lot of face from hosting a well-organized games, showing off the lipstick of the Middle Kingdom as it were, with Beijing all rouged up and so on. And I know a lot of people over there find it hurtful, find it actually personally offensive that so many people in North America and Europe are calling for a boycott because they see it as essentially calling them bad hosts, and there is a legitimate beef there that it's pure hypocrisy for people from Canada to defend our right to host the games but not China's on the basis of their human rights record, when we have such an appalling history of brutal colonialist policies like residential schools in our own very recent past and continuing into the present, and our own litany of racist institutional acts like the Chinese headtax and the disenfranchisement of First Nations voters and the policies towards Africville in Halifax and so on and so on...

So are the Olympics the venue to stir shit up, and make it very very public that the Chinese government is doing some monstrous things to its own people and propping up other regimes behaving horrendously in their corners of the world? I think so, definitely. The Globe and Mail has reported just this weekend (for real) on the increasingly authoritarian social and political controls being wound up in the run-up to these games. Some had anticipated this event might be the beginning of a road toward greater respect for human rights and public accountability at home and abroad. there's been reactionary crackdown after crackdown, and things are likely to get worse before they get better. The riots this month in Guizhou province's Weng'an county being a case in point, over the apparently cavalier dismissal of local Li Shufen's suspected murder and rape - by a group of men who may have included one relative of a local police officer - as nothing more than a suicide. The initial response to the crowds of 30 000 trying to burn down the station over allegations of corruption?

Arresting 300 protesters, asserting that 'the family were "too emotionally unstable" to accept the results of the "careful investigation according to the law"'
and accusing
'gangsters and others with ulterior motives of whipping up local residents' anger, warning that such offenders faced strict punishment.'

Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, Human Rights First are doing exactly the right things making people aware of China blocking even the simplest progress on human rights like sanctions on the government in Zimbabwe over the sham elections and the violence Mugabe is pushing over there. Using the intense lens on Beijing as a platform for this kind of stuff is brilliant.

But a boycott on watching them?

The cynic in me says get real, this is going to be a fricking amazing show and I can't imagine who would want to miss it. The idealist in me says yes, it would make the government lose face, which it should, in buckets. But then again, it also risks offending 1.3 billion people who feel understandably a bit sensitive about the whole thing, and it's them I think we should be engaging with to get them to push for better government for themselves, greater respect for human rights, and for better foreign policy from the Chinese government abroad.

Last year, my friend's dad and I got into an argument over this idea that the rest of the world should be afraid of the 'peaceful rise' of the People's Republic. It's largely just fearmongering from those scared of losing a monopoly on power in the American de facto empire, but he was also arguing that even if China became a superpower economically, politically and militarily on the same scale as the US, at least they wouldn't be going around acting like the World Police telling everybody what to do. Except, that just like the officials in Weng'an, in many countries - by its action and inaction - China is already doing so. For all of our sake, this is an opportunity worth using at the very least shame the government into doing so with more humanity.