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The Olympics - Looking to the Future

On 8 August, 2008 the Olympics open in Beijing! After years of preparation the entire Chinese nation will see the culmination of its expectations fulfilled. The world’s media will be focussed on Beijing, which has been cleaned, smartened and, to a considerable extent, rebuilt in honour of the occasion. The foreign athletes, tourists and correspondents who will pour in in their tens of thousands will see a city totally transformed from the drab, grey city which only thirty years ago was struggling to put behind it the poverty of the Mao years. New stadiums, roads, fly-overs and glitzy shopping malls will amaze the visitors. Local people, including the taxi-drivers, have made strenuous efforts to learn English to welcome the newcomers.

For the duration of the Games, Beijing’s streets will be cleared of beggars and carefully policed to ensure no demonstrations, let alone terrorist incidents, will mar the festive atmosphere. Those whose homes have been demolished in the race to build new sporting and tourist facilities will be kept well away from the city centre. Beijing’s notorious air pollution, which has soared since so many wealthy residents have purchased new cars, will also hopefully be diminished by the clever expedient of ordering taxi drivers and car-owners to only use the cities’ roads every other day by forbidding those with certain number plates from driving on certain days.

The government and many Chinese citizens want to celebrate the Olympics as China’s ‘coming of age’ party. The rowdy demonstrations which dogged the passage of the Olympic torch through London, Paris, San Francisco, Australia and Japan were met in China first by bewilderment and then anger. They were seen as an affront to deep patriotic feeling. As soon as the torch arrived in Hong Kong, Macau and then passed into Mainland China, it was as if a different world had been entered. This marks the gulf which still separates China from much of the rest of the world. Angry comments hummed along the internet between China’s over 200 million users, outraged that the Olympic torch should have been snatched from the hands of a helpless Chinese girl athlete in a wheel-chair in Paris. Angry demonstrations surged outside French supermarkets in Beijing and Shanghai and a few foreigners narrowly escaped being lynched on the spot. As happened before in the case of anti-Japanese and anti-American demonstrations, the authorities were forced to dampen down patriotic and xenophobic sentiments which could bubble over into violence. All large gatherings – even such innocent events as the opening of a new supermarket- were banned.

The Olympics were hoped by many to symbolise a new era of openness in China, not least in religious affairs. Some Christian organisations overseas were planning to use the Olympics as a springboard for mass evangelism. However, in the present atmosphere of tight control and fear that extremist groups could sabotage the Games, such evangelistic efforts would seem unwise, as they could provoke a negative response which would ultimately harm China’s own Christian community most. By the end of this year, the Games will be just a memory (hopefully a happy one). Foreign athletes, journalists and Christian tourists will move on. But unwise actions could have longstanding repercussions. It would be tragic if misuse of the Games, a symbol of international harmony and sportsmanship, were to usher in a renewed era of greater suspicion and mutual incomprehension between China and much of the outside world. This could also lead to further repression of Chinese Christians, just when Chinese society in so many ways is opening up to the Gospel, and Chinese Christians’ contributions in so many ways are being welcomed by the authorities.

Chinese Christians are now active in setting up old people’s homes, kindergartens, medical clinics and hospitals, centers for educating and helping autistic and severely handicapped children, and facilities to help drug users and those infected with HIV/AIDS. While cases of persecution still occur, the parameters for spreading the Gospel are constantly widening – witness the quiet opening of possibly as many as 200 Christian bookstores in many cities in recent years and the development of children’s and youth work in both TSPM-registered churches, and unregistered house churches. China’s leaders have publicly recognised for the first time the role that religious believers play in helping create a ‘harmonious society’. Christians will pray that the Olympics pass peacefully and that the church will have even greater opportunities in the near future to express the love of Christ in self-effacing, Christ-like service.

A key verse from Paul to help us in prayer:

“ Therefore I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence.” (I Tim. 2:1-2)