China and the Olympics

I was up late last night reading up on the situation in Tibet and on the idea of boycotting the China Olympics in protest. It's an interesting topic and I don't think it's being discussed seriously at all here in the States. The EU is debating the issue but it doesn't look like they will follow through.

The over-riding questions are - 1. What would you hope to accomplish by a boycott? and 2. Would a boycott actually accomplish those goals? History provides a couple of examples, of course the 1980 boycott of the Moscow games but also the banishment from Olympic competition of South Africa while they were ruled under apartheid.

I don't really have any defined opinions on it yet. I think there are valid moral arguments for boycotting. The question then becomes, do you actually accomplish anything by boycotting? I'm not convinced that a boycott would do anything to further the cause of Tibet or human rights in China more generally. It certainly didn't in the case of the Soviets (the Afghan war continued for the better part of the decade) and South Africa was banned for nearly 3 decades before racial equality was achieved.

I'm generally pre-disposed to engagement with our adversaries or with "rogue" nations when at all possible. History shows us that diplomacy does indeed work in many circumstances. Disengaging from the Olympics seems to run counter to this. That said, shouldn't we be doing something?

There's also the matter of our current fiscal situation. China owns a significant portion of our national debt. Provoking them is probably not a wise idea, we don't want them to start calling in our debt. It's disappointing that this fiscal issue has to be considered when assessing the human rights/Olympics debate but the fact is it is a significant issue.

James Fallows, who knows as much about China as anyone in the U.S. media (indeed he's been living there for sometime now) was opposed to a boycott this past fall. He writes about it here in the context of last fall's Chinese crackdowns in Burma. I wonder if his opinion has changed at all?