Events in Tibet have turned ugly. Once again we see the harm caused by Beijing's heavy-handed bureaucracy, and its panicky, untrained soldiers used for crowd control. But even when combined with all of Beijing's other alleged sins — Darfur, pollution, human rights and other issues — does Tibet justify the calls for a boycott of Beijing's planned Olympic Games later this year?
Olympic boycotts are a clumsy and biased weapon. Moscow had its 1980 Olympics boycotted because of its intervention in Afghanistan. But the Western, including British, intervention today in Afghanistan, while weaker in its ferocity, is almost identical in its motives — support for an unstable government with idealistic goals but unable to cope with domestic insurgents. Would anyone use that to boycott the planned London Olympics? Hardly.
Hypocrisy taints most of the other accusations against Beijing. Take Darfur, for example. Beijing is criticized for weapons sales to a Sudanese government guilty of assisting attacks on defenseless villagers, and refusing to intervene politically to help prevent those attacks. Yet nonintervention in the affairs of other nations was once a proudly proclaimed Western principle, aimed to end all wars in the 20th century. Now China is criticized for obeying that principle.