Outside View

China to avoid post-Olympics slowdown

Although some studies suggest the Olympics host nation may lag in GDP growth after the Games, most economists in China believe the nation will defy historical trends, CNN reported.

The seven-year run-up to the Olympics has seen China's white-hot economy chug along at more than 10 percent growth every year. More than half a million visitors are expected, and with the confluence of online streaming of the Games with traditional broadcast, this Summer Olympics could become the most watched in history, CNN said.

According to analyses by HSBC of every Summer Olympic Games since the end of World War II, the GDP growth of the Olympic host nation drops below global averages. "There is always a slowdown after the Games," said Robbert Van Batenburg, head of research for Louis Capital Markets in New York. For China, this "would be particularly troublesome as it already faces the risk of a supply glut," he said.

Host cities often predict a post-Olympics tourism boom in the afterglow of hosting the Olympics. The actual record, however, refutes this. A study by the Center of Policy Studies at Monash University in Australia shows that tourism to Sydney after the 2000 Olympics grew less than tourism to Australia as a whole.

Analysts are particularly concerned about the global impact of a post-Olympics slowdown.

However, most Chinese economists believe China's economy will defy historical expectations of a post-Olympics hangover. In June, Chinese economist Fan Gang, a member of the central bank monetary policy board,said: "China is a big country. Beijing is small. Even if Beijing's investment in infrastructure drops sharply after the Games, it would not have a significant impact on the whole economy."

His comments echoed those made in May by the new World Bank chief economist Justin Lin Yifu, who predicted investments in infrastructure across the country would continue, especially as it hosts the World Expo and Asian Games in 2010.

Fear of China groundless

What hides behind the human rights flag, that was held up by Western countries in wielding pressure on China and calling for a boycott of the Olympic Games, is a groundless fear of China's rise, a series of articles said recently in Bosnia and Herzegovina's second largest paper, the Liberation.

The articles condemned organizations like the Reporters Without Borders (RWB) for violating the Olympic Charter by politicizing the games.

The Olympics always bears the human race's hope for a better future, and only by separating it from politics, can we push forward further the world's human right cause, the paper said. Yet it also confessed that for a long time, human rights have been politically simplified, and the Games has also been intermingled with political players.

The Olympic flame was tarnished in France by RWB-directed farce on the pretext of improving human rights in China's Tibet autonomous region. But one may simply ask how such an insult to the holy flame could be excused because of the individual beliefs of a bunch of people.

China is a special country, which attaches more importance to inter-governmental dialogues than to contacts with NGOs. Perhaps that's why the RWB's case is nothing persuasive, the paper said.

"The Chinese culture is 7,000 years old, and it does deserve respect and friendship. But it's really surprising that some French people think that the Chinese know nothing about human rights and Tibet was occupied by China.

In fact, Chinese people's concern about human rights was reflected as early as some 2,000 years ago in Confucius's works. By comparison, contents in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN General Assembly are not more advanced, let alone the fact that Dalai Lama is the wrong person to discuss human rights with, the paper said, adding that the top priority of human rights for a country with 1.3 billion population is to secure food for its people.

In the process of achieving modernization, China has the ability to solve problems intractable to the West, and Western countries don't even have the courage to compliment China for the successes yielded by such a system, the articles said.

"As China must be a friend, rather than a foe, let's just mind our own business," the author concluded.

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(China Daily 08/07/2008 page11)