Steve's simple spiel

By Alan Howe

March 13, 2008 (Herald-Sun)- CHINA has some unpleasant friends - Burma, North Korea and Sudan spring to mind.

But their national flags will flutter as the world's athletes walk into the stadium at the start of the Beijing Olympics. Just like they did in Sydney.

Anyway, we play cricket with Zimbabwe, and we are quite happy to do business with Burma and Sudan.

We should remember that as calls for a boycott of the Beijing Games grow louder.

Steven Spielberg announced last month that he was withdrawing his services as artistic director of the Games' opening and closing ceremonies in protest at China's inaction on the genocide in Darfur.

He's been listening to that dill Mia Farrow, who had been urging the same.

You remember Mia. She once tried to adopt half of Vietnam and gave her until-then grateful kids names such as Lark Song, Summer Song and Satchel.

I'd be speaking to their newsagent and finding out why Spielberg and Farrow's papers haven't been delivered for the past 40 years.

It's taken a long time for them to find their conscience.

Where were Hollywood's big names when the Red Guards were murdering intellectuals and artists in the 1960s?

Darfur is a disaster. And the lying Sudanese Government is arming and supplying the Janjaweed militia, who are murdering non-Arabs in the west of the country.

China pretty much keeps Sudan as a satellite state while buying most of its oil. Like the West, to a lesser degree, has kept Saudi Arabia for the same purposes for many decades.

But Sudan's problems are rooted in overpopulation, starvation and endless drought and it is oversimplifying things to blame just its present, brutal regime.

China, with its great influence in that country, could do more.

Like we could have done more after the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, where perhaps hundreds of thousands were killed as the brave little nation was brought murderously into line by its bigger neighbour.

The intellectually lazy Archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual adviser to Australia's head of state the Queen, visited Darfur, witnessed the killings and managed not to criticise the Sudanese Government.

Perhaps Spielberg could boycott Anglican nations, refuse to show his films there and never again visit England or Australia. Wouldn't bother me.

China has a brutal streak, as any Tibetan will tell. Some Iraqis may say the same of us as we continue to insist they are ready for democracy.

And we are still fighting what became the Taliban in Afghanistan after the West armed locals to the teeth following the Soviet invasion of 1979.

Diplomacy is taking care of your strategic interests, and we do it as well as the Americans and the Chinese.

But that is not the only reason we should be wary of those who would have us boycott the Beijing Games.

China is not just the standout economy of the developing world; it has raised its people's standard of living faster than any country in living memory.

The Beijing Olympics is the new China's coming of age.

And like anyone who makes their majority, they'll have done it with regrets and mistakes. Some of them may even live with you.

Mia Farrow says China should listen to world opinion. China is one quarter of world opinion.

Freedoms will creep upon the burgeoning middle classes of the Middle Kingdom before we know it, and its 1.3 billion people need not insist on knowledge of the world -- it will arrive on their desks on computers made in their own country.

If only we could say the same.

A new post-Communist China is emerging and it looks nothing like the cruel, monolithic country built by Chairman Mao.

But while its markets have been freed, its government still seeks to control the population in ways we find distasteful.

But you can't control the thoughts of more than a billion people and if democracy appeals to them then a change is gonna come.