Hacker: The west is as guilty as China is the battle for moral high ground

Barry Davies, the BBC’s sporting sage, sounds like England to me. His steady, even tones are pure Albion – reedy, yet soothing, and conveying, without any pretentiousness, a sense of profound dignity and intelligence.

He is, in short, the very antithesis of Alan Green.

It tickles me that Davies received an MBE in 2005 for ‘Services to Sports Broadcasting’, not least since it’s rare for a knighthood to fall upon someone so deserving, but because listening to Davies feels in itself like you’re having tea with the Queen. He is possessed of a near-flawless English reserve, letting the mask of decorum slip only in cases of gross offence to his sense of fair play: an uneven pitch, perhaps, or Derby County scoring – that was Francis Lee, by the way, back in 1975.

When the cool Mr Davies says something just isn’t right and proper, therefore, one sits up and takes notice. So it was during first few days of the Athens Olympics, when Davies was performing a cameo role commentating on the heats of the judo competition.

An Iranian athlete who chose to withdraw in the opening round rather than face an Israeli competitor was served with a scolding so dry, so barren in its contempt – so very English – it was as punishing as a Chuck Norris roundhouse kick to the face.

“It’s sport, gentlemen.”

Ahmedinejad, your boy took one hell of a beating.

Eight years on and Davies’ talents are required once more; on present form, this summer’s Beijing Olympics risk unfolding under a cloud of political discord.

It began with Steven Spielberg, originally signed on as an artistic consultant for the opening ceremony. With a nod to Alec Baldwin’s turn as celebrity-turned-peacemaker in Team America, World Police, Spielberg publicly abandoned his role claiming that the Chinese government has failed to act to stop the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. “My conscience will not allow me to continue business as usual,” he said.

With depressing similarity to their screen-puppet counterparts, a mass of global public commentators and social consciences followed; close to home, UK Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell suggested that it was right to put “pressure” on China to do more

She was echoing the sentiments of a collection of Nobel Peace Prize winners, who in a letter also signed by political figures such as Dame Shirley Williams, called on Chinese President Hu Jintao to act in Sudan to stem the violence.

Prince Charles announced he would turn down the invitation to attend the opening ceremony, while Archbishop Desmond Tutu went so far as to suggest that a boycott should be staged if China’s government failed to change its policy on Darfur.

Troubling imagery has been deployed to support their cause. Readers of The Economist were, in the same week as Spielberg’s announcement, greeted with a full-page advertisement taken out by the ‘Save Darfur’ charity and lobbying group, featuring an image of gymnastic rings suspended from munitions belts.

Melodrama gold must go to actress Mia Farrow, who compared this summer’s games to the Nuremberg Olympiad of 1936.

Western outrage this shrill is hardly subtle; just as in Thunderbirds, you can see the strings – and one is left to wonder who is pulling them.

The difficulty isn’t the content of the complaints. China’s involvement in Darfur has been at best opportunistic, at worst unashamedly destructive. Most worryingly, the Chinese authorities seem unfazed by the possibility that arms sold to the Sudanese government are likely being used in a genocidal campaign against innocent civilians.

What grates is the hypocrisy inherent in western condemnation of Chinese foreign policy.

The core issue is the manner in which western media and commentators, if not governments themselves, have seen fit to criticise Chinese foreign policy while flirting with the possibility of gagging athletes who want to speak out about China’s appalling domestic human rights situation.

Team GB has retreated from the prospect of its athletes being forced to sign a declaration preventing them from criticising the Chinese government while in Beijing this summer. However, Belgium’s representatives at the Olympics will be asked to do just that; they are unlikely to be alone.

There is a pattern being established in which western countries are unable to accept an Olympiad taking place in a developing country with good grace. What began with the sorry tit-for-tat boycotts of the 1980s persisted in the International Olympic Committee’s selection process following the end of the Cold War.

That process, which has since been exposed as hopelessly corrupt until very recent times, has failed to deliver a single games to either Africa or South America, despite repeated near-flawless bids from Buenos Aires.

Nor did the IOC recognise the significance of awarding the centenary 1996 Olympics to Greece, missing a chance for a momentous homecoming – though that error was eventually remedied.

However, the 2004 Athens Games were nonetheless marred by a western fixation with security, which drove up costs astronomically for an event which saw no threats of any kind, from terrorists foreign or domestic.

The only attack took place during the men’s Marathon, when a defrocked Irish Catholic priest tackled a leading competitor – hardly worthy of the suggestion, bandied about at the highest levels of the US government, that Osama bin Laden was going to snap his fingers and make Athens fall into the sea.

China is an unpleasant place in certain respects, though it will doubtless mount magnificent games.

However, if we are to miss out on the Kathy Freeman-esque sight of a western competitor donning the Tibetan flag in solidarity with those who cannot speak out for themselves, the shame it being due to our own governments’ censorship is greater than any caused by China’s foreign policy.