Japan’s leaders have more leverage than they may realize — at the very least, they are in position to extract maximal concessions from the IOC for hosting some limited or delayed version of the Games, one more protective of the host.
The predicament in Tokyo is symptomatic of a deeper, longer-lasting illness in the Olympics. The Games have become a to-the-very-brink exercise in pain and exhaustion for everyone involved, and fewer countries are willing to accept these terms. Greed and blowout costs have rendered it an event that courts extreme disaster. In September, a report out of Oxford University’s business school found that the IOC has consistently “misled” countries about the risks and costs of hosting. Example: The IOC pretends that a contingency of about 9.1 percent is adequate to cover unforeseen expenses.
The true average cost overrun on a Summer Games? It’s 213 percent.
The IOC understates these risks for a reason: because fewer and fewer countries want to do business with it after seeing all the pillage.
The IOC intentionally encourages excess. It mandates elaborate facilities and events for the sake of revenue, most of which it keeps for itself while dumping the costs entirely on the host, which must guarantee all the financing. The IOC sets the size and design standards, demands the hosts spend bigger and bigger — against all better judgment — while holding close the licensing profits and broadcasts fees. Tokyo’s original budget was $7 billion. It’s now four times that.
China controls the IOC and Olympic sponsors the way it governs its citizens: Through fear
In the Oxford paper, “Regression to the Tail: Why the Olympics Blow Up,” authors Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier and Daniel Lunn observe that the Games dwarf every other national building project on earth in terms of cost blowouts — even mega-dams and tunnel digs. The ever-increasing complexity and expense, and the long window of planning (seven to 11 years) make them a project with high uncertainty that can be affected by everything from inflation to terrorist threat and “the risk of a big, fat black swan flying through it.” The Rio Games, held in 2016 in the midst of brutal economic downturn, were 352 percent over their original budget. And these blowouts are “systematic,” not happenstance.
“Either the IOC is deluded about the real cost-risks when it insists that a 9.1 percent contingency is sufficient, or the Committee deliberately overlooks the uncomfortable facts. In either case, host cities and nations are misled,” they write.
This is why virtually the only government leaders that will have anything to do with the IOC anymore are thugocrats such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, who can coerce labor and spend limitlessly for prestige. Over the past 20 years, other potential hosts have dried up. Among those who have wisely said no to the IOC: Barcelona, Boston, Budapest, Davos, Hamburg, Krakow, Munich, Oslo, Rome, Stockholm and Toronto. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who wrested away key concessions from the IOC for the 2028 Games, has observed that most cities “will never say yes to the Olympics again unless they find the right model.” This is where the barons’ gluttony has led them.
All of this should empower Japan’s leaders to do whatever is best for themselves and their own people. When the Games reasonably could be portrayed as a source of international tourism revenue, perhaps some of the expense could be justified. But now the costs to the Japanese people run much deeper than financial. If ever there was a time and place to remember that the IOC is a fake principality, an oft-corrupt cash receptacle for peddlers with pretensions of grandeur, this is it. The IOC has no real powers, other than those temporarily granted by participant countries, and Japan owes it nothing. A cancellation would be painful — but cleansing.
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一見右翼と左翼は思想的に両極端に位置するが、よくみると右翼の自由民主党と中国共産主義国家の中国共産党は実は双子の兄弟ぐらいに似ている。両方とも政権の一党独裁、日本の憲法はあってないようなもの。それを避けて通る穴がいくらでも存在する。また両国家は歴史の改ざんに忙しい。その改ざんにあっては若干の違いが存在するが、それは日本では自民の政党権力者が改ざんを指揮主導しているが、中国は歴史の改ざんを国政にしている点。まことに面白いではないか。現在の自由民主党が志向する天皇主義思想。天皇主義に洗脳された日本天皇軍が大平洋戦争を起こして、中国大陸で大暴れした。なんとその日本軍が中国共産主義国家誕生の手助けをしたというのだから、なんという歴史の皮肉。そしてその共産党政府の中国の脅威が叫ばれる昨今、大いに選挙戦に利用できた自由民主党が日本国民からゆるぎない投票数を獲得して政権を掌握して遣りたい放題をしている日本がある。
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The CCP Didn’t Fight Imperial Japan; the KMT Did
-While the KMT military defended China against Japan during WWII, the CCP built up strength for the civil war.-
By Zachary Keck September 04, 2014
Credit: Wikimedia Commons https://thediplomat.com/2014/09/the-ccp-didnt-fight-imperial-japan-the-kmt-did/
As Diplomat readers are well aware — and the Pacific Realist is frankly sick of —China has mounted a sustained campaign demanding that Tokyo take a “correct” view of Imperial Japan’s unspeakable crimes during WWII.
There’s always been a good deal of irony to all of this. Although far too many Japanese leaders have tried to shrink or even deny the crimes of Imperial Japan, including its atrocities in China, successive Japanese governments have acknowledged and apologized for many of these.
On the other hand, the Chinese Communist Party has also committed numerous massacres of Chinese since establishing the People’s Republic of China. This began early in its tenure while consolidating its control over the vast country, as Frank Dikötter notes in a terrific recent book. With regards to the “land reform” campaign alone, for instance, Dikötter writes, “The exact number of victims killed in the land reform will never be known, but it is unlikely to have been fewer than 1.5 to 2 million people from 1947 to 1952.” At least another two million were killed in the Great Terror that Mao launched between 1950-1952 to weed out imaginary counter-revolutionaries.
Of course, there was also the widespread famine that killed tens of millions during the Great Leap Forward. To be sure, there’s no reason to believe that Mao and the other CCP leaders intended to starve these people when they launched the Great Leap Forward. That being said, they continued these policies for years after they realized the disastrous outcomes they were having simply because Mao didn’t want to admit his failures. Then, of course, the entire country was plunged into chaos once again during the Cultural Revolution, which was Mao’s attempt to ensure his atrocities weren’t publicly acknowledged by the Party after his death.
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As it turned, he needn’t have worried as the CCP under Deng Xiaoping decided it was not in the Party’s interest to acknowledge it had nearly destroyed the county many times over in its first 25 years in power. Instead, the CCP has devoted considerable resources to systematically rewriting history — or at the very least burying it. Unlike in Japan, where history is distorted by hardline leaders, in China distorting history is the official state policy. Meanwhile, taking the correct view of history is illegal — which is why books like Tombstone are banned.
Reasonable observers might conclude that it is the height of hypocrisy for the CCP to wage a global PR war over Japan’s views of history on the one hand, while on the other hand criminalizing a correct view of its own history. And there was a time not too long ago I might have agreed with these reasonable observers’ conclusion. However, this week Xi Jinping and the CCP took their hypocrisy on history to new heights.
As Shannon reported on Wednesday, earlier this year “China’s legislature passed a resolution creating two new national observances. ‘Victory Day’ on September 3 would commemorate Japan’s surrender in the ‘War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression,’ China’s name for its fight against Imperial Japan before and during World War II. December 13 was also named a National Memorial Day to commemorate the Nanjing Massacre.”
She went on to note that President Xi and the entire Politburo Standing Committee participated in the new Victory Day celebrations, which they used mostly to criticize contemporary Japanese policy, and to try to create the impression that Japan’s shifting defense posture represents a return to the militarism of Imperial Japan.
However, along with criticizing Japan, Xi and the PBSC also used the Victory Day celebrations to praise the CCP itself. As Shannon writes, the Victory Day holiday “also served as a celebration of the Chinese Communist Party’s role in defeating Japan — and more than that, in saving China from its century of humiliation…. Xi credited the CCP with spearheading the movement to unite all of China’s people in opposition to Japan. To Xi Jinping, the deciding factors in the war were the ‘great national spirit’ of the Chinese people — particularly, their patriotism — and the leadership of the CCP.”
None of this is particularly new. The CCP has long claimed credit for having tirelessly defended China from the Imperial Japanese army. This couldn’t be further from the truth, however. As I have noted elsewhere, Japan’s invasion of China saved the CCP from Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT, and ultimately allowed Mao to defeat the KMT in the ensuing civil war. Indeed, by the end of 1934, the CCP was on the verge of extinction after KMT troops delivered another heavy blow to the Red Army in Jiangxi Province, which forced the Party to undertake the now infamous Long March to Xi’an in the northwestern province of Shaanxi. Chiang initially pursued the Communist forces, and would have almost certainly delivered a final blow to the CCP if war with Japan could have been delayed. As it turned out, Chiang was not able to put off the war with Japan any longer, and domestic and international pressure forced him to accept a tacit alliance with the CCP against Japan.
At the onset of the war, then, the CCP was not in any position to defend anyone from the formidable Japanese military. In fact, it wasn’t even in a position to defend itself from the KMT. The initial battles of the second Sino-Japanese War in southern China were the largest ones, and the KMT fought them alone.
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This would be the trend of the entire war. As two scholars note, “From 1937 to 1945, there were 23 battles where both sides employed at least a regiment each. The CCP was not a main force in any of these. The only time it participated, it sent a mere 1,000 to 1,500 men, and then only as a security detachment on one of the flanks.There were 1,117 significant engagements on a scale smaller than a regular battle, but the CCP fought in only one. Of the approximately 40,000 skirmishes, just 200 were fought by the CCP, or 0.5 percent.”
By the CCP’s own accounts during the war, it barely played a role. Specifically, in January 1940 Zhou Enlai sent a secret report to Joseph Stalin which said that over a million Chinese had died fighting the Japanese through the summer of 1939. He further admitted that only 3 percent of those were CCP forces. In the same letter, Zhou pledged to continue to support Chiang and recognize “the key position of the Kuomintang in leading the organs of power and the army throughout the country.” In fact, in direct contradiction to Xi’s claims on Wednesday, Zhou acknowledged that Chiang and the KMT “united all the forces of the nation” in resisting Japan’s aggression.
While the KMT were busy uniting the country and fighting the Japanese military, CCP forces spent much of the early part of the war hiding in the mountains to avoid battle. As the KMT was decimated by the Japanese military, it was forced to retreat further south. At the same time, the Japanese forces largely focused on securing control of Chinese cities and strategic infrastructure, while ignoring China’s massive countryside. Thus, the KMT’s efforts to actually defend China created a power vacuum in rural areas, which the CCP came out of hiding to seize. It used its control over these villages to perfect its propaganda and political efforts, and hid among the population to avoid fighting the Japanese army. According to Soviet military advisers stationed in CCP-controlled areas at the time, the CCP also used this land to grow opium to fund its growing operations.
As far as fighting went, the CCP engaged in guerilla warfare and sabotage missions. This certainly annoyed the Japanese forces, but it did not have a significant impact on Japan’s war operations. In fact, even the Japanese North China Area Army — which had command over the northern areas where the CCP was located and the KMT was relatively weaker than elsewhere —continued to see defeating the KMT as its primary objective. The greater impact of these guerilla operations was in helping the CCP win new recruits. The CCP used their “heroic” operations against the hated Japanese enemy to recruit young men (and women) to their cause, much as militant groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham film their exploits today and post them on YouTube to attract recruits.
This was highly successful. According to the CCP’s own estimates, it began the war with 30,000 troops. By Victory Day, it had 1.2 million regular troops and around 2.6 million to 3 million militia
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under its command. It was also quick to seize the areas that the Japanese army was vacating, and seized the Japanese equipment. In fact, in some instances it even forced the Japanese soldiers to join the Red Army (the KMT did the same). Of course, the war not only allowed the CCP to grow much stronger, but it also greatly depleted the Nationalist’s strength. This allowed the CCP to prevail easily in the civil war.
This was not by accident but by design. The CCP had a choice: it could have prioritized defending the country against Japan during the war, or it could have prioritized seizing control of China from those who did fight the Japanese. It chose the latter. Meanwhile, by choosing to actually try to defend China against Japan during the war, the Nationalists handed the country to the CCP afterwards.
Which is why Xi and the CCP’s decision to create a national observance day to honor its defense of China during the second Sino-Japanese War represents the height of hypocrisy. It’s one thing to try to suppress all information exposing the Party’s failings, which killed millions of Chinese, while demanding Japan take a correct view of history (which Tokyo should do). It’s another thing altogether to falsely claim credit for one of the defining moments of your country’s modern history. And it’s really something unprecedented to create a national holiday to honor your Party for doing something it consciously avoided; namely, putting China’s defense over the CCP itself. Classy.
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