By Tim Chai
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After the International Olympic Committee awarded China with this year’s summer games in 2001, people around the world watched the country with increased attention and baited breath. While Chinese nationals rejoiced with weeks of celebration, the rest of the world eagerly looked to the Olympics as a way to accelerate openness in China and facilitate improvement on its human rights record. As seven years passed, these stares gradually turned into harsh criticism and sometimes outright violence. To be sure, China still has a lot of ground to walk, but its progress (and the out-of-the-world spectacle it hosted weeks earlier) has been unfairly undervalued by the West.

Modern China is like one of Monet’s famous lily pad paintings. If you look closely at a spot on the canvas, you will see things that seem more like random brush strokes than a priceless landscape. Take a few steps back, and the sight in front of you is far more appealing. Since the onset of the Beijing Olympics, outsiders have placed modern China under a microscope, finding much of what they see as ugly. Granted, there are many blemishes to choose from—the government is repressive and undemocratic, and it censors news coverage and maintains a monopoly on political power. While attention to these aspects of modern China is well-warranted and much-deserved, it is a shame to focus on its sins to the exclusion of everything else. This preoccupation with China’s faults makes it impossible to take in the entire compass of Chinese life and the vast changes it has undergone in just the last few decades.

Westerners can easily forget that this authoritarian country used to be a totalitarian one—a regime that, during the three decades after the communist party took over in 1949, was responsible for more than 70 million deaths; the government deliberately fomented savage social upheavals and devastated China’s cultural heritage. However, even a slight glance at modern China unveils the difference between present and past. Since Deng Xiaoping liberalized the economy in the 1970s, it has expanded beyond belief; no country in history has ever lifted so many people out of poverty so rapidly. The landscape of prison camps has largely eroded, conceding a great deal of personal freedom to ordinary people. They can work and live where they choose, they can travel and study abroad, and they have access to global communication resources like the Internet (note that these rights were nonexistent when my parents were growing up). Perhaps most promising of all is the growing sense among the Chinese that they are entitled to certain basic rights, a giant leap for a country where individual liberties have been an alien concept for thousands of years.

China’s recent progress is not only remarkable in its own history, but also compared to the rest of the world. A recent BBC article surveyed major countries and their overall international image; China placed toward the top of the list, surpassing the United States by more than 10 points. Even Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama has publicly expressed his admiration of certain aspects of China, including its extensive infrastructure network and rapid development. If the last decades have taught us anything, it is to not underestimate China’s ability for positive change. There is good reason to expect that, in the coming years and decades, China will continue to progress socially, politically and economically. Hoover Institution fellow Henry Rowen, an East Asia specialist, notes that economic development and democracy almost universally move in tandem. China currently has more than one trillion dollars in its reserve, and that figure is growing by hundreds of billions of dollars every year. As that figure continues to increase, more democracy will seep into the Chinese system; Rowen predicts, given China’s growth trajectory, that it will be classified as one of the free nations of the earth by 2025.

In light of this, maybe it’s time to evaluate our own country. As evident by the BBC poll, we can point our fingers as much as we want, but there will always be thousands pointing right back. In some regards, perhaps we can learn from the Chinese. When the United States—regarded as the most liberal and diversified country in the world—witnessed the inauguration of our first Muslim congressional representative, China had already elected 12 Muslim congressmen, two Muslim governors (out of a total of 31 provinces) and a Muslim official in the Central Committee. When Hillary Clinton announced her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination earlier this year, and Sarah Palin declared her addition as the vice-presidential candidate to the McCain ticket, a wave of feminism swept the country as, in their own words, the glass ceiling started to crack; in contrast, China’s vice premier Wu Yi received her post more than five years earlier. Most recently, during a time that many financialists characterize as the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the United States government was forced to bail-out Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, the Lehman Brothers and AIG (all of which China has invested hundreds of billions of dollars into), adding to the more than 9.8 trillion dollar federal debt (of which almost a trillion is owed to China); by comparison, China has enough reserves to create a hedge fund powerful enough to buy the top several companies on the Fortune 500 index.

I leave off by asking you to simply give credit where it’s long overdue. Continue the constructive criticism of the Chinese communist party and acknowledge that China has further obstacles to overcome, but take a few steps back and admire the rapid progress it has undergone in the last few decades and the beautiful painting it is quickly becoming. In the short run, remember the Beijing Olympics not for the few scars marring certain aspects, but rather by the magnificence of the whole. Its ability to rally and host the best (in this case, I do feel justified in using this superlative) opening and closing ceremonies in the history of the Olympic Games is proof enough of China’s bright future.