Grave beyond a splash in the Olympic pool

It’s no mere splash in the Olympics pool. Ye Qingsong, father of swim prodigy Ye Shiwen, perhaps unwittingly put his finger on the pulse.

“Western media has always been very arrogant, always questioning Chinese people,” Ye the father told the Chinese news portal Tencent from the family home in Hangzhou.

Yet the media is mere mirror of the people of which it is a product, and/or reflection of what it perceives to be the interests and values of the people it purports to serve.

For this, Ye Qingsong is closer to the gravity of the first doping scandal to bedevil London 2012 than he might have realised.

As China, by force of numbers, grows to dominate global affairs, questions about its political development in step with its economic, and its military and strategic designs, have become shrill.

Demands are being made for China to conform to “international norms” patterned on Western models of rule of law.

For good reason — historical, cultural and demographic — the Chinese are treading softly.

In the realms of ideology and financial and commercial management, the global financial crisis of 2008 was a shock to “socialism (over time incorporating capitalism) with Chinese characteristics”. The GFC represented a reversal for the global good.

China has never been colonised — neither has it, incidentally, ever been a coloniser — but events in its long history had set it on a divergent course with wave upon wave of would-be colonisers.

Suspicion of interlopers has historically been mutual. Given past grandeur and civilisational splendor of the Middle Kingdom, the wariness of government and people of prescriptive modeling may be understandable.

With China’s now established economic dominance, fears of its strategic and military expansionism is assuming proportions of paranoia.

Consequently, within China, the sense of containment is profoundly felt. This runs counter to endeavors to induce China’s peaceful engagement with the world. And it does the people no favors for the international community to create an atmosphere where the political elite can manipulate national fervor against a “common foe”. The cause of human rights is hardly served.

Most grievous of all, the insinuations of doping leave the hectoring on rule of law empty.

Testing for performance-enhancing substances has never been more vigorous and rigorous. For athletes thinking of cheating, the drugs have to be administered over a long time for their effectiveness to be anywhere near worth taking the risk.

In the case of 16-year-old Shiwen, her state-sponsored programme — as is those of so many of the other elite swimmers — requiring blocks of training with coaches in Australia would make it next to impossible for her to elude detection if she had been on dope.

The International Olympic Committee is satisfied. Media has frothed over remarks of John Leonard, executive director of the World Swimming Coaches Association — also executive director of the American Swimming Coaches Association — who apparently does not see it incumbent on him to look beyond the superficiality of swimming’s day-to-day.

Quite the contrary to China’s former Olympics doctor Chen Zhanghao. “America’s (Michael) Phelps broke seven world records. Is he normal?” Chen asks. “I suspect Phelps, but without evidence I have to recognise that we should be grounded in facts.”

In other words, the rule of law.

Public figures have to be sensitive beyond their narrow interests. John Leonard has failed swimming, and the international community.