(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-03-25 18:25

The Tibet events do not justify calls for a boycott of Beijing's Olympic Games, and Olympic boycotts are a clumsy and biased weapon, Gregory Clark, a former officer in Australia's Department of External Affairs, wrote in a Japan Times' opinion article on Friday.

Moscow had its 1980 Olympics boycotted because of its intervention in Afghanistan. However, hardly will anyone use that to boycott the planned London Olympics while Britain has joined in intervention today in Afghanistan.

"Hypocrisy taints most of the other accusations against Beijing," Clark said.

Western armies are known to attack defenseless villagers at times, as in Indochina before, and now in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of all the Western nations, only the Scandinavians at the time had the moral courage to halt arms sales to the US in protest.

China is criticized as the great global polluter and user of scarce resources. But in one almost completely overlooked respect it has done far more than any of the rest to overcome both problems.

This is its family planning policy. If not for that policy, China today would have to feed, clothe and accommodate an estimated extra 300 million to 400 million people -- more than the entire population of Western Europe. The strain on world resource supplies and the environment would have been unbearable.

Meanwhile, China's impressive efforts to increase nuclear and hydropower and so reduce dependence on polluting coal are criticized by the Western anti-nuclear, anti-dam progressives.

China, it seems, just cannot win, no matter what it does. It is like the six-ton elephant that everyone likes to bash.

"You judge a nation by the direction in which it is traveling, not by the road bumps. And China is clearly moving in a direction of very considerable promise to us all. The Olympics, like ping-pong diplomacy, will push China further in that direction," Clark said.