History, as Marx famously said, “repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce”. Although there has never been any dearth of tragedy in China, the nation was yet to witness its finest moment of farce until yesterday. Violence has been the raison d’être of the Communist Party of China since Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949 by defeating the Kuomintang party in a devastating civil war. The tragic trail grew during the Cold War, as the single-party government consolidated its Orwellian regime. Even as China lifted the Bamboo Curtain — the Iron Curtain of east Asia — and absorbed the magic of market economy, a familiar circle of tyranny kept closing over it. If reforms lifted 250 million citizens out of abject poverty, hundreds were killed in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Between its aggressive aspiration for local as well as global self-determination and the desire to become a superpower, China is yet to make the crucial transition from modernization to modernity.

And now the PRC has had its first major tryst with farce, as the Beijing Olympics kicked off on 08.08.08 at 08:08:00 in the evening. Apart from timing the opening ceremony perfectly to the auspicious convergence of the number 8, China has spared no effort to turn this occasion into its grand coming-of-age in the international arena. The spectacular Bird’s Nest Stadium was built, over three years, with 42,000 tons of steel; draconian laws were introduced to curb air pollution; measures have also been taken to keep the horses placated before the equestrian events in Hong Kong. Since the elements cannot be trusted, 32,000 scientists have been employed to deflect rain, as Beijing is quite prone to typhoons this time of the year. However, in this less-than-ideal world, even the most scrupulously conceived model of perfection is not free of smudges. As always, there are the irascible naysayers, crying themselves hoarse over a handful of bêtes-noires: Tibet, human rights, democracy, death penalty. At this critical hour, when China is at last on the brink of making its symbolic entry on the world stage, such dissonance cannot be allowed to jar the rhythm of history. So home-grown dissenters have been imprisoned, forced into exile, arrested and tortured, while foreigners have been silenced in slightly more intangible ways. The American speed-skater, Joey Cheek — the co-founder of Team Darfur — has been denied his visa, while a couple of British nationals were deported for their pro-Tibet propaganda. There is also the notorious Great Firewall of China, blocking free access to the internet.

Apart from the tragic or the farcical, history also returns along a path of the blackest irony. Hitler used the 1936 Berlin Olympics to assert Germany’s role in knitting “the bond of peace between nations”, while Italy’s triumph in the 1934 and 1938 World Cup football tournaments filled Mussolini with national pride. Given the fates of the Führer and il Duce, China would be better off not to conflate sports with its political destiny.