Beijing Wins Olympic Bid

The decision to award the 2008 Olympic Games to China was a major "foreign-policy" success for China, according to a Hamilton College professor who's a native of China and has written a recent book on that nation's upcoming leadership.

"This is not only a victory for China but a victory for the Olympic spirit, peace. There will be no war in the Taiwan Strait in the next decade and beyond," says Cheng Li, professor of government at Hamilton and author of a new book, China's leaders: The New Generation of Leaders.  Li believes that forces will come to bear --internal and external -- and China will become a democracy in the next seven years. The decision to award the Games to Beijing is a "tremendous foreign-policy success" for China, he adds.

If China hadn't won, Li predicted it would be "seen as a great failure and it could bring a domestic crisis. " 

Li, who visited China recently, says the Olympics in China guarantee stability in that part of the world through 2008. China will be under added scrutiny with the Olympics in the wings.
        
Li address these issues in a talk about China's leaders to an audience at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. Li was interviewed by the BBC, Christian Science Monitor and other media.