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Melting Pot Meets Great Wall

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By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 26, 2008

BEIJING - The Olympics may just be a sporting event, but it is hard not to read larger messages into the results, especially when you see how China and America have dominated the medals tally. Both countries can - and will - look at their Olympic successes as reaffirmations of their distinctly different political systems. But what strikes me is how much they could each learn from the other. This, as they say, is a teaching moment.

Call it: One Olympics - two systems.

How so? You can't look at the U.S. Olympic team and not see the strength that comes from diversity, and you can't look at the Chinese team and not see the strength that comes from intense focus and concentrated power.

Let's start with us. Walking through the Olympic Village the other day, here's what struck me most: The Russian team all looks Russian; the African teams all look African; the Chinese team all looks Chinese; and the American team looks like all of them.

The Associated Press reports that there are 33 foreign-born players on the U.S. Olympic team, including four Chinese-born table tennis players, a kayaker from Britain, seven members of the track-and-field team - as well as Lopez Lomong, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan's civil war, who was resettled in the U.S. by Catholic Charities
It is amazing that with our Noah's Ark of an Olympic team doing so well "that at the same time you have this rising call in America to restrict immigration," said Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International. "Some people want to choke off the very thing that makes us strong and unique."

That said, there are some things we could learn from China, namely the ability to focus on big, long-term, nation-building goals and see them through. A Chinese academic friend tells me that the success of the Olympics is already prompting some high officials to argue that only a strong, top-down, Communist Party-led China could have organized the stunning building projects around these Olympics and the focused performance of so many different Chinese athletes. For instance, the Chinese have no tradition of rowing teams, but at these Games, out of nowhere, Beijing fielded a women's quadruple sculls crew that won China's first Olympic gold medal in rowing.

The lesson for us is surely not that we need authoritarian government. The lesson is that we need to make our democracy work better.

Congress has gotten worse. Our democracy feels increasingly paralyzed because collaboration in Washington has become nearly impossible. Our ability to focus America's incredible bottom-up energies - outside of sports - has diminished. You see it in our crumbling infrastructure and inability to shape a real energy program. China feels focused. We feel distracted.

Thomas Friedman is a columnist for The New York Times.

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