Olympic boycotts are a clumsy and biased weapon, Gregory Clark, formerly China desk officer in the Australian Department of External Affairs, said in an article published on Japan Times Friday.

Commenting on the attempts to politicize the Beijing Olympic Games by making use of recent riots in Lhasa, capital city of China's Tibet Autonomous Region, Clark said, "Moscow had its 1980 Olympics boycotted because of its intervention in Afghanistan."

"But the Western, including British, intervention today in Afghanistan, while weaker in its ferocity, is almost identical in its motives -- support for an unstable government with idealistic goals but unable to cope with domestic insurgents. Would anyone use that to boycott the planned London Olympics? Hardly."

Clark, who is currently vice president of Japan's Akita International University, said hypocrisy "tainted" most of the other accusations against Beijing, including those over China's family planning policy.

"China is criticized as the great global polluter and user of scarce resources," he wrote. "But in one almost completely overlooked respect it has done far more than any of the rest of us to overcome both problems. This is its one-child 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," he said.

China now "has to live with two unfortunate results -- a serious male-female population imbalance and rapid aging of the population," but "no one thanks Beijing for making these sacrifices," he said.

"On the contrary, some Western conservatives see the one-child policy as yet another Beijing evil," he added.

"China, it seems, just can't win, no matter what it does."

"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," he noted.

The Olympics, like ping-pong diplomacy, will push China further in that direction, Clark concluded.

(Xinhua News Agency, March 23, 2008)