More Than Just Games for China

"What Drives China": Readers for the most part didn't subscribe to Orville Schell's thesis that because China suffers from a history of humiliation the Olympics should not be marred by political protests. One said, "The Chinese government's serious human-rights violations, against its own people and Tibetans, need to be addressed vigorously without moral cowardice." Another considered China's driven athletes and posited, "No nation suffering from an 'inferiority complex' can succeed in firing up its athletes with that kind of self-confidence."

Pride, Protest and the Olympics
China scholar Orville Schell's "China's Agony of Defeat" (Aug. 4) was interesting and informative. However, one need not look back 100 years to know that those choosing the Beijing Olympics as an opportunity to protest are in the wrong. The purpose of the modern Olympic Games is to promote competition as an alternative to confrontation as a model for relations among nations. Furthermore, one does not accept an invitation with the intent to be disruptive and insulting to one's host. Such behavior is simply rude.
Betty Jo Chang
Douglas City, Calif.

Orville Schell suggests that the Olympic Games are not the proper arena to address the Chinese government's derelictions. Why? Because the bully might hit you with more force than if you did nothing. What a cowardly view of the situation. The Chinese people are continually being humiliated, as Schell states, but it is the government doing the humiliating. It is time for the global community to say stop. And what better venue than the Olympics? Stop persecuting your people, stop censoring the masses and journalists in particular. Stop funding the aggressors in the Sudan by supplying them with monies. Stop the persecution of anyone who disagrees with your inhumane tactics. One doesn't stop a bully by ignoring him, but by standing up to him. Thank God Gandhi and others like him did not share Schell's philosophy.
Raymond Westbrook
Pittsburgh, Pa.

I cannot find any sympathy for the Chinese "humiliation." The humiliation should be for following a leader who took them backward in time, enslaved and subjugated them, and turned the country into a big prison camp. They were dominated mentally and physically by one of the most regressive and totalitarian regimes in world history. Only when they started to adopt foreign ideas like capitalism that their leaders had demonized did China start progressing economically. The Chinese people should feel humiliated but not for the reasons listed by Orville Schell. Their leaders failed them and the populace didn't have the wherewithal to recognize it.
Jeff Cohen
Canfield, Ohio

Need McCain Be Tech-Savvy?
Anna Quindlen says we live in a time of peril and under the shroud of war upon war ("The Techie in Chief," Aug. 4). To stretch her thesis to meet her liberal bias, she then says since McCain is a neophyte, technologically speaking, he can't possibly be a competent and forward-thinking president. For goodness' sakes, she points out the man can't even use a BlackBerry. Odd; when I employ her thesis, I imagine that in times of peril and war, we can't possibly have a president who hasn't seen battle and understood the implications and tragedies connected to war.
Lyla Fox
Kalamazoo, Mich.

John McCain's inability "to use the most sophisticated means of communication available," the Internet, is the least of his inadequacies. He has a twisted sense of humor that found it funny to amend the Beach Boys' song "Barbara Ann" to "Bomb Bomb Iran." The increase of America's export of cigarettes to Iran inspired him to playfully contemplate that it might be "a way of killing 'em." There is nothing amusing about collateral damage; there is nothing amusing about killing. Do we really want a leader who could play "follow the leader" and plunge our country into further world disaster?
Celine E. Riedel
Avon Lake, Ohio