Beijing Beat: A Blog of the 2008 Olympic Games : Activist Games

Human Rights: Geriatric Gulag?

Melinda Liu — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:52:25 GMT

We all knew China's population was graying rapidly, but Wednesday authorities drove home the point by sentencing two elderly women to the gulag. Wu Dianyuan and Wang Xiuying are both citizens in their late 70's who walk using canes; Wang is partially blind. They'd applied for permission to protest in one of the three government-designated "protest corners" in Beijing public parks. Their grievance is a common one: that they received inadequate compensation for their homes which were demolished in a recent pre-Games wave of urban redevelopment. Permission to protest was not granted; none of at least 77 applicants have received permission, in fact. Then the two elderly ladies each received a suspended sentence of one year of "re-education through labor", an extra-judicial punishment that doesn't require the decision of a court judge.

Other Chinese activists have been held incommunicado since the onset of the Games. Dissenters and the lawyers who represent them have been detained, even beaten. The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China reports that, in less than a month, members have encountered reporting interference by authorities on an average of about two cases per day. Meanwhile foreign critics of Beijing's policies in Tibet have been playing a cat-and-mouse game with Beijing police, launching guerrilla protests of various sorts on an almost daily basis—only to be swiftly arrested and deported. (A recent protest near the Bird's Nest stadium, involving activists holding LED lights that spelled out "Free Tibet", lasted just 20 seconds, according to Students for a Free Tibet; the exile group said that on Tuesday half a dozen "citizen journalists, videobloggers, and activists" were detained, including Brian Conley who created the well-known videoblog "Alive in Baghdad".)

For more background on this behind-the-scenes tussle, Newsweek.com interviewed Minky Worden, media director for Human Rights Watch China. Worden recently edited the book "China's Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges". She talks about the recent failures and hopeful future for human rights reforms and extended press freedoms in China. (The contributor who talked with Worden requested anonymity for fear of retaliation). Excerpts:

In the short term, what do you think the impact of the Olympics has been on human rights?
     This year a chill descended and it started almost exactly with the one-year countdown on August 8, 2007. This was entirely predictable, but it was also against the backdrop of a pretty rough year -- with the 17th Party Congress in October, the freak snowstorms earlier this year, the Tibet protests, and the Sichuan earthquake.
     It's important to remember that 2008 is not just an Olympic year. It's also the 30th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping's opening and reform policy. In the past ten years, there have been important reforms for the rule of law and human rights. And the Internet means people have a lot more access to information than they had before, even though it's not total access.
     This year, there's been a marked deterioration [in the human rights situation]. But this is a very Darwinistic Communist party: there are elements within that recognize the need to change, not the least to hold on to their own power. We're hopeful that after the Olympics the Chinese government will move on vital legal reforms, including [changes to] the criminal procedure law, to reeducation through labor, and to due process checks on death sentences that could radically reduce the numbers of executions.

Temporary regulations, due to expire October 17, have allowed foreign journalists to interview anyone they'd like, as long as the
interviewee gives permission. These represent a liberalization compared to the old 90's-era rules. What do you think will happen in the
future?
     Some public officials have publicly mooted that these temporary rules could be extended past October 17. If they were extended and made permanent--as Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists have requested--it would create a two-tier system [with the Chinese press having less freedom that foreign press]. We don't believe that would be sustainable.
     If the rules were extended to Chinese journalists, that could be a dramatic move for human rights in China. If environmental catastrophes and human rights abuses could be covered by Chinese journalists in advance, before they become global crises, that would be much better for the government and the Chinese people. The number-one beneficiary would be the Chinese people.
      But that's still an open question. There are still more journalists and Internet writers jailed in China than in any other country. The Foreign Correspondents Club of China has documented cases of abuses, harassment, and detention almost every day--some of them very serious.
     The hope is that the government will see that 20,000 journalists fanned out over China and there were no lasting bad effects from allowing journalists greater ability to report.

What are some of the cases of jailed activists that you're most concerned about?
      The saddest cases of all are the domestic lawyers and activists who probably wouldn't been in prison if they hadn't taken the government at its word that there would be more freedom. Hu Jia, an AIDS activist and human rights advocate, gave phone testimony to the EU Parliament last year. He was arrested in December and sentenced in April--while the IOC was in China. Right before the Olympics began, his wife, Zeng Jinyan, disappeared and we don't know if she was arrested or fled with her daughter.

       And then there are the people who tried to use the protest zones set up by the government for the Olympics. You have to register to protest, but anyone who's tried to register has been arrested. It's so cynical of the government to set up these parks and use them to round people up. They're like Potemkin protest zones--they exist in name but not in practice. The idea that you would set up something and not allow people to go--that's not in keeping with the Olympian spirit.

Why do you think the situation got worse this year?
      It's an impulse to control that predates the Olympics. Whenever there's a big event, there's this impulse. And the negative press is principally because of this. China would have gotten a lot of credit if it had allowed the protests.

You recently criticized the IOC in an op-ed you wrote in the International Herald Tribune. What do you think the IOC's responsibility is?
It's important to step back and remember the "why" and "how" China got [to host] the Olympics. 1989 was the Tianamen Square crackdown. In 1990, Deng said, "China should apply for the Olympics." At that time, China was in a global diplomatic deep freeze. They needed something to sweep away the images of Tiananmen Square. That bid [for the 2000 Olympics] failed, probably because China was not prepared to host the Olympics.
In 2001, the bid guaranteed human rights improvements and complete media freedom. My favorite line is, "China will live up to its words and turn its words into deeds...The government will honor the promises and commitments made during our bid to host the Games." It highlights how Beijing made these pledges voluntarily. A confident and modern government lives up to its own promises--including those to its own people.

Hurdler Liu Xiang's photo on the book jacket

     Richard Pound, who writes a chapter in the book, was there in 1993 and 2001 [for China's two bids]. What was different in 2001 was the inclusion of human rights, which provided an irresistible opportunity, they thought. And he's not an activist--he's a 30-year member of the IOC. It's fair to say that the IOC failed because they were advised well in advance by HRW and others and had numerous opportunities to raise issues about human rights. They could've made the host city contract public. Past contracts have been made public--particularly in the wake of the Salt Lake City bribery scandal. There's no reason the world should not know what China agreed to.
     They also wasted an opportunity not to put into place a human rights mechanism that would hold the host country responsible for abuses. We're pushing for that before the 2014 Sochi [Winter] Olympics in Russia. It needs to be statutory: if the IOC is going to continue to award the Games to human rights abusing countries then there need to be some checks in place--like there are for doping and bribery--so the human rights concerns don't overwhelm the Games.

Did you ever consider a boycott of the 2008 Games?
     HRW did not support a boycott for two reasons. One was practical: so many of the Chinese people support the Games. The other was tactical
because China had made so many pledges to support the human rights and this was an opportunity to try to hold them to it.

HRW's website was recently unblocked in the Olympic media center. How long had it been blocked for?
      Our website was always blocked in China until the Olympics [began].

I found I could access the English-language version--and every language except Chinese.
     At some level, who cares if the English version works? They haven't unblocked the most important part. For starters, it's a violation of the pledges of journalistic freedom. What about journalists who are part of the Beijing press corps? It shows there was a specific effort to block only the Chinese version. It also means the Chinese people are missing an opportunity to see how a human rights organization works. If that site was unblocked, they could see that we also cover human rights violations in the U.S., Russia, and 80 other countries.

What do you think the long-term outlook is for China?
     I think the sad thing is China has done well in showcasing its modernity and architecture. But it missed the opportunity to show what transformed the country and that was reform. China's not going to close up again--the Chinese people won't allow it. The question is, what is the pace of reform?
     The great hope is that once the pressure of the international spotlight is off, reform can continue. Reformists will move forward with processes that have already lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

Men's Diving: A Splash of Controversy

Mary Hennock — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 05:14:41 GMT

The Olympics is the world's greatest sports contest and it'd be strange to come to the world's greatest sporting event, or even simply have it arrive on the doorstep as has happened for those of us who live in Beijing year-round, without catching any sport. So today, I headed for the men's diving finals. They were battling for the gold medal for synchronized pair-diving off the 10 meter platform (the highest board, if like me you're new to this).

The event was a gold medal chance for one of the youngest athletes in the Beijing Olympics, 14-year old schoolboy Thomas Daley from the UK. He lost, ending last among the eight teams along with his diving partner Blake Aldridge, aged 26. The Chinese pair won, and the US team bumped along in the middle through all six dives in the contest. When it was over, the US duo was placed fifth.

An ugly spat then erupted between the British prodigy and his partner after the event as Aldridge blamed his much younger team-mate for their dismal ranking. "Tom was very nervous, more so than ever before. I think he really struggled to get through the competition, and as his partner it was hard for me to get up there and try and ease him into it," Aldridge said.

Aldridge revealed that 14-year old had "had a pop" at him before their final dive. "When we were sitting down I saw my mum in the audience and I asked her to give me a call but Tom went to me: 'What are you on the phone for? We're in a competition and we've got another dive to do'", Aldridge said. "That's just Tom being over-nervous. That's how it was today. Tom should not be worrying about what I'm doing. Today he was worrying about everyone and everything and for me that is really the sole reason why he didn't perform today." Nonetheless, even the pair's previous personal best of 446 points wouldn't have got them the bronze today.

Though he's young, Daley (still only an inch over 5 feet tall) showed that he's already seasoned at batting off journalists. "It was a great experience....It just didn't happen for us today", he said smoothly. He admitted to being "very nervous" - as indeed he was. He could be seen sucking in air before dives, but insisted he'd enjoyed himself, learned valuable lessons for the 2012 Games and was looking forward to competing in the individual 10 meter platform event. Aldridge is not competing in any other events in Beijing which might explain the depth of his disappointment. "For me, my time is now to get a medal. I believe I'll still be around for 2012, but diving's evolved so much," he said.

American Thomas Finchum, 18, said took much the same diplomatic line at the young Brit by the way: "We stayed consistent...we didn't miss anything. We just didn't hit it to the best of our potential." It seems to be the soundbite of choice when you lose.

The Chinese were always hot favorites to win. They grabbed the lead with their first dive, and never lost it. The real battle was for silver and bronze. The Russian pair was in second place for most of the contest, but Dmitriy Dobroskok wobbled on the fifth dive and entered the water with his legs flipped back. It was a technical error that couldn't be blamed on nerves, he said ruefully afterward. As a result, the German pairing of Patrick Hausding and Sascha Klein scooped Germany's first silver medal of the Games.

It was my first time inside the Water Cube, a magnificent building that glows blue on the outside as light shifts across the giant bubbles that make up its polyurethane surface. Inside, it's smoothly cool, transparent and neutral, unlike the bitter rows going on inside its walls.

It's not the only place in this giant country where tensions are high but inside the bubble of Olympic politics and sporting rivalry it's hard to remember there are other sources of friction. China is suffering its worst spate of terrorist attacks in years, for instance. State media reported that 10 militants and a security guard died in suicide bombings and a shootout in Kuqa in Xinjiang province in western China on Sunday and "dozens of unexploded bomb devices" were seized. While the body count suggests the police won this round, a week ago it was the authorities who got hit hardest when 16 border guards died in explosions elsewhere in Xinjiang. The Chinese authorities blame separatists in the largely Muslim region.

It also emerged over the weekend that Zeng Jinyan, the wife of a jailed dissident, disappeared on the day before the magnificent Olympic Games opening ceremony. The Chinese Human Rights Defenders group says it fears she "has been taken into police custody and might be mistreated." She was under house arrest and her husband Hu Jia is serving a three and a half year jail term for inciting subversion after criticizing China's human rights record in online testimony to the European Parliament.

CORRECTION: Thomas Daley is not the youngest performer in the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Estonian rower Indrek Jarvoja was born a day later than Tom, on May 22, 1994.

Bombs in China's Restive Muslim West, Again

Mary Hennock — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 02:17:13 GMT

Two people have been killed in a series of explosions on Sunday morning in Kuqa County of China's western province of Xinjiang, the official Xinhua news agency reported, citing the local military. Gunfire was also heard. Beijing is clearly facing more trouble in the restive Muslim region.

Xinhua added that casualties may still rise. A woman worker at Kuqa People's Hospital said several people were in critical condition and described hearing several explosions from different places around the city, the Associated Press reported. Police have cordoned off the area according to locals, and the military are on high alert.

Xinjiang is about 3,000 kilometers from Beijing, but the message is still a worrying one for China's leaders. This is the second set of explosions in less than a week in the province, where discontent against Han Chinese migrants is widespread among Xinjiang's 8 million ethnic Uighurs. Last Monday 16 border police died when attackers drove a truck at them and threw grenades during a morning exercise session.

No one has yet claimed responsibility for Sunday's attack, though a group calling itself the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) released a video on Thursday threatening to carry out attacks during the Olympics. TIP earlier claimed to have carried out bus bombings in Kunming in July and Shanghai in May that killed a total of five people. Chinese authorities maintain they have prevented several plots to attack the Games as well as an attempt to blow up an airliner in March, but as usual details are sketchy and impossible to verify.

Little is known about TIP. Or for that matter about the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which the US has recognised as a terrorist group. Security experts say that militants from Xinjiang have received training from Al-Qaida in northern Pakistan.

Chinese officials have used massive efforts to protect the Olympic Games from a terrorist attack. They must be a little more nervous this morning. However, there is another possibility that should perhaps be on the agenda of presidents George Bush and Hu Jintao when they hold talks today, but probably won't be. China's real worst-case scenario would be a low-level but persistent civil war in Xinjiang - something it has so far avoided.

China has successfully ridden on the coat tails of the Bush administration's "war on terror" to deflect criticism of its human rights record in Xinjiang. Meanwhile, the Bush administration's policy in Afghanistan is unraveling, with a rising death toll among US and allied troops, a situation that could make it easier for Xinjiang militants to receive training.

Torch Relay Enters Beijing: the Square, Circled

Melinda Liu — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:08:08 GMT

Today I decamped at dawn to watch the torch relay in you-know-which-famous-square. A couple dozen other journalists and I were herded to a spot facing Mao’s portrait. We waited and waited. The last time I’d waited that long in that place, that early in the morning, was in 1989 during a brief and ill-fated Beijing Spring.

Waiting for Yao Ming and the torch relay

Back then I was waiting for Chinese police to come clear the square of hundreds of youthful protesters who’d hung colorful silk banners off official flagpoles in front of the granite obelisk known as the Monument to the People’s Heroes. (Chinese look down on your political movement if you don’t have flags made of luxuriant silk, and if you don’t know how to brandish them just right so that the fabric floats like butterflies’ wings.) These kids in 1989—about the same age as the youth in the square this morning—chanted pro-democracy slogans and strummed folk-songs on guitars.

That earlier time I had stayed overnight in the square, surrounded by this moonlit and surreal Chinese Woodstock scene, because the next day Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was due in town for a historic Sino-Soviet summit. I assumed police would come waving their truncheons, and maybe lobbing tear gas, to clear the square of this ragtag assembly of demonstrators before Gorby’s arrival. Otherwise the protesters would be able to hijack the summit spotlight, China’s leaders would be embarrassed, and things would get messy.

Police never came that night. Leaders were embarrassed. Things got messy.

We still don’t know exactly how many people died in the crackdown, and the topic remains an extremely touchy one still for authorities. Despite the unblocking of a number of websites on Aug. 1—after the IOC squawked and Chinese officials caved (sort of)—many sites related to the 1989 crackdown remain inaccessible to ordinary Netizens.

Which is why this item will not mention the name of that famous-square-whose-name-cannot-be-mentioned. The last blog posting we did on this topic, by my colleague Jonathan Ansfield, (who did name names) not only created access problems for this blog but even managed to get certain pages of another blog blocked for a time because it had cited Jonathan’s item (sorry, Roland).

So, back to the torch relay, which entered Beijing amidst much hoopla on its way to the finale and the Aug. 8 Olympics opening ceremony. Today there were many, many luxuriant silk flags fluttering in the square. Red and white flags representing the Olympics and the Beijing Games. Lots of familiar red Chinese national flags. And a sea of crimson flags wielded by youth in matching red t-shirts, caps and backpacks all exhorting observers to revel in the glory of….Coca Cola.

Not to be outdone, on the opposite side of the square was another group of exuberant youth, with another Chinese national flag that was truly enormous. It required a number of excited kids to coordinate in holding it parallel to the ground, tilted slightly so that photographers could capture the true impact of its immense size. After all, who could be more worthy to be flag-bearers in China than these enthusiastic volunteers brought to you by….McDonald’s.

Onlookers promoting McDonald's and celebrating the torch relay, under Mao's gaze

Indeed, the torch relay organizers who bussed us into the square amidst extremely tight security thoughtfully gave each journalist a bag of McDonald’s goodies. Big Mac’s for breakfast are something I never dreamed of in Beijing (or anywhere else) in 1989.

In today’s China we don’t blink an eye as we chow down on carb-heavy Western fast food waiting for worldwide basketball celebrity Yao Ming to grab the Olympic torch and trot past icons of the Chinese Communist Party’s continuing supremacy (such as the national emblems on the Great Hall of the People), as onlookers organized by famous Games sponsors cheer and tiny shaven-headed boys dressed in daffodil-yellow pajama-style outfits perform martial-arts maneuvers while a massive security presence including a brand-new spit-polished black Hummer with police markings lurks in the alleyways, a CCTV news helicopter captures what will become the official version of the scene while flying lazy arcs over the square, and Chairman Mao Zedong’s portrait gazes sternly on the entire proceedings from the south gate of the fabled Forbidden City.

What would Mao think of all this? Marxist ideology has given way to McDonalds. The Communist party has linked arms with Coke. Beijing police watch CSI Miami for tips on how real police act and outfit themselves (even if Hummers are themselves wider than some Beijing sidestreets). The youth in the square today were not chanting “Democracy! Freedom!” as they did in 1989 but rather “Go China! Go Beijing!” Mao’s squat and stolid mausoleum was all but eclipsed by fluttering silk flags, floating over all of us like a red tide.

The square has come full circle.

NOTE: THIS IS A CROSS-POSTING FROM THE "COUNTDOWN TO BEIJING" BLOG, WHICH DOCUMENTED THE RUN-UP TO THE GAMES

Games and the Gulag: Let the Protests Begin

Newsweek — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:05:04 GMT

Aritz Parra/AP

The first skirmishes in the guerrilla war between Chinese authorities and human rights protesters took place on Wednesday. Plenty of what China doesn't want to happen has happened here today, but so far it's been small-scale, with a scrappy, subterranean feel, and very little of it has occurred in public. By the end of the afternoon, four Free Tibet protesters had been detained and a film show was canceled. Human rights groups staged at least four protests.

The day's most successful stunt came from Students for a Free Tibet. Two men--American Phil Bartell and Briton Iain Thom--climbed pylons near the showcase Bird's Nest National Stadium at dawn and hung out banners saying "Tibet will be Free" and "One World, One Dream, Free Tibet". Police detained the climbers and their two helpers–one man and one woman–who were acting as spotters at the base of the pylon, and there has been no word of them since. It's likely they've been deported. Despite the small scale of this incident, the stadium is the icon of the Games and will be the site of the opening ceremony on Friday. It's blow to the police for activists to get so close so such a sensitive site.

Free Tibet activists also organized film showings in hotel rooms, notifying reporters by text message. The first show went ahead, attended by Reuters and BBC reporters, but Newsweek's invitation was to the later event in a second hotel. There was a distinctly amateur feel to this occasion as two dozen reporters milled round the lobby of the modest Hotel G (no secrecy here, that's its full name) in east Beijing, trying to gain entry to Room 612. While management insisted that 612's occupant did not want us admitted, reporters dialed the room and were told to come up. After a while, though, Room 612 stopped answering. Seven journalists who did make it inside appeared and said that management had switched off the TV and ordered them out. The UK-based organizers included Dechen Pemba, a Tibetan woman with a British passport who was deported from Beijing in July. Before the film, Pemba gave a 10 minute introduction by video, Reuters reported.

Hotel rooms were a creative theme of the day. If the film show was art-house, the day's third event was more like an art school degree show installation. Selected reporters were invited to go to two hotel rooms a couple of miles apart, locate the room key taped to the back of the "Do not disturb" sign and let themselves inside for a private viewing. What they found, according to a photographer with the Spanish paper El Mundo, were walls daubed with slogans and a life-size black-clad figure laid out on the bed with a splash of red paint at its neck. Daubed directly onto the walls was the slogan "Speak out for those who have no voices", the Beijing 2008 logo and the names of five jailed dissidents. The names in both rooms were the same: AIDS activist Hu Jia, Pastor Zhang Rongliang who supports unregistered churches or "house churches", journalist Shi Tao, human rights activist and lawyer Guo Feixiong, and Falungong member Xu Na. There was no sign of the organizers (who presumably paid cash for their rooms) according to Richard Spencer of the UK-based newspaper The Daily Telegraph. It's not clear who organized these spectacles.

These guerrilla actions are small scale affairs, but the Games haven't started yet. There almost certainly will be more protests in the days ahead.

The Hotel G was shut down after this incident, according to an email from the film show's organizers. "According to many sources the guests of Hotel G. were forced to leave their hotel and find other places for the coming night," it said.