Recently in Beijing 2008 Category

By BBC World News
March 16, 2009

Bone tests on teenage athletes in south China have shown that thousands had faked their age, often in order to keep competing in junior events.

Tests on nearly 13,000 athletes found that more than 3,000 were older than their registered age, according to the Sports Bureau of Guangdong Province.

At least one athlete was seven years older than their stated age, but most were said to differ by a year or two.

The news comes as Guangdong prepares to host the 2010 Asian Games.

The investigation is the latest in a number of initiatives by the Chinese authorities to crack down on the practice of age-faking, which many experts believe is rampant.

The expensive bone age analysis tests were carried out on teenage athletes registered with sports academies in Guangdong.

The province's governing body found that about a fifth of those tested had lied about how old they were.

"We must ensure that those athletes faking their ages cannot find any way to take advantage [in competition]," officials were quoted by local media as saying.

"Based on the bone X-ray examinations, we will review all the results of youth sports competition in 2008."

'Widespread practice'

Funding of sport at provincial level is dependent on success.

The BBC's sport news reporter, Alex Capstick, says local officials are under huge pressure to win, which makes them more likely to bend the rules.

It is no surprise some athletes and their families, many of whom see sport as a way out of hardship, have joined in the lie as the system only rewards the very best, our correspondent says.

Chinese athletes have faced repeated claims of age-faking in recent years.

At last year's Olympics in Beijing, some of China's gold-winning gymnasts were alleged to be below the minimum age of 16.

However, after an inquiry, the sport's governing body cleared them of any wrongdoing.

The Chinese Basketball Association recently announced that last year 26 players in the top league had registered an incorrect age. This would have allowed them to represent junior teams when they were in fact too old.

There have been similar problems in football.

At the weekend, it emerged that a badminton player who had won a provincial title as a 14-year-old had now admitted to being 17 at the time of the contest.

>> Original source

By Edward Wong | THE NEW YORK TIMES
February 22, 2009

On Monday, a 62-year-old woman named Zhong Ruihua who traveled from southern China to Beijing during the Paralympics to conduct a protest is scheduled to go on trial for disturbing the public order, according to one of her daughters.

Ms. Zhong will be the first of 10 people from the industrial city of Liuzhou to come to trial for planned protests in September.

The group came to petition for redress for property seizures or destruction that involved local officials, a common complaint among Chinese. The oldest member was a 79-year-old woman.

They never got to protest; within an hour of being interviewed by The New York Times about their plans, they were detained by scores of plainclothes police officers who had followed them from their home in the Guangxi Autonomous Region. They were then driven back south. The daughter, a woman whose name is Ms. Dang, said no one had been allowed to see Ms. Zhong since she was driven back to her hometown.

Another daughter who had come to Beijing with Ms. Zhong is also being detained, said Ms. Dang, who asked that only her surname be used, citing fear of government reprisal.

"I'm not sure how her health is," Ms. Dang said of her mother. "Of course I'm anxious."

Ms. Zhong's original plan when she flew to Beijing was to apply for a permit to hold a protest. During the Summer Olympics and Paralympics, the Chinese government had said anyone could apply to hold a protest in one of three designated parks in Beijing. In the end, no permits were granted, and the government even detained some people who had applied, including two frail grandmothers in their 70s.

Ms. Zhong, who had heard about the earlier detentions, said she became too scared to apply for a permit when she heard that she had to do so in person. So on Sept. 10, she and one of her daughters walked out of an apartment in Beijing where Liuzhou's would-be protesters had been hiding. They were on their way to hold their protest when they were picked up by the police from Guangxi.

The other people in the apartment were also detained when they walked out the same afternoon.

One of the other women, Huang Liuhong, and her 4-month-old son have not been seen since September, when the two were put under arrest in a government hotel in Liuzhou, said one of her sisters.

Two other sisters and Ms. Huang's mother, 79, had also gone for the protest and were arrested in September. The mother has been released, but the other sisters are still in jail.

As Ms. Huang was being driven back to Liuzhou in September, she said by cellphone that the police had stripped her of her clothes so she would not flee.

"I have no idea where they are," the sister said Saturday. "The police won't let me see them."

>> Original source

By Edward Wong | THE NEW YORK TIMES
January 16, 2009

A legal advocate who was arrested after applying to hold a protest in Beijing during the Olympic Games in August has been sentenced to three years in prison, said a lawyer who has been asked to represent the man in the appeals process.

The advocate, Ji Sizun, 58, was sentenced on Jan. 7 by a judge in the city of Fuzhou for forging official seals and documents, the lawyer, Lin Kaihua, said Thursday.

Mr. Ji was one of many victims of a tactic employed by the central government during the Beijing Olympics that has angered human rights advocates and has raised questions about whether the International Olympic Committee should have put more pressure on the Chinese government to respect human rights and freedom of speech.

In the prelude to the Games, the government announced that it had designated three parks in Beijing as legal protest zones and that anyone could apply to hold protests in them. When people did apply, however, their requests were ignored or they were detained and arrested.

The government did not allow a single protest to be held in any of the parks. In the most infamous incident of would-be protesters being arrested, two women in their 70s were detained for applying to hold a protest over a land dispute. The women were sentenced to re-education through labor, a punishment handed down to dissidents without judicial review.

Mr. Ji, from the coastal province of Fujian, met with a similar fate. He arrived in Beijing planning to hold a protest against government corruption, an issue that angers many Chinese and that undermines the legitimacy of the government.

On Aug. 9, Mr. Ji went to the Deshengmenwai police station to apply for a permit to protest at the Purple Bamboo Park, one of the three designated protest areas. Mr. Ji had several reporters accompany him because he feared being arrested. He tried to submit his application but was questioned intensely by police officers. The reporters who accompanied him said they were harassed. Mr. Ji left the station that day, but returned two days later to check on the status of his application. The police arrested him then.

He was sentenced by the Taijiang District People's Court in Fuzhou. No one answered the telephone at the court when calls were made seeking comment on Thursday.

Mr. Lin, the lawyer, said that Mr. Ji had asked for his representation during the appeals process but had yet to raise the money to pay the legal fees.

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting.

>> Original source

By Andrew Jacobs | THE NEW YORK TIMES
November 25, 2008

The Chinese government reacted angrily on Monday to what it called a slanderous United Nations report that alleges systemic torture of political and criminal detainees. The government said the authors were biased, untruthful and driven by a political agenda.

The report, issued Friday by the United Nations Committee Against Torture, documented what the authors described as widespread abuse in the Chinese legal system, one that often gains convictions through forced confessions.

The report recounts China's use of "secret prisons" and the widespread harassment of lawyers who take on rights cases, and it criticizes the government's extralegal system of punishment, known as re-education through labor, which hands down prison terms to dissidents without judicial review.

"The state party should conduct prompt, impartial and effective investigations into all allegations of torture and ill treatment and should ensure that those responsible are prosecuted," said the report, which was written by a 10-member committee of independent experts.

Qin Gang, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, called the document "untrue and slanderous," and said that China cherished human rights and opposed torture. "To our regret, some biased committee members, in drafting the observations, chose to ignore the substantial materials provided by the Chinese Government," he said in a statement posted Monday on the ministry's Web site, adding that they "even fabricated some unverified information." The ministry did not describe the material it had provided to the United Nations committee.

The report's publication is another embarrassment for the Communist Party, which has been striving to demonstrate its commitment to human rights. Last month, the government was infuriated by the European Union's decision to honor Hu Jia, one of the country's best-known dissidents, who is serving a three-and-a-half year prison term for subversion; last week, China was angered by a United States Congressional report that criticized what it called China's failure to fulfill a pledge to improve human rights leading up to the Olympic Games and during them.

"Illegal detentions and harassment of dissidents and petitioners followed the Chinese government and Communist Party's instructions to officials to ensure a 'harmonious' and dissent-free Olympics," the report said. "Individuals detained for circulating a 'We Want Human Rights, Not Olympics' petition are now serving sentences in prison and 're-education through labor' centers."

Although China's Constitution includes provisions to protect human rights and China has ratified numerous international conventions banning torture, public security officials frequently use coercion to gain signed confessions. "I have yet to see a political case in which the person was not tortured or mistreated," said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher based in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch. Even though torture is technically illegal under Chinese law, he added, there is no explicit prohibition against evidence obtained through coercion.

Human rights advocates say that the government's crackdown on dissenters has not let up since the Games, when petitioners seeking permission to demonstrate in parks officially designated for protests were whisked away by the police.

The most recent cases include that of Guo Quan, an associate professor at Nanjing Normal University, who was detained on Nov. 13 on suspicion of "inciting subversion of state power" after he established an independent political party. Earlier, Liu Xueli, a farmer from Henan Province whose land had been confiscated by local officials, sought a protest permit during the Olympics and was sentenced to re-education through labor.

On Friday, a court in Chengdu handed down a three-year sentence to Chen Daojun, a journalist and environmental advocate who was convicted of "inciting to subvert state power." Mr. Chen was detained in May after he published articles on the Tibetan quest for greater autonomy and the spate of anti-Western demonstrations that erupted across China after the Olympic torch relay was disrupted by protesters in Paris, London and San Francisco.

Although prosecutors accused Mr. Chen, 40, of slandering the Communist Party, his lawyer, Zhu Jiuhu, suggested that the authorities might have been especially irked by Mr. Chen's participation in a demonstration this year opposing the construction of a petrochemical plant near Chengdu. Mr. Zhu said he was denied access to his client; the trial, he added, lasted less than an hour. "We tried our hardest," he said.

In an interview on Monday, Mr. Chen's wife, Zeng Qirong, said she had not seen her husband since he was taken into custody. She said he had often written literary criticism or articles about rural life.

The detention, she said, would be particularly onerous for the couple's 10-year-old son and Mr. Chen's sickly parents. "The process was not fair," she said of the trial. "They were only articles. It was his own opinion. He was only describing the way society is."

>> Original source

By Christine Brennan | USA TODAY
October 30, 2008

China's government was so concerned about the possibility of athlete demonstrations in the Beijing Olympics that it created a list of nine U.S. athletes and one assistant coach it thought might cause trouble at the Games, according to an internal U.S. Olympic Committee e-mail obtained by USA TODAY.

The names included softball players Jennie Finch and Jessica Mendoza and soccer player Abby Wambach, who broke her leg and missed the Olympic Games. It also included two Paralympians, one athlete who wasn't a member of the 2008 softball team and a top female collegiate golfer. Golf is not an Olympic sport.

"We viewed these concerns as being entirely unjustified and unwarranted," USOC spokesman Darryl Seibel said in an e-mail Wednesday. "As such, we rejected the request to address this with our athletes or transmit the letter to them. We saw absolutely no need to burden the athletes with this."

The list was given to USOC officials in a July 8 meeting by Shu Xiao, minister counselor for cultural affairs at the Chinese embassy in Washington, according to the e-mail.

"The subject matter had to do with information the Chinese have received regarding the intention of certain members of the U.S. Olympic team to stage some sort of demonstration at the Games, perhaps displaying banners or wearing apparel or wrist bands bearing political slogans," the e-mail stated. It added that Shu said "many of them" were "apparently associated with Team Darfur," an international coalition of athletes committed to raising awareness about the crisis in Darfur, Sudan.

"Shu appeared quite concerned over the prospect of such demonstrations and asked what we could do," according to the e-mail.

Seibel said the USOC "communicated to the Embassy in very clear terms that our athletes would have the same right to free speech and free expression, consistent with what is set forth in the Olympic Charter, that they have enjoyed at previous Games. We made certain those rights would in no way be infringed upon or compromised."

The USOC was concerned and alerted its team leaders of those sports in which athletes were named.There were no incidents involving the athletes in China, and after months of conversation about possible athlete protests over Darfur, Tibet or China's treatment of dissidents, none materialized at the Games.

"This may be the biggest compliment of my life," Wambach, a member of Team Darfur, said in a phone interview when informed of the list. "If they're worried about us, maybe we do have more strength as athletes and as people to speak out. This just gives me more empowerment."

"It doesn't surprise me but it makes me laugh," said Mendoza, who also is president-elect of the Women's Sports Foundation. "We're not burning our shirts and ranting and raving. We're just trying to help thousands of people from dying."

Phone calls to the Chinese embassy Wednesday afternoon went unanswered.

>> Full transcript from source