Beijing 2008: August 2007 Archives
By Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley | THE NEW YORK TIMES
August 26, 2007
No country in history has emerged as a major industrial power without creating a legacy of environmental damage that can take decades and big dollops of public wealth to undo.
But just as the speed and scale of China's rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all precedents. Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut.
Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China's leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water.
Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of the country's 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union. Beijing is frantically searching for a magic formula, a meteorological deus ex machina, to clear its skies for the 2008 Olympics.
Environmental woes that might be considered catastrophic in some countries can seem commonplace in China: industrial cities where people rarely see the sun; children killed or sickened by lead poisoning or other types of local pollution; a coastline so swamped by algal red tides that large sections of the ocean no longer sustain marine life.
China is choking on its own success. The economy is on a historic run, posting a succession of double-digit growth rates. But the growth derives, now more than at any time in the recent past, from a staggering expansion of heavy industry and urbanization that requires colossal inputs of energy, almost all from coal, the most readily available, and dirtiest, source.
"It is a very awkward situation for the country because our greatest achievement is also our biggest burden," says Wang Jinnan, one of China's leading environmental researchers. "There is pressure for change, but many people refuse to accept that we need a new approach so soon."
China's problem has become the world's problem. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed by China's coal-fired power plants fall as acid rain on Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo. Much of the particulate pollution over Los Angeles originates in China, according to the Journal of Geophysical Research.
More pressing still, China has entered the most robust stage of its industrial revolution, even as much of the outside world has become preoccupied with global warming.
Experts once thought China might overtake the United States as the world's leading producer of greenhouse gases by 2010, possibly later. Now, the International Energy Agency has said China could become the emissions leader by the end of this year, and the Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency said China had already passed that level.
For the Communist Party, the political calculus is daunting. Reining in economic growth to alleviate pollution may seem logical, but the country's authoritarian system is addicted to fast growth. Delivering prosperity placates the public, provides spoils for well-connected officials and forestalls demands for political change. A major slowdown could incite social unrest, alienate business interests and threaten the party's rule.
But pollution poses its own threat. Officials blame fetid air and water for thousands of episodes of social unrest. Health care costs have climbed sharply. Severe water shortages could turn more farmland into desert. And the unconstrained expansion of energy-intensive industries creates greater dependence on imported oil and dirty coal, meaning that environmental problems get harder and more expensive to address the longer they are unresolved.
By RTTNews | nasdaq.com
August 23, 2007
A prominent California Republican congressman is helping to spearhead GOP efforts to urge President Bush to boycott the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing amid concerns that China has not improved its often-criticized human rights record.
Introduced by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., the nonbinding resolution calls for the U.S. government to take "immediate steps" to boycott the games unless the "Chinese regime stops engaging in serious human rights abuses against its citizens and stops supporting serious human rights abuses by the governments of Sudan, Burma and North Korea against their citizens."
Rohrabacher, a member of the House Committee on International Relations, said the Olympic Games represent the "noblest elements of humanity," while the communist Chinese government "represents the opposite."
"The Olympic torch is supposed to be a beacon of light shining upon mankind's higher aspirations in the world, and it's a travesty to have that torch hosted by a regime that is the world's worst human rights abuser," he said.
The resolution is co-sponsored by House Republicans Joseph Pitts of Pennsylvania, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan, John Doolittle of California, Dan Burton of Indiana, Frank Wolf of Virginia and Christopher Smith of New Jersey.
Rohrabacher said just as the United States turned a blind eye to Germany's Nazi regime by participating in the 1936 summer games in Berlin, the U.S. participating in the 2008 games would ignore China's ties to the Sudanese government, which has been complicit in the genocide in the Darfur region.
By BBC News
August 24, 2007
The wife of a jailed human rights activist in China has been prevented from leaving the country to pick up an award on his behalf, friends say.
Yuan Weijing had been due to travel to the Philippines to collect a human rights award for her husband, Chen Guangcheng, who was jailed last year.
But fellow activists say the Chinese authorities revoked her passport and stopped her boarding the flight.
Chen Guangcheng was jailed for damaging property and disrupting traffic.
But his supporters say the real reason Mr Chen, who is blind, was sentenced for four years and three months is because he exposed violations linked to China's one-child policy, including forced sterilisations and abortions.
Prestigious award
Yuan Weijing said the authorities told her on Thursday that they had revoked her passport, even though it was still valid.
She said the authorities then attempted to block her journey both from her home in Shandong province and from the house in Beijing where she stayed in overnight.
She was eventually detained at the airport and her luggage removed from the flight, friends said.
Yuan Weijing had been due to collect the award from the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation in Manila - one of Asia's most prestigious honours.
The foundation had named Chen Guangcheng as one of seven winners for his "irrepressible passion for justice in leading ordinary Chinese citizens to assert their legitimate rights under the law".
Mr Chen, 35, has campaigned against what he says are abuses of the Chinese government's one-child policy.
Before being imprisoned, he accused local health workers in Linyi city, in Shandong province, of illegally forcing hundreds of people to have late-term abortions or sterilisations.
China brought in its one-child policy 27 years ago, in a drive to curb population growth, but forced sterilisation and abortion are prohibited.
Following are highlights of Op-Ed Contributor Ross Terrill
*** as published in The New York Times on August 22, 2007
Please follow the link at the bottom to read the entire Editorial
IN China, language has long been a test of political orthodoxy. In Mao Zedong's era, to confuse evil "bourgeois" with virtuous "proletarian" was to face a prison cell. Write the Chinese character for a leader's name at a wrong angle and you were a class enemy. Now, as Beijing begins the final year of its preparations for the 2008 Olympic Games, a mistake with an English word is taboo.
Some lapses are harmless. "Don't Bother" as a privacy request on a hotel door, for example, or "Chop the Strange Fish" on a restaurant menu. Others could lead to minor trouble. "Please take advantage of the chambermaids," says a resort brochure.
The penalty for "Chinglish" is usually humiliation, not incarceration. Still, citizens are asked to snitch, Mao-era style, on people who shame China with their shaky English. An outfit called the Beijing Speaks Foreign Languages Program issues prefabricated foreign phrases to workers who cannot converse in any foreign tongue. The Olympics have become one more tool in the authoritarian state's box of tricks.
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Yet behind the attack on Chinglish lies an Orwellian impulse to remake the truth. Banished from Beijing for the Olympics will be not only fractured English, but disabled people, Falun Gong practitioners, dark-skinned villagers newly arrived in the city, AIDS activists and other "troublemakers" who smudge the canvas of socialist harmony.
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Likewise, in 2001, arguing before the world to get the Olympic Games, the vice president of Beijing's bid committee said, "By allowing Beijing to host the Games, you will help the development of human rights." Yet the opposite danger looms: Games preparation has spurred repression.
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Alas, few Americans visiting Beijing next August will realize that the drinking water from the faucets of their five-star hotels is unavailable to 99 percent of the city's residents. In fact, this city's water is not safe to drink; the water for the athletes and tourists will be piped in from neighboring Hebei Province.
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For years, the party hopes, it will be able to flaunt photographs of Tibetan farmers cheering at a Chinese gold medal in table tennis, videos of Muslims in Xinjiang Province fainting with joy as the women's high jump goes to China by half an inch over Japan, and documentaries in which Beijing taxi drivers speak in perfect English to tourists from New York.
***Ross Terrill, an associate in research at Harvard's Fairbank Center, is the author of "The New Chinese Empire: And What it Means for the United States."
By BBC News
August 17, 2007
Some spectators attending the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing face serious health problems due to air pollution, a leading health expert has warned.
Dr Michal Krzyzanowski of the World Health Organisation told the BBC that those with a history of cardiovascular problems should take particular care.
He also said the city's poor air quality could trigger asthma attacks.
The warning came as Beijing began a four-day test scheme to take 1.3m vehicles off the city's roads.
During the test period, cars with registration plates ending in odd and even numbers will each be banned from the roads for two day.
Any driver caught contravening the restrictions will be fined 100 yuan ($13, £6.50) by 6,500 police officers.
If the strategy works, it will be used next August to reduce air pollution and traffic during the Olympics.
Officials expect the ban to cut vehicle emissions by 40%, although correspondents said thick smog continued to hang over the city on Friday.
Beijing's residents, who are being told to take public transport rather than their cars during the test period, appear to be supporting the pilot project.
'Highly polluted'
But despite the plans to cut emissions, Dr Krzyzanowski said the WHO still feared for the welfare of those planning to attend the games next year.
"All of the cities are pretty highly polluted by European standards, but even by the standards of Asia, Chinese cities are pretty highly polluted," he told BBC Sport.
>> Read the complete article
By CHARLES HUTZLER | Associated Press | via (uncensored) Yahoo! News
August 17, 2007
Communist authorities have banned most state media from reporting on the deadly collapse of a bridge in southern China, with local officials punching and chasing reporters from the scene, reporters said Friday.
The harassment and the reporting ban, issued by the Central Propaganda Department, came Thursday while reporters swarmed the tourist town of Fenghuang to report on Monday's accident.
Unidentified locals roughed up a group of five newspaper and magazine reporters as they interviewed families of those killed, according to a photographer and a reporter whose colleague was among the journalists involved.
The collapse of the bridge, which was under construction, left at least 41 people dead, making it one of the worst building accidents in China in recent years.
On Friday, rescue crews blasted massive stone and concrete columns to clear the way for a deeper search of the rubble for two dozen missing workers.
The rough treatment given the media stands at odds with the responsible, concerned image China's Communist Party leadership has tried to convey publicly in the wake of the accident and the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Officials from President Hu Jintao on down have promised a thorough investigation into the collapse and punishment for any wrongdoing.
But the accident has raised troubling questions about shoddy building and possible corruption between the officials and contractors, and by trying to control reporting on the disaster, Beijing is fueling those suspicions.
"The local government does not want the media to uncover the collapse," said Li Datong, a veteran newspaperman forced from a top editing job two years ago for running reports that angered authorities. Li said he was told about the harassment in Fenghuang by reporters involved.
A duty officer in the Fenghuang police department, Liu Xiajun, said reporters had made an emergency call reporting the harassment Thursday, but he said he could not elaborate.
An official in the Propaganda Department's information office who declined to give his name said he was "not clear" about the ban and declined further comment.
While all media in China is state controlled, some outlets have engaged in lively, aggressive reporting in recent years, taking advantage of greater social freedoms that have accompanied economic growth and seeking higher profits. Accounts of reporters being beaten by local thugs have increased, with one reporter even being beaten to death early this year.
After the Propaganda Department issued the ban, editors soon phoned their crews in Fenghuang, ordering them to clear out. Editors "told them to disappear within 10 minutes from Fenghuang," the photographer who was having dinner with a group of reporters Thursday night wrote in an e-mail.
The photographer and the reporter asked that they and their media not be identified for fear of reprisals by the department, China's top media censor.
Under the ban, state media were ordered not to send reporters to Fenghuang or independently gather the news but to rely solely on reports by the government's Xinhua News Agency, according to the reporter.
By Keith Bradsher | The New York Times
August 12, 2007
SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 9 — At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.
Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.
Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.
Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime. But they say the technology can be used to violate civil rights.
The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired permanent residency.
Both steps are officially aimed at fighting crime and developing better controls on an increasingly mobile population, including the nearly 10 million peasants who move to big cities each year. But they could also help the Communist Party retain power by maintaining tight controls on an increasingly prosperous population at a time when street protests are becoming more common.
“If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future,” said Michael Lin, the vice president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology.
Incorporated in Florida, China Public Security has raised much of the money to develop its technology from two investment funds in Plano, Tex., Pinnacle Fund and Pinnacle China Fund. Three investment banks — Roth Capital Partners in Newport Beach, Calif.; Oppenheimer & Company in New York; and First Asia Finance Group of Hong Kong — helped raise the money.
Free-Tibet activist expelled by Beijing gets hero's welcome on return to Canada
By Nicholas Keung | The Toronto Star
August 10, 2007
A weary Lhadon Tethong received a hero's welcome from her family and supporters as the human rights activist arrived in Toronto last night - less than two days after being detained by China for calling for freedom for Tibet.
With tousled hair and wearing a backpack, the 31-year-old woman was embraced by her father Tsewang Choegyal, brother Losel and cousin Cindy Rees as a dozen Tibetan-Canadians chanted her name and waved red, yellow and blue Tibetan flags.
"It feels great to be back," sighed Tethong as people threw beige and yellow Tibetan scarves on her neck.
"I was worried about my personal safety," she said. "It's hard not to be freaked out. Whenever I felt afraid and nervous, especially in the night, I would just think about what protection I thought I did have.
"Compared to ... Tibetans and Chinese dissidents - (who have) no protection, no foreign passports or foreign press to come to their aid - what I was doing really felt small compared to that."
Tethong, executive director of the New York-based Students for a Free Tibet, was among three Canadians detained after a group of activists hoisted a banner saying "One World, One Dream, Free Tibet, 2008" on the Great Wall Tuesday, as the one-year countdown began for the Beijing Olympics.
Tethong was detained Wednesday and deported for blogging and posting photos online about what her group called China's "propaganda campaign" in the year leading up to the Games.
Fellow Canadians Melanie Raoul, 25, and Sam Price, 32 - who were among six activists who raised the banner - arrived home in Vancouver earlier yesterday to hugs from their parents and supporters.
"She has been an activist since she was small," said Tethong's father, a Tibetan who met his Canadian wife, Judy, in India before they settled in Victoria, B.C., in 1975. "It's a relief to see her home, safe and sound. We're all proud of her."
Chinese Communist troops moved into Tibet in 1951. Tibetans regard China's presence as an occupation.
Tethong, a graduate of Dalhousie University, said the world has to seize the opportunity to bring China's rights records to the forefront.
"China is under the gun right now," she told reporters at the airport. "They wanted this (Olympic pride), but they didn't want what it means to be a free and open society, which is to allow dissent and to allow protest."
By Associated Press | via (uncensored) yahoo!news
09 August 2007
China deported a group of activists who hung a banner on the Great Wall calling for Tibetan independence ahead of celebrations marking one year until the Beijing Olympics, an activist group said Thursday.
The six members of Students for a Free Tibet arrived in Hong Kong on Wednesday following their two-day detention by Chinese authorities, said Kate Woznow, the group's campaign director. They were not physically mistreated during that time but were exhausted from repeated questioning, she said.
Three Americans were part of the group: Leslie Kaup of St. Paul, Minn., Nupur Modi of Oakland, Calif., and Duane Martinez of Sausalito, Calif.
On Tuesday, the group scaled down part of the Great Wall to unfurl a huge banner reading "One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008."
Also deported to Hong Kong was Lhadon Tethong, the activist group's executive director, who had been in Beijing blogging about "China's Olympics-related propaganda," the group said in a statement. A British colleague was detained and deported as well.
"Even though she knew there was a likelihood she was going to be detained, it still seemed that what she was doing -- blogging -- isn't illegal. In most countries it wouldn't cause anyone to bat an eye," Woznow said in a telephone interview from Hong Kong.
By Jim Yardley | The New York Times
August 08, 2007
Human rights groups on Tuesday accused China of failing to improve its record on civil liberties, and of harassing lawyers, dissidents and journalists, despite official promises to make human rights a centerpiece of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
Meanwhile, a group of Chinese scholars, journalists and lawyers wrote an open letter to President Hu Jintao and other national leaders calling for the release of political prisoners, including jailed Chinese reporters and inmates convicted on religious grounds. The group wrote that China's Olympic slogan, "One World, One Dream" should instead be "One World, One Dream, and Universal Human Rights."
The criticism came from groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and journalism advocacy organizations, and foreshadowed how China's human rights record is likely to come under growing scrutiny as the Olympics approach.
The timing is hardly a coincidence. Wednesday is the start of the one-year countdown to the Olympic opening ceremony, and a public relations battle has erupted between Beijing officials, who are planning a major celebration, and advocacy groups that want to use the milestone to attract attention to their causes.
"Unless the Chinese authorities take urgent measures to stop human rights violations over the coming year, they risk tarnishing the image of China and the legacy of the Beijing Olympics," said Irene Khan, secretary general of Amnesty International.
Amnesty International said several political advocates in Beijing were under threat of close surveillance or house arrest. At the same time, authorities are persecuting Chinese journalists, the group said. And the police are sweeping up vagrants and other Beijing residents under a controversial policy that allows officers to detain people for up to four years without trial, it said.
The report described the detentions as part of a citywide "cleanup" operation to prepare for the Olympics.
Chinese Olympic officials have said that advocacy organizations should not exploit the Games to further their own agendas, but the government also appeared to be growing accustomed to criticism from a range of groups. On Monday, Jiang Xiaoyu, an executive vice president for the Beijing Olympic Committee, said that "we are mentally prepared that such voices will become louder in the future."
Last week, Human Rights Watch released a broad critique of China's record on civil liberties, accusing authorities of clamping down more tightly on dissent and blaming Olympic preparations for exacerbating longstanding problems like evictions and abuses of labor rights.
On Tuesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists called for the release of 29 domestic reporters imprisoned in China, as well as greater press freedom for foreign and Chinese journalists.
Under a regulation enacted Jan. 1, accredited foreign journalists may travel freely throughout China and conduct interviews without official permission. But a recent survey of Beijing-based foreign correspondents found that harassment and numerous obstacles still existed.
On Monday, the police in Beijing briefly detained several foreign journalists who were covering a protest by the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. The group had displayed a banner outside the local Olympic headquarters that depicted Olympic rings made of handcuffs.
by Dan Martin | AFP | via (uncensored) yahoo!news
August 7, 2007
China's communist leaders faced a barrage of criticism at home and abroad on Tuesday over human rights abuses, casting a shadow over Beijing's efforts to celebrate the one-year Olympics countdown.
Leading the calls for Beijing to start honouring Olympic ideals was a group of China's top dissidents, who issued a rare open letter calling for an end to the "systematic denial of human rights" in the country.
The letter, signed by 37 dissidents, writers, lawyers and academics, urged the government to free all prisoners of conscience, allow the return of dissidents abroad and release its stranglehold over the media.
Not doing so makes a mockery of Beijing's own 2008 Games slogan "One World, One Dream", said the petition.
"'One world' can still be a world where people suffer discrimination, political and religious persecution, and deprivation of liberty," said the letter, posted on the website of China Rights Defenders, a loose coalition of rights activists.
Organised campaigns by China's small and harried dissident community are rare.
The signatories included Bao Tong, once a close aide to deposed former Chinese leader Zhao Ziyang and now the country's top dissident.
"Human rights is the most important matter facing China," Bao, who lives under tight surveillance in Beijing, told AFP by phone.
"The Olympic motto of 'One World, One Dream' should apply to the rights of the Chinese people as well."
The petition's release was timed to pressure China as it marks Wednesday's one-year countdown to the Beijing Games, which start on August 8, 2008, with much fanfare.
China is planning a huge party on Wednesday at Tiananmen Square, the same place where the military crushed democracy protests in 1989, killing hundreds if not thousands of people.
Amnesty International said China would tarnish its own image and the Olympic movement unless it took urgent action on human rights.
It said dissidents and rights defenders remained in detention or under tight monitoring, and that authorities continued to use detention without trial in efforts to "clean up" Beijing for the Olympics.
Also Tuesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Human Rights Watch released separate reports saying foreign and Chinese reporters were still being harassed despite pledges of greater media freedom ahead of the Games.
The reports said police and plainclothes "thugs" working for the government were often used to intimidate or even attack reporters covering issues the government hopes to suppress, such as political dissidents, China's control of Tibet, the spread of HIV, and social unrest.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | via ABC News
August 5, 2007
Scores of people have been arrested in a traditionally Tibetan area of western China following public calls for the return of Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, reports said Friday.
Police and army reinforcements were sent to the town of Lithang in western Sichuan province following the incident Wednesday at an annual horse festival that attracts thousands of people, according to the overseas monitoring group International Campaign for Tibet and the U.S. government-supported Radio Free Asia.
The reports said a local resident, Runggye Adak, was detained after he climbed onto a stage erected for Chinese officials, grabbed a microphone and asked the crowd if they wanted the Dalai Lama to return.
Other residents appealed to police and local officials to release him, leading officers to fire warning shots to disperse the crowd outside the local detention center.
RFA [Radio Free Asia] said about 200 Tibetans were detained following the protest, but gave no indication of whether they were still in custody.
International Campaign for Tibet said additional arrests were reported, but gave no figures or estimates.
A woman who answered the telephone at Lithang's police station confirmed the protest had occurred, but hung up when asked for details.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | The New York Times
August 4, 2007
China is cracking down on cable television operators who offer unauthorized foreign satellite broadcasts -- the communist government's latest bid to maintain its monopoly on information, a newspaper reported Saturday.
China's TV regulator last month ordered local authorities to root out operators that provide Chinese homes with foreign channels, which are officially restricted to tourist hotels and compounds where foreigners work and live, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper reported.
Summaries of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television's order said it was aimed at strengthening regulation, maintaining government information controls and ''blocking the intellectual and cultural infiltration of enemy forces.''
Penalties were not stipulated, although the report said violators would have to reapply for the right to receive all satellite broadcasts.
The highest profile victim of the crackdown could be Hong Kong's Phoenix satellite news channel, hugely popular among China's urban middle class and received in millions of homes across the country despite the restrictions.
The report said the crackdown was intended to both silence voices other than official media and protect the monopolies of local stations that have lost viewers to channels such as Phoenix.
The joint venture with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. offers a wider range of news and views, although it largely hews to the official Chinese government standpoint and avoids sensitive political and social issues.
By The Associated Press | The New York Times
August 2, 2007
One year before the start of the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government has failed to live up to promises of greater human rights and has instead clamped down on domestic activists and journalists, Human Rights Watch said Thursday.
China, which has long been criticized for its human rights record, has cracked down on dissent to stave off potential political instability, the human rights group said.
''The government seems afraid that its own citizens will embarrass it by speaking out about political and social problems, but China's leaders apparently don't realize authoritarian crackdowns are even more embarrassing,'' Brad Adams, the Asia director of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.
The Beijing Olympics, which begin Aug. 8, 2008, are a huge source of pride for China. In bidding for the games back in 2001, Chinese leaders promised International Olympic Committee members that the Olympics would lead to an improved climate for human rights and media freedoms.
Instead, there has been ''gagging of dissidents, a crackdown on activists and attempts to block independent media coverage,'' Adams said.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry had no immediate comment on the Human Rights Watch statement. In the past, China has said it was fulfilling all the commitments made in it's bid for the games.
The IOC said it believed the Olympics have had a positive effect China.
''While some may question China's ability to meet it's obligations related to the Beijing Games, we think it is premature to state that China has failed to live up to it's pledges,'' IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davis said.
Human Rights Watch sighted several examples of activists who have been obstructed, including a husband-and-wife couple, Hu Jia and Zeng Jinyan, who have been under constant surveillance and travel restrictions since May for allegedly ''harming state security.''
Others include Jingo Yanking, a military surgeon who broke government secrecy to reveal the true scale of Beijing's SARS outbreak in 2003. He has reportedly been banned from leaving China to accept a human rights award in New York.
Hu, an AIDS activist, said law enforcement authorities told him last year, while he was in custody for nearly six weeks, that Olympic security measures started two years ahead of the Beijing Games.
''Olympic security includes extinguishing all threats,'' he said. ''The greatest threats aren't necessarily terrorists or crime, the greatest threats are those who reveal China's social problems and protest the government.''
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