Editorials: April 2008 Archives

By Jill Drew and Maureen Fan | The Washington Post
April 21, 2008

China has spent billions of dollars to fulfill its commitment to stage a grand Olympics. Athletes will compete in world-class stadiums. New highways and train lines crisscross Beijing. China built the world's largest airport terminal to welcome an expected 500,000 foreign visitors. Thousands of newly planted trees and dozens of colorful "One World, One Dream" billboards line the main roads of a spruced-up capital. The security system has impressed the FBI and Interpol.

But beneath the shimmer and behind the slogan, China is under criticism for suppressing Tibetan protests, sealing off large portions of the country to foreign reporters, harassing and jailing dissidents and not doing enough to curb air pollution. It has not lived up to a pledge in its Olympic action plan, released in 2002, to "be open in every aspect," and a constitutional amendment adopted in 2004 to recognize and protect human rights has not shielded government critics from arrest.

The two realities show that when China had to build something new to fulfill expectations, it has largely delivered. But in areas that touch China's core interests, Olympic pledges come second.

"To ensure a successful Olympic Games, the government did make some technical and strategic efforts to improve the environment, human rights and press freedom. They did make some progress. But in these three areas, there's a long, long way to go," said Cheng Yizhong, an editor who tracks China's Olympic preparations.

With the Games less than four months away, the International Olympic Committee is scrambling to nail down specifics of how China will treat criticism of its actions during the event. Pressed this month, IOC President Jacques Rogge clarified that athletes would be allowed to speak freely in Beijing's Olympic venues, calling it an "absolute" human right.

"I can't help but feel cynical about all this," said David Wallechinsky, an Olympic historian, who said the IOC should have been more forceful with China earlier. "What are they going to do, take away the Games?"

>> Read complete analysis

By DENIS D. GRAY Associated Press Writer | ABC News
April 17, 2008

FRIENDSHIP BRIDGE, Nepal-Tibet Border

Three lithe Chinese security men shift silently into position so they are anchored abreast exactly midway across Friendship Bridge, high above a Himalayan river gorge.

It's the only international gateway into Tibet. As a small group of foreigners approaches, the guards' unspoken message is clear: the rebellious territory behind them is off-limits.

After anti-government riots erupted March 14, Beijing closed off Tibet to foreign and domestic tourists and cracked down on Tibetans trying to escape. And China's security apparatus doesn't stop at the border.

Chinese security police in athletic wear can be seen lounging in tea shops and strolling the sole street in the border town of Liping. They shadow three Associated Press journalists from the moment they arrive, ordering them not to take photographs -- on Nepalese territory.

And in the capital Katmandu, Tibetan exiles say China is pressuring the Nepalese government to crush anti-Chinese activities by the world's second-largest Tibetan exile community.

"The Chinese asked us unofficially to cooperate on securing the border. They are far stricter now," said one Nepali immigration official, requesting anonymity since he was not authorized to speak to the press. "Even an Austrian lady who was studying Chinese in Lhasa (Tibet's capital) was not allowed to enter."

Before the current unrest, some 1,500 foreigners a month would make the rough, four-hour car journey on a Chinese-built road from Katmandu to the border and then on to Lhasa.

Now, Chinese authorities have reversed an earlier decision to reopen Tibet to tourism on May 1, tour operators in Beijing said last week. There has been no official indication of when the border would reopen. The International Campaign for Tibet, a U.S.-based activist group, says it has information the region may remain sealed until after the Beijing Olympics in August.

>> Read complete report

By Matthew Forney | International Herald Tribune
April 15, 2008

Many sympathetic Westerners view Chinese society along the lines of what they saw in the waning days of the Soviet Union: a repressive government backed by old hard-liners losing its grip to a new generation of well-educated, liberal-leaning sophisticates.

This outlook is naïve. Educated young Chinese, far from being embarrassed or upset by their government's human-rights record, rank among the most patriotic, establishment-supporting people you'll meet.

As is clear to anyone who lives here, most young ethnic Chinese strongly support their government's suppression of the recent Tibetan uprising. One Chinese friend who has a degree from a European university described the conflict to me as "a clash between the commercial world and an old aboriginal society." She even praised her government for treating Tibetans better than New World settlers treated American Indians.

It's a rare person in China who considers the desires of the Tibetans themselves. "Young Chinese have no sympathy for Tibet," a Beijing human-rights lawyer, Teng Biao, told me. Teng, a Han Chinese who has offered to defend Tibetan monks caught up in police dragnets, feels very alone these days. Most people in their 20s, he says, "believe the Dalai Lama is trying to split China."

Educated young people are usually the best positioned in society to bridge cultures, so it's important to examine the thinking of those in China.

The most striking thing is that, almost without exception, they feel rightfully proud of their country's accomplishments in the three decades since economic reforms began. And their pride and patriotism often find expression in an unquestioning support of their government, especially regarding Tibet.

The most obvious explanation for this is the education system, which can accurately be described as indoctrination. Textbooks dwell on China's humiliations at the hands of foreign powers in the 19th century as if they took place yesterday, yet skim over the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and '70s as if it were ancient history.

Students learn the neat calculation that Chairman Mao's tyranny was "30 percent wrong," then the subject is declared closed. The uprising in Tibet in the late 1950s, and the invasion that quashed it, are discussed just long enough to lay blame on the "Dalai clique," a pejorative reference to the circle of advisers around Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

Then there's life experience - or the lack of it - that might otherwise help young Chinese to gain a perspective outside the government's viewpoint. Young urban Chinese study hard, and that's pretty much it. Volunteer work, sports, debate teams, musical skills and other extracurricular activities don't factor into college admission, so few participate. And the government's control of society means there aren't many non-state-run groups to join anyway.

>> Read complete report

By Scott Pitoniak | Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
April 13, 2008

I couldn't help but feel a tinge of sadness recently as I watched London police wrestle with a man trying to put out the Olympic torch with a fire extinguisher.

I remembered the exhilaration I experienced when I carried the torch during the 2002 relay. I recalled how, during my fling with flame, spectators became excited, animated, transfixed the instant they saw the torch; how they snapped pictures, waved miniature flags, applauded, shouted encouragement and shed tears of joy.

Olympic torch relays, like the Olympics themselves, are supposed to be about uniting people and celebrating the world's similarities and differences.

But this so-called "Journey of Harmony" has been anything but. And while it hurts to watch, I understand completely the protesters' perspective.

China was hoping to use the torch relay and the Olympics as a showcase for its "arrival."

But Beijing had to be naïve to think the world would look away from the crackdowns in Tibet, the subsidizing of the Darfur genocide in the Sudan, and the imprisoning of journalists who had the courage to report the truth about the oppression of a Communist regime.

And one can't help but wonder what the International Olympic Committee was thinking when it awarded the games to China in the first place in 2001. Did IOC officials truly believe that Beijing was sincere in its assurances that China would suddenly change its long-time repressive ways and live up to the standard for human rights spelled out in the Olympic charter?

As we watch torchbearers surrounded by members of China's tracksuit-clad Sacred Torch Guard Team, we are reminded that little has changed. The team is supposed to protect the torch, but its members have gone out of their way to attack protesters and even bully the torchbearers themselves.

Sebastian Coe, a two-time medalist and chairman of the 2012 London Games, described them as "thugs" after they tried to push him. Another torchbearer had a Tibetan flag headband snatched from his head.

>> Read complete editorial

By Howard W. French | International Herald Tribune
April 10, 2008

I had hardly finished writing a news article on repression in Xinjiang last week when word reached me of the violent suppression of yet another protest by Tibetan monks in western Sichuan Province.

There were conflicting reports. Some said eight Tibetans had been killed, some of them ordinary bystanders. Other reports put the number as high as 15.

The Tibetans were not the only casualties, though, in the unfolding story of disaffection, protest and repression in China's western region. In a bitterly ironic way, the plight of Xinjiang's Uighurs had been obscured by the news of yet more brutality against Tibetans.

The news out of China in recent weeks has involved multiple, interlocking tragedies, with a cast of victims much larger and more complex than the easily digestible narrative people in the West are accustomed to thinking about, a tale of put-upon Tibetans and imposing Chinese.

The onrush of Western sympathy for the cause of Tibet is well-intentioned but often naïve. The way the Tibet story has been reduced to a binary matter, almost literally of Tibetan saints and Han Chinese sinners, is problematic on many levels, not least because of hypocrisy implicit in the West's selective outrage.

Moreover, our many oversimplifications and perceived double standards fuel nationalist outrage in China and provide ready ammunition for ripostes by propagandists, whose task is to drum up popular support for the government as it digs deeper into the very positions that protesters seek to overturn.

Unfortunately for conventional Chinese opinion, the first instance of hypocrisy that needs to be dealt with involves the plight of the Uighurs, whose situation very nearly mirrors that of the Tibetans, the distinction being that Tibetans have become lovable because of popular notions about Buddhism and because of the way Hollywood has romanticized Tibet and its saffron-robed monks and supported the Dalai Lama.

Natives of Xinjiang, by contrast, are Muslim, and geopolitics and popular culture have combined in ways that have been deeply prejudicial to the Uighurs, who have no celebrity sponsors or young Western sympathizers eager to identify with their culture or support their cause.

The biggest and least obvious victims in this crisis, however, are the Chinese themselves. This has nothing to do with the ritualized self-pity combined with zealous nationalism and occasionally vicious hate speech that one encounters from Chinese all over the Internet these days. Here, we speak of people who insist that any criticism of China is really motivated by deep-seated Western contempt for the Chinese people themselves, or of the strident Chinese voices that say that people in the West have no standing to criticize them because Westerners have plenty of awful things to answer for themselves.

Yes, it is true, the Americans massacred the Indians and the Europeans conducted a centuries-long Atlantic slave trade. One could go on and on compiling a list of sins. But surely it does neither China nor its image any good to say don't criticize us because of your past - or worse, it doesn't matter if we do bad things because you've done bad aplenty, too.

On one issue after another, many Chinese fashion themselves as victims in these terms, or cut themselves unlimited moral slack, doing themselves neither honor nor good. It often goes like: How dare you criticize us as undemocratic, since it took you hundreds of years of development to become democratic; or how dare you say anything about our pollution, because you've been the biggest polluters in the past.

Arguments like those are effective in China largely for one reason, because the state, which has so tightly controlled the narrative in China through the strict filtering of information and education, has pulled off a feat of monumental political manipulation, persuading China's great Han majority that any criticism of its government is a deliberate slight against the Chinese people.

One may spare a thought for China for having arrived rather late to the party of modernization, when things like environmental standards and democratic participation and human rights and openness are standard expectations, but demands for them won't go away, including increasingly from China's own people.

The reason the people of China are the biggest victims in the ugly spectacle of the last few weeks is that the Chinese government sold them on the Olympics as a measure of their standing and stature in the world. It did so, moreover, as if hypnotized by its own peculiar and stilted rhetoric, which demands that the world applaud its achievements with no pause for questions or thought.

That, after all, is the meaning of Beijing's insistence that politics have no place in the Olympics, even as the country uses the Games to bolster its domestic standing and to make an unsubtle statement to the world: We are successful and grand. Behold and admire us. We have arrived.

One hopes that the Chinese public, smart, increasingly sophisticated and more and more exposed to the kind of reality checks that come from contact with others, can figure out the trick that is being played on them. A criticism of an action of their government is in no way a criticism of them.

Go to any auto show and see for yourself. Whenever a shiny new model is rolled out and the manufacturer hands out glossy promotional brochures, the normal reaction of those in attendance is to kick the tires for themselves.

Beijing showed the world last week what happens to its own citizens who dare hold up a mirror to the system and assess things for themselves: The activist, Hu Jia, was imprisoned for daring to write. When you come to the Olympic Games in Beijing, you will see skyscrapers, spacious streets, modern stadiums and enthusiastic people. You will see the truth, but not the whole truth, just as you see only the tip of an iceberg.

The greatest insult an outsider could pay to the Chinese people would be failing to understand what lies beneath.

Note: Bold emphasis of text by Truth About China; not by the author of this outstanding "Letter from China".