Tibet: July 2008 Archives

The Christian Science Monitor
July 18, 2008

Like a marathoner at the finish line, China seems whipped. It struggled two decades to host the Olympics that open in three weeks. It has spent about $50 billion, pumped up its athletes, spiffed up Beijing, and fended off calls for a boycott. Now it may wonder if the effort will be worth it.

The Games themselves will, of course, be the world's main focus for two weeks after the Aug. 8 opening ceremonies. And thousands of athletes will fulfill once again the purpose of the modern Olympics, as stated by founder Pierre de Coubertin: "to bring together in a radiant union all the qualities which guide mankind to perfection."

But these Olympics also came with two political expectations, both of which are not even close to earning a medal.

One is human rights in China. The International Olympic Committee, in awarding the Games seven years ago, pointed to the Communist Party's record in suppressing dissent and said it expected that "openness, progress, and development in many areas will be such that the situation will be improved." The IOC also said athletes have "an absolute right" during the Games to speak out. The party itself did not publicly agree to improve its record, but the head of China's bidding team did say the Beijing Games would "benefit the further development of our human rights cause."

If anything, China's human rights record has worsened, as seen clearly during this spring's crackdown on Tibet's Buddhist monks. Last year, the number of arrests for "endangering state security" was at their highest since 2000.

And China's hand in world atrocities, such as Darfur and Zimbabwe, has also worsened. Steven Spielberg quit as artistic adviser for the Olympic ceremonies over China's backing of Sudan.

Why would China do this? These Olympics may simply serve as a pretext for the party to keep an authoritarian hold over 1.3 billion Chinese, who are increasingly revolting against corrupt rule. Not only do the Olympics justify crackdowns, but Chinese leaders have shown again and again that they will use foreign protests to whip up nationalist pride.

Those actions undercut the second expectation of these Olympics: to celebrate China's economic progress and its emergence as a power.

China's leaders may have thought the Beijing Olympics would serve the same purpose as the 1964 Games did for Japan: a coming-out party. Instead, the many protests, such as the interruptions of the torch relay, and the strong possibility of protests in Beijing during the Games, are likely to lower the PR boost.

The 2008 Olympics could end up like the 1936 Berlin Games, in which Hitler tried to promote Nazi (and Aryan) superiority, only to have American blacks, such as Jesse Owens, win track events. But these Games may not be the PR disaster of the 1980 Moscow Games that were widely boycotted after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were overturned within years after their Games. A better model for China would be the 1988 Seoul Games. During the run-up to those Olympics, the South Korean people used the coming event to rise up and force an end to a dictatorship. Now that was an example of "qualities which guide mankind to perfection."

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By Jill Drew | The Washington Post
July 10, 2008

A British citizen of Tibetan descent was expelled from China this week as police clear the capital of anyone they believe might draw attention to political tensions during the Olympic Games next month.

Dechen Pemba, 30, who had lived in Beijing since September 2006 studying Mandarin and teaching English, held a work visa valid until November 2008. But on Tuesday morning, seven or eight police officers confronted her as she left her apartment. They forced her back inside, told her to pack a bag and, after searching its contents, escorted her to the airport.

Police also seized her bank account book and demanded her PIN number. They confiscated her cellphone, returning it once she had boarded the flight to London.

"Everyone living in Beijing has noticed the security crackdown, but it sends a worrying signal that they would do this to someone," Pemba said in a phone interview from London. "I think about my Tibetan friends, who don't have the protection of a British passport."

Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said Pemba was not deported because of the Olympics, but because she was involved in "separatist activities" and had admitted breaking Chinese law. He did not specify which law.

Pemba denied the charges. "I am completely shocked at these baseless, fabricated allegations," she said.

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By Aileen McCabe | canada.com - where perspectives connect
July 06, 2008

With just one month to go before the opening ceremony, it is increasingly obvious worldwide efforts to use the Beijing Olympics to hold China's feet to the fire on human rights have floundered.

A 71-page report outlining violations of press freedom in China released Monday by Human Rights Watch is the latest indication that hosting the Games was not enough of a lever to convince the Beijing government to improve its sad rights record.

Proponents and critics of the Beijing Games agreed on one thing - that fewer restrictions for international media and scrutiny of China at this time would constitute progress, Sophie Richardson, HRW's Asia advocacy director said.

Yet the Chinese government, with the help of the International Olympic Committee, has done its best to impede progress. Talk of an Olympic boycott to pressure Beijing on rights never gathered wide support, but it fizzled totally last week when U.S. President George W. Bush said he would attend the opening ceremony on Aug. 8.

Following his announcement, French media reported President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has hemmed-and-hawed about boycotting, would also attend. Sarkozy's office did not deny the story and a disappointed Robert Menard, head of Reporters Without Borders, said in a television interview on the weekend: "This is a stab in the back of Chinese dissidents. This is truly cowardly and is the opposite of what one expects from France."

Hordes of world leaders, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, are not going to the opening ceremony. But like Harper, most have taken some pains to make it clear their absence is not a boycott.

Over the past year, Beijing has made a few concessions to human rights concerns, almost certainly because it is hosting the Olympics.

When Hollywood director Steven Spielberg withdrew as a consultant to the opening ceremony to protest China's involvement in Darfur, China made some effort to bolster international attempts to rein in the rogue government.

And, this spring, after protests over the crackdown in Tibet reached a crescendo worldwide that threatened to affect the Games, China re-opened talks with representatives of the Dalai Lama.

But, as in the case of media freedom, which was the sole "rights" guarantee China actually gave the International Olympics Committee (IOC) when it was awarded the Games, progress on those files is spotty, at best.

The HRW report documents dozens of cases where the Chinese have harassed, intimidated and impeded foreign journalists in direct violation of its promise to allow free access nationwide to foreign reporters in the run-up to the Games.

The most egregious example is the closure of Tibet to foreign journalists following the violent protests in March, but HRW cites case after case where reporters working on environmental, health or industrial stories were also hassled, roughed-up or detained by security officials. It lists incidents where they were simply talking to disgruntled citizens and their notes or pictures were confiscated and their sources intimidated. In many, if not all of these cases, the reporters appealed to Beijing to live up to the guarantees it gave the IOC, but they were ignored.

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By April Rabkin | The New York Times
July 02, 2008

Last week, amid continuing calls from activists in Europe and the United States to boycott the Olympics to protest China's record on human rights, came a rare rebuke from the International Olympic Committee. The committee expressed disappointment with a speech in which Tibet's Communist Party leader used the occasion of an Olympic torch ceremony to denounce the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader.

What the committee and the rest of the world don't realize is how little China cares what they think. Here in Beijing, the Olympic Games are primarily for domestic consumption, justifying the government's new global power to its own people.

My neighbor's 12-year-old son has seen half a dozen movies starring the five balloon-headed Olympic mascots: Beibei, Jingjing, Huanhuan, Yingying and Nini. He has been reminded of the Olympics every day at school and on the street by billboards depicting the masses as a gray ocean converging like a wave to lift up a red-uniformed basketball player making a layup. He listens to Olympic tunes -- one of which sounds like a drill sergeant singing along to carousel music.

For millenniums, Chinese dynasties have claimed the "mandate of heaven" to justify their existence. On this score, there hasn't really been any great leap forward. Inept dynasties augur instability and are overthrown. China still has no democracy and no real sense of political stability. Rulers fear revolution, and just as strongly, so do the people. And nationalism is the dominant strategy for preventing it. With a well-run Olympics, the Chinese Communist Party can prove its legitimacy and its continued mandate.

By September, it is conceivable that China's global standing could plummet while China's citizens see the Olympics as an astounding success. Despite the Internet and the lifting of some restrictions on journalism, there's still an ocean-wide gap between the international and domestic news media. During the torch relay in Paris this spring, for instance, Chinese TV viewers saw mainly the heroic efforts of the wheelchair-bound amputee who used her upper body to shield the flame from a lunging protester and not the mass of pro-Tibet demonstrators.

In junior high and high school here, two semesters of history instruction focus on the humiliation of China by Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and the United States during the last centuries. International criticism is described as a continuation of this legacy, and for other countries to condemn the regime is to disparage the Chinese people. Foreign criticism strengthens domestic loyalty to the regime, so the threat of a boycott of the Olympics in August only bolsters nationalism.

In March, an exhibition baseball game in Beijing between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres provided a sneak preview of what to expect at the Olympics. A 16-foot sign at the stadium listed 100 banned items, including, oddly, brooms. The singing of the United States national anthem was forbidden. The police seized and interrogated a Korean fan of the Dodgers pitcher Chan Ho Park for holding a sign reading "Park is No. 1." While foreign spectators were taken aback by the security measures, the Chinese were impressed that the teams were there at all.

For the Olympic athletes, victories remain to be won. But for Chinese leaders, the competition is pretty much over. They triumphed in 2001 when the International Olympic Committee selected Beijing as the site for this year's games and hundreds of thousands of Beijingers streamed into Tiananmen Square to celebrate. It was one of the biggest gatherings there since the 1989 massacre.

This August a few world leaders may boycott the opening ceremony. But the Games will go forward and be televised to what China will most likely declare is the largest worldwide audience ever. The Chinese government will have pulled off a modern Olympics -- as close to a mandate from heaven as could be imagined by any dynasty of any era.