China’s Dirty Pre-Olympic Housecleaning
China dumps truckloads of garbage on own its citizens, and when one of them records the event on his cell phone, he's beaten to death by municipal officers. Then his cell phone footage is deleted by the regime intent on airbrushing its repression in advance of the Olympics. Bridget Johnson argues that China's preparation for the Summer Games demonstrates exactly why it doesn't deserve to host them in the first place.
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When construction company executive Wei Wenhua witnessed a newsworthy event, he did what most of us would do: He took out his cell phone and filmed it.
On Jan. 7, villagers in Wanba, China, were protesting government officials dumping truckloads of waste next to their homes. Municipal officers known as “chengguan” scuffled with residents trying to prevent the dumping, and Wei began filming.
When the dozens of chengguan noticed Wei, they beat him to death.
Eager to tamp down public anger over the brutal murder, the Chinese regime fired the local urban administration bureau chief and arrested some of the chengguan — yet in a sign that nothing really changes in the People’s Republic, authorities deleted the cell phone video.
And the fact that the officials were dumping garbage on some poor villagers takes on extra meaning as the Chinese regime is undertaking a bit of pre-Olympic housecleaning.
After all, they can’t have people swarming into the Beijing Summer Olympics and realize the truth about China, mucking the already tarnished image of a government that has long dreamed of such a global spotlight.
“As negative exposure will damage the government’s image, the government has been trying to ‘clean’ the voices,” Boxun News founder Watson Meng said. “That is why human rights and press freedom have not been improved.”
This year already, China’s housecleaning has included slapping unprecedented censorship on Web media. “Those who provide Internet audio and video services must serve socialist ideals and the Chinese people,” the government said about the rules to go into effect Jan. 31.
And last week, the propaganda department announced a crackdown on unapproved political publications — and, to make the effort look somehow gallant, porn — under the guise of “defending socialist culture.” Liu Yunshan, head of the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee, said that “unswerving efforts should be made to … fight various illegal publications so as to maintain a sound cultural environment.”
And remember the 33 journalists behind bars in China, which also holds 51 of the 64 known imprisoned cyberdissidents in the world and fields some 30,000 Internet cops.
“China is still failing to honour the promises it made when bidding for the Olympics, to improve human rights,” Amnesty International UK Director Kate Allen said. “It still locks up dissidents, shuts down opposition Web sites and executes more people every year than the rest of the world put together.”
The issue of human rights should transcend partisanship. Urging a boycott of the Beijing games, the right and left — Reps. Dana Rohrabacher and Maxine Waters — came together with their respective resolutions calling for human rights to come first. Both also voted against permanent normal trade with China in 2001.
But The Hill reported in October that their fellow lawmakers, right and left, just tiptoed around the measures. “It’s clear that a lot of members of Congress are making decisions on fundamentally moral issues based on a desire not to upset a very powerful force in the world,” Rohrabacher said.
When it comes to presidential politics, the tiptoes are only slightly more audible. Bill Richardson floated the idea of an Olympic boycott in a summertime debate and John Edwards signaled his support, an idea then dissed by Chris Dodd. In later discussions, the B-word was pared down to “every option.”
Or sometimes the tiptoes have turned to stomping on the boycott idea. After Richardson’s remarks, a spokesman for Mitt Romney — the candidate who has touted his leadership of the Salt Lake City games as credentials to lead the country — panned depriving Beijing of its glory moment. “Governor Romney believes it would be a mistake to punish our athletes,” said spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom. “It didn’t accomplish anything when Jimmy Carter tried it, and it won’t accomplish anything now.”
Disappointingly, President Bush accepted an invitation from Chinese President Hu Jintao to attend the Beijing Olympics. But what I’d love to see from the presidential contenders is some principled backbone to say that they, as president, would decline the invitation, that they would give serious consideration to the efforts of Rohrbacher and Waters, that they would not tip their hats to a regime that continues to violate human rights in such egregious manners.
How far will our candidates go to help those like Wei Wenhua?
Are they still of the mind that China will magically change its ways by means of greater inclusion in the global community, or are they troubled that China has thumbed its nose at the hollow promises made to the International Olympic Committee to be granted the games in the first place?
Will any of them dare to back the B-word?
Bridget Johnson (www.bridgetjohnson.org) is a columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News.
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6 Comments
DoktorNo:Call me cynical, but I think that Olympic Games should happen in Beijing. Why? Because they could do for Chinese government the same what olympics in 1980 had done to Soviet Union.
Or I am wrong?
Jan 26, 2008 - 1:41 am Randall Gremillion:Boycott? I guess people have forgotten what a disaster it was for America’s athletes when Carter boycotted in 1980. The IOC made a bad choice - why should we punish thousands of American athletes and, by extension the world athletic community by robbing the games of their legitimacy?
Jan 26, 2008 - 11:50 am BeenThere:I am an American Olympic gold medalist, and visited Beijing last summer. There’s no need for a boycott. It would supremely unfair to the athletes who have trained all their lives for this moment, but there is more…
During the Olympics, the international media are going to do a hit job on the Chinese politicians and their political corruption. It will be so brutal they won’t know which way is up.
The Olympics only lasts two weeks, and there will be neither the time nor the will for the Commies to throw out all the journalists. My only hope is that the mainstream outlets have the spine to print what the journalists report.
During my visit, I found that the Chinese are like us. They want the freedom to build a better life. Having the Olympics–with the USA participating and all its attendant media attention–will be a watershed event in making that freedom happen.
Jan 26, 2008 - 2:02 pm Curly Smith:During my visit, I found that the Chinese are like us.
You found out that the Chinese People are like the American People.
Bridget demonstrates that the Chinese Politicians are like our Politicians:
“As negative exposure will damage the government’s image, the government has been trying to ‘clean’ the voices,”
“Those who provide Internet audio and video services must serve socialist ideals and the Chinese people,”
How do you spell McCain-Feingold in Chinese?
Jan 26, 2008 - 3:25 pm P. Ami:When I moved to Beijing in 2004, the first story I heard from my buddy was of a friend who had been beaten by workers doing construction across the street because he was taking pictures. Construction workers and the chengguan are not government cadre.
While I despise China and disagree with the gold medalist above who thinks the Chinese are like us, I agree that a world wide press corps is bound to expose much more about the truth of China then that government expects. The question is whether we consumers, distributors, stockholders and voters in America will care enough to make the changes in our lives that would lead to changes there.
Jan 26, 2008 - 3:31 pm Kim Zigfeld:Bravo! First we allowed the summer games to go to China, and then we allowed the winter games to Russia, and of all places right in the backyard of Chechnya. If we can have a G-8 group democracies (which, as Senator McCain properly says, Russia should be booted out of) then we can have a similar group for an Olympics in the true spirit of the games. The idea that allowing these rogue regimes to hold them will somehow magically civilize them is absurd. Did it work with Hitler? Of course not! Shame on us.
Jan 27, 2008 - 4:23 am