Editorial of FT
Friday, August 15, 2008
It has taken less than a week for the contradictions between the reality of Communist party rule and China's pre-Olympics promises of openness and press freedom to burst unpleasantly into the open.
Perhaps the party's decision to order a pretty nine-year-old girl to lip-synch the patriotic singing of another girl deemed insufficiently cute for the opening ceremony can be dismissed as a misguided quest for artistic perfection.
Nor is the manhandling of journalists by police – as happened on Wednesday during a small pro-Tibet demonstration – an unusual event.
But the breathtaking cynicism of the Chinese authorities in declaring zones in three parks open for public protests and then persecuting, detaining or expelling from Beijing those who applied for permission to use them is a clear breach of the promises made by China to help win the bid to host these Olympics back in 2001.
The International Olympic Committee, meanwhile, is so eager not to offend the Chinese hosts that it has made no visible attempt to hold China to its word. Indeed its officials adhere so rigidly in public to the party line that everything is going smoothly that they make the Chinese Olympic authorities seem like mere novices in the arts of stonewalling and evasion.
On a small scale, the parks fiasco recalls what happened in 1957 when Mao Zedong deployed the slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend” to flush out critics of the party. He then proceeded to organise the beating or even killing of those whose views he did not like. Ji Sizun, a legal activist from Fujian, is the latest name to emerge of those who have been punished for daring to take the Chinese authorities at their word. He applied to demonstrate in favour of a greater public role in politics and against corruption and abuses of power and was promptly detained when he went to check at a police station on his application, according to Human Rights Watch.
Similarly, Zhang Wei has been jailed for a month for asking to protest against the demolition of her Beijing home to make way for a property development.
China has also broken its promise to allow “complete freedom” to the media. No one expected the domestic media suddenly to be unshackled for the Olympics – the heated debate in China over the two young singers was duly excised from local websites and banned from the state-controlled media – but foreign journalists did think they would operate freely. That has not happened. It has been easier than ever for visiting journalists to enter China, but they are often hindered and harassed if they try to cover issues other than sport, and some websites are blocked within the main Olympic press centre.
The Chinese Communist party's approach is not a surprise. But the IOC's casual attitude towards the promises it received seven years ago from Beijing on human rights and press freedom (it has done slightly better on monitoring Beijing's poor air quality) is an embarrassment for the whole Olympic movement.
