Gold Medal Gamble

The Age

Thursday February 28, 2008

Mary-Anne Toy

China's long march from Mao to the Olympic flame is nearly complete. Let the politics begin. Mary-Anne Toy reports.

WITH less than 200 days to go until the Olympics, China is preparing to dazzle the world with the most glittering spectacle ever seen. This is the biggest "coming out" party of all. Now Beijing anxiously waits to see if its giant sporting gamble will reap the geopolitical laurels it seeks.

Fifteen years after its failure to win the 2000 Games, which went to Sydney largely because of concerns over China's human rights record, the planet's most populous nation has transformed itself, overtaking Britain to become the world's fourth largest economy after the US, Japan and Germany. China has embarked on a buying spree to secure energy and resources on every continent, including Australia, unrivalled in scope since the US became the world's dominant power. Beijing has used a missile to shoot down an old weather satellite to signal the start of a renewed space program that will launch its third manned space mission later this year.

It has also steadily ratcheted up its international diplomacy, to reflect its new economic power and to ensure a smooth path ahead for continued growth.

From launching a new satellite in space, to better monitor Olympic weather, to the estimated $40 billion to rebuild Beijing's transport, water and power systems and cut pollution, to educating 400 million school children about Olympic history and principles, to mobilising more than 21,000 torchbearers to carry the Olympic flame on the longest relay route in history, including scaling the top of Mount Everest, China is leaving nothing to chance.

The figures are mind-boggling.

China has spent more than $2 billion building 12 venues, including architectural icons such as the Bird's Nest national stadium and the Australian designed Water Cube aquatic centre, plus renovating and expanding 11 existing venues and eight temporary venues.

Tomorrow, China's new airport terminal is open for take-off. Designed to resemble a dragon, the Norman Foster-designed building will, naturally, be the biggest airport building in the world. Another $12 billion has been poured into greening the dusty city, including 900 hectares of plants in the Olympic Green alone. It is well on its way to replacing its 60,000 taxis and 19,000 buses with more energyefficient models.

Most public signs have been made bilingual (with "Chinglish" gems such as the Dongda Anus Hospital renamed, in this case as the Dongda Proctology Hospital) and organisers say up to 100,000 bilingual volunteers are being recruited to help the expected 2.5 million Chinese visitors and the 550,000 foreign tourists who will descend on the capital this summer navigate around a city where English, while rapidly growing, is still far from common.

But will this mammoth drive be enough to convince the world that a new China will truly emerge from the Olympics, or will air pollution and food safety concerns, persistent charges of human rights abuses on everything from Tibet, religious freedom, corruption and, of course, international controversy over China's global diplomacy, particularly the situation in Darfur, Sudan, mar the nation's efforts to "enhance (positive) domestic and global publicity" and "showcase China's image as an open, democratic, civilised and harmonious country"? The latter are two of Beijing's nine proclaimed Olympics goals for 2008.

The controversy over US director Steven Spielberg quitting the Beijing Games because of alleged Chinese inaction to stop the atrocities in Sudan's Darfur region highlighted the gulf between the expectations of the Western world and domestic critics of how China should liberalise for the Olympics and how China sees its obligations - and the public relations risks inherent in "coming out" under the glare of world scrutiny.

Spielberg's decision was front-page news in the rest of the world, seen as a black eye for Beijing, but in China it was initially ignored by the mainland press. The exception was the jingoistic Global Times , which said Chinese people were "disgusted" with the decision. "Western exploitation of the Olympics to pressure China immediately provoked much disgust among ordinary Chinese people," the paper said. "The vast majority of Chinese people have expressed bafflement and outrage at the Western pressure.

In their view, it's absolutely absurd to place the Darfur issue, so many thousands of miles away, on the head of China."

Truth is, due to China's still very effective censorship, the vast majority of Chinese people didn't hear about the Spielberg story for several days, until the lumbering state-controlled media was given permission to write about the issue and attack Spielberg.

China has protested that Spielberg's linking of Darfur to the Games is against the Olympic spirit because it mixes sport and politics, but, of course, every host country uses the Olympics for political purposes.

The 2008 Beijing Games are undeniably intended to inspire awe around the world. But for China's leaders, who are steering through uncharted waters as they try to create the first successful hybrid of a capitalist, one-party autocracy, there is still more at stake: the Olympics are seen by them as a legitimisation of the Communist Party of China - a patriotic rallying point to unite its 1.3 billion, increasingly expectant citizens in times of explosive economic growth and social and cultural upheaval.

Xiao Qiang, a Chinese human rights activist now based in California, supported China's fist Olympics bid four years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, believing it would force reform. He told the San Francisco Chronicle that dream was now lost: "It's all to a certain degree to justify the Communist Party. The Olympics is a perfect vehicle to support the official narrative."

Yet, since the Spielberg controversy China's envoy to Darfur has renewed efforts to broker peace there. And while it has also sought to intercede with the military junta in Burma during last year's monks' rebellion and with the North Korean communist dictatorship of Kim Jong-il, distancing itself from repression at home may prove more difficult.

After losing the bid for the 2000 Games in 1993, China reluctantly changed tack in its campaign for the 2008 Olympic Games and pledged that the Olympics would improve human rights in China. Now, with less than six months to go before the Games, a slew of detentions have cast doubt on that claim. Last week, the trial began of a land rights activist, Yang Chunlin, accused of staining China's inter national image because he has opposed the Olympics. Yang, a 52- year-old retrenched factory worker, is charged with "inciting subversion of state power" after he helped gather 10,000 signatures on a petition demanding "human rights, not the Olympics". Yang, who has pleaded not guilty, has questioned why China is spending billions on the Olympics when millions of Chinese cannot afford food and school fees.

Meanwhile, another court sentenced democracy activist Lu Gensong to four years' jail for subversion.

Others, such as blind activist Chen Guangcheng who exposed local authorities illegally forcing women to have abortions to comply with onechild quotas, are in jail, awaiting trial or have disappeared, either in hiding or in secret detention. And this week, Shanghai human rights lawyer Zheng Enchong was reportedly beaten by police outside his home.

Heightening fears of a crackdown, formal charges of subversion were laid last month against Hu Jia, one of China's most prolific dissidents who has campaigned for AIDS patients, democratic reform and environmental protection. Hu Jia's wife, Zeng Jinyan, a human rights activist in her own right and prominent blogger, has been imprisoned with their three-monthold daughter in their Beijing flat, with phone, internet and mobile lines cut off, since Hu's arrest on December 27.

The family's flat is in Bobo Freedom City, a typical Beijing compound of dozens of high-rise buildings next door to a massive new Olympic park, chosen as one of 26 sites across Beijing to have giant television screens for public viewing of the Games.

Balanced against the plight of Hu and others has been the early release of several prominent journalists in the past month. They include Yu Huafeng, editor of the crusading Southern Metropolitan News, who was released after serving four years of an original 12-year sentence for embezzlement and graft. Yu, and two other editors also since released, were arrested in 2004 after the newspaper reported the beating death of a man in detention and broke the news of a case of severe acute respiratory syndrome while Beijing was still denying it had any SARS cases.

Hong Kong journalist Ching Cheong was also released this month after serving three years of a five-year sentence for allegedly leaking state secrets and spying for Taiwan. In his first public comment since his release, the 58-year-old chief China correspondent for Singapore's The Straits Times maintained his innocence as he called on the mainland authorities to grant amnesty to more prisoners, to enhance social harmony in the run-up to the Games.

Dissident writer Liu Xiaobo said he expected the Government would release many activists in an amnesty before the Games. Other dissidents are not so confident.

Requests for an interview with officials of the Beijing Organising Committee of the Olympic Games on how China sees its obligations before the Olympics and how they are going to deal with dissent have not been answered. Despite BOCOG arranging weekly press conferences and briefings, getting answers is another matter.

A source close to Beijing's Olympic organisers said what the Western media did not get was that the Chinese see the Olympics as primarily for the 1.3 billion Chinese - despite their rhetoric about the games being for the world. "Remember that no one does propaganda better than China ? and as long as the domestic audiences are kept happy then they don't give a shit about what the foreign media write."

The Olympic insider, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, says the rest of the world should accept that China is not going to adopt Western- style, multi-party democracy any time soon, but the country should be given credit for its gradual liberalisation.

He cites as a graphic example the history of the Workers Stadium.

Built in 1959 as Beijing's first soccer stadium, it was the Bird's Nest of its day. During the 1960s Cultural Revolution, the sportsground was filled with thousands of Red Guards hailing Chairman Mao and cheering as class traitors were shot in the head. Come August, the renovated 70,000-seater will be filled with cheering spectators with soft drinks and popcorn and the only blood spilt will be in the Olympic boxing bouts it will host."

The Olympics will change this country forever despite the Government wrapping it up in propaganda - governments come and go," the Olympic insider said. "Chinese people are excited about the Games, they can see this as a way of joining the international community and even though the gulf in understanding will remain between the West and China, the bigger story that isn't being written is that some 400 million schoolchildren in China are now reading IOCapproved materials teaching them about universal values such as fair and honest play. It's the next generation, the post-Olympics generation where you will see change."

Political observer and author Sidney Rittenberg, who lived and worked in China for 35 years after World War II, including 16 years spent in jail accused of being an American spy, says a boycott or any big-scale human rights campaign against China will be counterproductive."

These Games aren't the property of the Communist Party - they are a national event in the heart of virtually every Chinese and anything perceived as an attack on the Games is going to make ordinary Chinese people angry and resentful and that's not what we want," Rittenberg said yesterday."

This is the first time in 5000 years of history ... that China has really joined the world and increasingly so it is moving towards what (former US deputy secretary of state) Robert Zoellick called a 'responsible stakeholder'."

Mary-Anne Toy is China correspondent.

© 2008 The Age

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