2008 Beijing Games Human Rights News

Activists of all kinds have started to spoil the party in the run-up to the opening ceremony, the government’s choreographed prologue to the big Olympic festivity.

Reporters Without Borders unveiled its CYBER-DEMONSTRATION on the eve of the big bash, inviting netizens from all over the world to come to a special website to express their disapproval of the macabre comedy with a forced smile being played out in China. The venue is a virtual version of the Bird’s Nest, the Olympic stadium that is supposed to be the architectural star of these games. As we cannot do this in Beijing, let’s do it in a parallel Beijing, while we wait for the virtual to become real.

In the morning, two Britons and two Americans from Students for a Free Tibet hoisted a banner saying “One Dream, One World, Free Tibet” on a pylon near the Bird’s Nest. Twelve minutes later: police, handcuffs, prison, as the saying goes.

In the early afternoon, a group of US Catholics staged a sit-in beneath a banner saying “Jesus is King” in Tiananmen Square in protest against a bunch of impious things in China such as the one-child policy and abortion.

As Beijing’s streets have been turned into movie sets for the police, activists staged several events in hotel rooms, AFP reports. It clearly got crowded in these tiny air-conditioned rooms, what with journalists, police, zealous hotel employees and organisers...

Unfortunately for them, some people were unable to join the party. Reuters reports Chinese pro-democracy activists being turned back for the past week at Hong Kong airport. Blacklist, aircraft, return to exile, thank you for remaining silent.

As for the crews of the South Korean TV station SBS, they have been banned from the opening ceremony for filming the rehearsals for this grandiose event. Around 100 other TV stations broadcast the footage they shot, but that doesn’t matter.

Order reigns, if you don’t look at the disorder.

With the season of love in full flow and the Olympic Games about to start in Beijing, an ordinary Chinese youth decided to offer his fellow citizens “free hugs” just as people do in many western cities. But things did not go as planned. It turned out that the Chinese police disapprove of such beatnik-style informality.

Foreigners are welcome in China but only as long as they help to infuse hearts with patriotic pride.

Zimbabwe’s embarrassing President Robert Mugabe, for example, was forced to fly back to Harare yesterday despite being a loyal ally. It seems the authorities decided that allowing such a notoriously brutal despot into the “Bird’s Nest” for the opening ceremony would cause as much “loss of face” as the presence of ordinary human rights activist. The Sydney Morning Herald said it had been told it took an enormous amount of persuasion to get Mugabe to return to his “starving billionaires.” Mugabe’s straight-faced spokesman nonetheless insisted that “Comrade Bob” attached “too much importance” to the talks under way with the opposition to stay in Hong Kong. Impatience is second nature for him, it seems.

The presence of Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho, on the other hand, has set hearts fluttering in China, and not just in the ordinary public. The Shenyang Evening News organised a ceremony for Ronaldinho and his legendary trainer “Dunga” that was steeped in enthusiasm and patriotic fervour. In its account of the event, the website Danwei.org shows how the Middle Kingdom is delighted to be at the centre of the world and can even find reasons to be proud in a visit from a well-known footballer.

Meanwhile, ordinary foreigners, those who are not celebrities or dictators, are being welcomed in Beijing with permanent surveillance. Radio Free Asia reports that microphones are to be placed in the capital’s taxis, enabling indiscreet but politically educated ears to learn everything that is said in these rolling confessionals. For those who cannot afford to take taxis, there are the little old men on the neighbourhood public benches with red armbands. According to writer Jen Lin-Liu in the New York Times on 4 August, they have been given the job of watching out for “suspicious activity” in places frequented by western visitors.