What human rights legacy for the Beijing Olympic Games?

Medals and Rights

What the Olympics reveal, and conceal, about China

[Medals and Rights 1 of 4]

Few foreign visitors to Beijing will see — but surely few can be unaware of — the state repression that is as integral to the contemporary Chinese model as urban monumentalism, social conformity, and state-managed sports. In July 2007, police in northeast China arrested a peasant land-rights activist named Yang Chunlin who had collected thousands of signatures for a petition titled “We Want Human Rights, Not the Olympics”. He was held and tortured for eight months, then tried and sentenced to a five-year prison term on the vague charge of “inciting subversion of state power.” Lu Gengsong, a Hangzhou-based activist who campaigned online against official corruption, was sentenced to four years in February 2008 for the same crime. Wu Lihong, a farmer activist who exposed environmental pollution in Lake Tai in Jiangsu province, was sentenced to three years in 2007 on fake charges of fraud and extortion.

The government has intensified repression in the past two years in order to ensure order during the Olympics. The San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation says that arrests for endangering state security rose in 2007 to their highest level in eight years. The small cadre of Chinese “rights protection” lawyers who have stepped forward to defend political activists in court have been subjected to escalating beatings, detentions, and threats, as chillingly detailed in a recent Human Rights Watch report.

This is an excerpt from Andrew J. Nathan’s Medals and Rights, which was first published in The New Republic. This is the first of four instalments.

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Medals and Rights [2 of 4]

The government seems to treat critics who have foreign audiences with special venom, as if to remind outsiders how little their disapproval matters. Two of the best-known cases are Hu Jia and Chen Guangcheng. Hu Jia, an AIDS activist and blogger, was sentenced to three and a half years in April 2008 by a Beijing court for — again — inciting subversion of state power because of his writings, including an open letter on “The Real China and the Olympics.” For months before his arrest, Hu had been harassed. At one point he posted on YouTube an ominous yet comic video of buff young plainclothes security agents outside his apartment smoking, lunching, and picking their teeth. When Hu’s wife went on an errand, they crowded and jostled her like bullies in a high school hallway.

This must be especially terrifying when the bullies run the country. I have asked activists why they take such risks. They usually say that they know how to manoeuvre within the limits allowed by Chinese law. But for many of them this gamble eventually goes wrong, and Hu Jia was such a case. After his arrest, Hu was tortured with stress positions and sleep deprivation. As Jerome A. Cohen and Eva Pils have observed, “It is part of the logic of political systems that treat opposition as a crime that they must not only punish the opposition, but also break its spirit.”

The case of Chen Guangcheng, the blind activist for women’s rights, is even more egregious. Chen is a soft-spoken man in his early thirties who got involved in helping draft appeals against forced abortion and sterilization in the rural area where he lived, which is part of Linyi city in Shandong province. (Chinese cities administer surrounding rural areas.) After a visit to Beijing, Chen was kidnapped and brought home by public security agents from Linyi, who placed him under illegal house arrest. When he persisted, he was roughed up by thugs, then arrested on charges — intentionally ludicrous, for a blind person — of destroying property and assembling a crowd to disrupt traffic. Defense lawyers who came from Beijing to see him were taken off a bus, beaten, and kept from attending his trial, which produced a sentence of four years and three months. On appeal a higher court did something that virtually never happens in China — it sent the case back for rehearing. But the local court reaffirmed the original sentence, which Chen is currently serving under harsh conditions.

it is the same in the case of Hu Jia.
all these cases just show that china doesn’t have to host the olympics to prove that it has progressed tremendously. amendments in their policies concerning the masses, transparency and more openness is required on the part of any governemnt, and in this case, china.

you know its farcical given the numerous examples of HR abuse by the Chinese gov’t, that they feel affronted by questions, by scrutiny on basic human rights.
Gao Zhisheng is another brave human rights lawyer who has been incarcerated for saying too much, now they abuse his family to try & make him compliant.
a monumental error of judgment by the IOC,  but then do they really give a stuff!!

Isn’t it slightly hypocritical that China is at the centre of all this negative publicity when they are hosting the olympics which is meant to stand for freedom and equality for all nations when it oppresses its own people in such ways.

Lets cancel the games- or is sport more important than peoples’ lives?

Medals and Rights [3 of 4]

To be sure, the Olympics so far have not entirely worked out the way the planners intended. Beijing’s bid in 1993 for the 2000 games was defeated at least partly on human rights grounds (although Frank Ching implies in China’s Great Leap that bribery from the winning city of Sydney had more to do with it). It is not clear whether Beijing made explicit human rights commitments in its second bid. Sharon K. Hom notes, in China’s Great Leap, that despite numerous requests, the host city contract has never been made public. [Anne-Marie] Brady says foreign p.r. consultants advised Chinese officials to mention human rights in the bid document, and [Susan] Brownell reveals that they debated at the very high vice-premier level whether to do so, deciding in the end to keep such mentions informal. This may explain a remark — often cited by critics — made around that time by Liu Jingmin, vice president of the Beijing Olympic Bid Committee, who said that allowing Beijing to host the Games would “help the development of human rights.” Whether or not human rights were explicitly included, Beijing certainly made pledges that it would not fulfil. China’s Great Leap documents non-compliance with all four elements of the published 2002 Beijing Olympic Action Plan: Green Olympics, High-Tech Olympics, Free and Open Olympics, and People’s Olympics. Even the logo has evoked ironic caricatures, including one in which the red running man is the bloody silhouette of a firing-squad victim.

The campaigns to embarrass China over the 2008 Olympics have been as long in the works as the Games themselves. From the moment the Games were awarded to Beijing in July 2001, human rights advocates, instead of calling for a boycott, began planning to use the event to ramp up pressure on the Chinese government. Human Rights Watch and Human Rights in China set up special websites tracking the Beijing organizing committee’s failure to make good its commitments (I am on the Asia advisory committee of the former and am board co-chair of the latter). The Committee to Protect Journalists issued a series of reports on violations of press freedom. Amnesty International’s “Olympics Countdown” series has tracked violations over the two-year period leading to the games. Chinese Human Rights Defenders has issued an “Olympic Watch” series of press releases. The Save Darfur campaign and an offshoot, Olympic Dream for Darfur, pressed China to address the Darfur problem via the link between Beijing and Khartoum. Advocacy groups recently demonstrated along the route of the Olympic torch, clashing with blue-and-white-suited Chinese escorts who were drawn from the student body of the People’s Armed Police academy.

All this is also propaganda, of course ― human rights groups prefer the term “advocacy”; but precisely for that reason it is a mystery why the Chinese leaders and the IOC ever thought they could get away with throwing a party to celebrate China’s accomplishments at which no one would mention China’s shortcomings. Why did China put its face out to be slapped? And why did the IOC abet them in doing so? Evidently both parties were blinded by the charm of their own blarney, the line that sports is only sports.

But in the end this miscalculation has not mattered much. In the Chinese leaders’ accurate realpolitik analysis, they had already stared down Western human rights pressure after Tiananmen, defeated Bill Clinton’s “human rights conditionality” in 1994, rolled back post-Tiananmen sanctions, forged alliances with other rights-violating states to pull out the teeth of the United Nations Human Rights Council, and pushed Western criticism into the confidential government-to-government “human rights dialogue” and “private diplomacy” channels where there is no fear of real action. The West’s economic interdependence with China has become so intense that an Olympic boycott — or indeed any effective sanction against China — has become unthinkable.

Wonderful post Editor. Thank you.

Medals and Rights [4 of 4]

At home, if the government cannot have Western approval, it can make stone soup out of disapproval by playing the criticisms as an attack on the pride of the nation. This official attitude was well expressed in a book that Chen Guangcheng’s persecutor, Li Qun, published in 2004, well before the Olympic controversies had reached high pitch. During his studies at New Haven University in 2000, Li Qun did an internship in the office of Mayor John DeStefano Jr., and after his return he published a book unforgettably titled I Was a Mayor’s Assistant in America. He described his studies in America as a “political test” that confirmed his confidence in the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics. “Most Americans,” Li wrote, “are friendly to China, although they do not understand it very well. But a small group of politicians strike the banners of democracy and human rights to critique us constantly by their own standards, distort things, and interfere with our domestic affairs. Their real purpose is not to protect the so-called human rights but to use this pretext to influence and limit China’s healthy economic growth and to prevent China’s wealth and power from threatening their world hegemony.”

There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of Li’s sentiments, cliched though they are, or the degree to which they represent the views of many Chinese inside China and out. Coming to the United States and seeing how things work here does not necessarily shake the faith of Chinese officials, or students, in their country’s way of doing things. Quite remarkably, and in general for the better, tens of thousands of Chinese students have returned home from the West to play their willing roles in academia, the media, business, and other sectors, accepting subordination to the ruling party and its national project.

Thus it is not only China’s growing military and economic power that renders it less and less vulnerable to human rights advocacy, which depends on international reputational costs. Perhaps even more importantly, the government is protected by its success in shaping its own public’s reaction to the criticism. Indeed, the regime faces more risk in yielding to Western criticism than in being subjected to it. The audiences that matter are not in the United States and Europe, but in China and the Third World. Even the main Olympic sponsors ― GE, Coca-Cola, Kodak, McDonald’s, Visa, and seven other American and foreign companies, who are front and center in the eyes of international consumers ― have decided to hunker down and absorb whatever hits cannot be avoided in order to protect their enormous long-range stakes in China. This is an almost unimaginably large market, and a market that remembers. Name and shame works with countries dependent on the West, but China is no longer such a country.

BIRD NEST? BONE NEST?

The Olympic Game is coming. In Beijing, if you can only see

the beautiful buildings and cheerful people? You will be

cheated this time.

May be many athletes still have not been aware they will

swim in the blood. Yes, the swimming pool is red rather

than blue. As the thousands of Falun Gong people’s organs

were harvested alive and sold in order to get money to

build the stadiums;

They may be have not been aware the “bird nest” was made of

skeletons, as thousands of children dead in the

substandard buildings during the earthquake. The government spent $42 billion US dollars for this Games; however, they have not money to build a solid school for the poor children.

They may be have not been aware while they are sleeping in

the village, hundreds of Beijing residents became homeless

because the government demolished their homes to make way

for the Olympics. Most of the cheerful people are just slaves,

they are homeless or jobless or losers in the Chinese stock

market. You can not find any freedom sparkle in their eyes. They dare not to cry in front of you.

So, can you still drink beer happily while aware, in the

same city, many children are still crying and starving

because their parents are human rights defenders, who are

experiencing incredible torture now?

Can you still sing songs while breathing the air full of

smell of blood?

Can you still pretend to be blind while the Chinese

government keep polluting our environment? (Yes, They shut

down all factories around Beijing now. How the weather will

be after the Game finishes). They are polluting everything: the

air, water, soil, toys, shoes,…… and, the worst: They are polluting

your soul, except, you can immune it.

If you can pretend to be blind this time, what will you

teach to your children? What will you say to God in the

church? What will you talk to yourself 60 years later?

We are waiting for a super hero, who can bring fresh air to

China;

We are waiting for a super man, who can at least point out

to the Chinese government: it is unfair for treating your

people by doing so.

We are waiting for a Dark Knight, who will be remembered by

all of the world for helping 1.3 billion people on the road

of getting freedom.

Maybe you will not get a gold medal or a silver meal, but

you will be the most shiny star in the Games.

Last long-service medals are given today, but, surprisingly, not exactly to the world class athletes, but to the Chinese workforce behind the event. Capitalism has found new people to exploit. Million of women, men, and very very young people are working endlessly everyday for ridiculous salary. Under the pretext of producing everything at ridiculous costs, all occidental investors come here in force, and strip the workforce of their own country of the right to work, and to raise their family with dignity. Then, being under the yoke of the true rulers of the world, they have to submit themselves to the reality they have created. If they don’t, workers of every free country lost something, as for instance their house as it happened so recently. But of course, the law of the strongest must prevail. Isn’t it? Isn’t that the meaning of all those medals that are given today?
But it’s only the beginning. What the Chinese workers suffer today, as so many others in the world, sooner or later all countries, even the richest, will have to face the same issue. All the working force in the world will have to work endless hours for nothing. But there won’t be any long last-service medals for them anymore. Not because of the lack of gold: rich people are up to become richer than ever. No, but only because all workers in every country will die from exhaustion, as they did when the notion of human right didn’t exist.
 

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This website will be revamped, and will not be updated in the meantime. For more information about Amnesty International's work on China, please visit this link.

Thank you for your support.