Welcome to Part III of this series. For the first two parts, go here and here.
Communist China has done everything possible in preparation for the ’08 Games — as we’ve said, everything must be perfect. Nothing untoward must occur. This is the PRC’s “coming-out party.”
Some of the measures the government has taken are benign; some of them are less so. Among the benign: a new airport terminal, huge and impressive. When it opened, the band played “Auld Lang Syne.”
A million cars have been banned from Beijing, and 200 million trees planted. This is in an effort to combat pollution, which is severe in Beijing. The world’s leading marathoner, Haile Gebrselassie, withdrew from that event, on account of the air.
They have banned tobacco in and around the Olympic period: You can’t smoke on public transport or in indoor workplaces — and this is a real sacrifice for a heavily smoking nation. The Health Ministry said, “Let a smokeless Games provide healthy competition, a healthy environment, and a healthy lifestyle.” There will be anti-spitting patrols. Citizens have been admonished to be polite to foreigners. And government workers have been warned to watch their morals: no tom-catting around, while the foreigners are looking. (The foreigners, no doubt, will do the tom-catting around.) Men are not to have their energies “dissipated by wine and women.”
The name of the Propaganda Department has been changed to “Publicity Department” — for the benefit of English speakers (only). Chinese scientists have been tinkering with the weather, as they are wont to do. They practice “rain mitigation,” and they are doing their best to ensure that no rain, or less rain, falls on the Olympics. A Los Angeles Times report said, “They have had a couple of dry runs, so to speak — a China-Africa summit and a panda festival in Sichuan province, among others.”
In order to make way for improvements, and make the capital sightlier, the government has razed whole neighborhoods, once filled with traditional huts. There is not much thought to the people displaced. And Westerners marvel at what the Chinese authorities can accomplish, and the speed with which they can accomplish it. They are even envious. An American acting as senior adviser to the Beijing Olympic Committee said, “The ability to get things done here is really staggering. In Los Angeles, it would take endless discussions to build any structure. Here they decide to do it, and kaboom! It happens.”
Yes, dictatorships are known to be good at that sort of thing. In his 2007 book, The China Fantasy, James Mann quotes Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times columnist who has won the Pulitzer Prize three times. In one of his columns, Friedman wrote,
Shanghai’s deputy mayor told me that as his city became more polluted, the government simply moved thousands of small manufacturers out of Shanghai to clean up the air. . . . At this time, when democracies, like India and America, seem incapable of making hard decisions, I cannot help but feel a tinge of jealousy at China’s ability to be serious about its problems and actually do things that are tough and require taking things away from people.
In fact, taking things away from people has always been one of Communism’s specialties.
‐Another thing Beijing has done to prepare for the Olympic Games is give policemen a little instruction in English. The government has published a manual called Olympic Security English, for home study. The Christian Science Monitor obtained a copy. A practice dialogue headed “How to Stop Illegal News Coverage” goes like this:
P(oliceman): Excuse me, sir. Stop, please.
F(oreign journalist): Why?
P: Are you gathering news here?
F: Yes.
P: About what?
F: About Falun Gong.
P: Show me your press card and your reporter’s permit.
F: Here you are.
P: What news are you permitted to cover?
F: The Olympic Games.
P: Falun Gong has nothing to do with the Games. . . . You should only cover the Games.
F: But I’m interested in Falun Gong.
P: It’s beyond the limit of your coverage and illegal. As a foreign reporter in China you should obey China law and do nothing against your status.
F: Oh, I see. May I go now?
P: No. Come with us.
F: What for?
P: To clear up this matter.
“Come with us,” indeed.
The authorities have done their considerable best to sweep away “unharmonious” elements, including beggars, migrant workers, and so on. China must show a happy, carefree face. The authorities have also rounded up hundreds of stray cats, and some pictures of this roundup have appeared: very, very dismaying ones.
According to a report in Time magazine, “thousands of websites have been shuttered while government controls and blocking of sites outside China [have] intensified significantly in recent months.” Irene Khan, head of Amnesty International, is quoted as saying that China’s ongoing “crackdown” has “deepened, not lessened, because of the Olympics.”
And that is the point, perhaps above all, that I wish to stress.
Out of Hong Kong, multiple-entry visas have been stopped until after the Olympics, and the visa process as a whole has slowed — this is so that the PRC can have a better handle on who is coming in.
The Monitor reports that “the government has recently issued a law forbidding local and foreign journalists [to report] on disasters such as an outbreak of disease, a terrorist attack, or an environmental catastrophe before the authorities have issued a statement on the incident.” Previously, the government had issued regulations disallowing news that, in its words, “endangers China’s national security, reputation, and interests.”
Beijing has been rounding up Falun Gong with renewed energy, taking away almost 2,000 of them, according to the group. In addition, they’ve been rounding up Uighurs — the disaffected Turkic minority — lest they get Tibet-like ideas (or rather, act on them).
And they have arrested heroic dissidents — China’s best people — such as Hu Jia. He was arrested and sentenced (to three and a half years) precisely because he had criticized the ruling party’s Olympic maneuvers. As the party press put it, “Hu spread malicious rumors and committed libel in an attempt to subvert the state’s political power and socialist system.”
In an article he wrote with Teng Biao, a lawyer, Hu had a message for visitors to the Beijing Olympics: “You will see skyscrapers, spacious streets, modern stadiums and enthusiastic people. You will see the truth, but not the whole truth, just as you see only the tip of an iceberg. You may not know that the flowers, smiles, harmony and prosperity are built on a base of grievances, tears, imprisonment, torture and blood.”
Other Chinese who have been arrested, or who have been “disappeared,” because of their writings about the Olympics include Yang Chunlin, Gao Zhisheng, and Wang Dejia. Each of them makes an amazing, appalling, and inspiring story. Why do some people risk so much against a vastly powerful machine — namely, the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party? What makes them so brave, so extraordinary?
I have asked this about Cubans, Arabs, and many others.
In any case, thank you for joining me for Part III, and the series continues tomorrow.