While the PRC had said that the Olympics was going to bring more openness and reform it seems like they are backtracking on those claims. From the Washington Post http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25983709 Defiant Chinese harassed, jailed before Games Crackdown defies vow Beijing made to be host ZHENGDING, China - Behind the gray walls and barbed wire of the prison here, eight Chinese farmers with a grievance against the government have been consigned to Olympic limbo. Their indefinite detainment, relatives and neighbors said, is the price they are paying for stirring up trouble as China prepares to host the Beijing Games. Trouble, the Communist Party has made clear, will not be permitted. "My bet is the authorities won't let them out until after the Olympics," said Wang Xiahua, a veteran anti-government agitator from this farm town 180 miles southwest of Beijing and a supporter of the imprisoned farmers. The Olympic Games have become the occasion for a broad crackdown against dissidents, gadflies and malcontents this summer. Although human rights activists say they have no accurate estimate of how many people have been imprisoned, they believe the figure to be in the thousands. The crackdown comes seven years after the secretary general of the Beijing Olympic Bid Committee declared that staging the Games in the Chinese capital would "not only promote our economy but also enhance all social conditions, including education, health and human rights." Now, human rights have been set back rather than enhanced, activists say. "The Olympics have reversed the clock," said Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based specialist for Human Rights in China. Another foreign human rights advocacy group, Amnesty International, came to a similar conclusion in a report issued Monday titled "The Olympics Countdown -- Broken Promises." "By continuing to persecute and punish those who speak out for human rights, the Chinese authorities have lost sight of the promises they made when they were granted the Games seven years ago," said Roseann Rife, Amnesty's Asia-Pacific deputy director. "The Chinese authorities are tarnishing the legacy of the Games." The repressive atmosphere has intensified in part because senior Communist Party officials seem to be just as determined to prevent embarrassing protests -- which could be televised -- as they are to avert terrorist attacks during the Olympics. In exhortations to security forces, Public Security Ministry commanders and Xi Jinping, the senior Communist Party leader in charge of Olympic preparations, repeatedly have said that police must block any attempt to damage China's image. Despite these concerns, President Bush and many other world leaders have accepted China's invitation to attend the Olympic opening ceremony on Friday. After saying for months that the Games should be viewed only as a sporting event, Bush met with Chinese rights activists Tuesday and said he would use the opportunity to remind President Hu Jintao of U.S. support for human rights. The Foreign Ministry criticized his gesture, calling it interference in China's internal affairs. But his decision to attend was still being interpreted as endorsement of China's contention that the Olympic Games are not an appropriate stage for human rights appeals. Bequelin, the researcher at Human Rights in China, said the opportunity for foreign governments to use the Olympics to pressure China on human rights has passed in any case, because world leaders are likely to be reluctant to embarrass Hu and other party leaders with strong stands during China's moment in the sun. "It is a new low for the international community to see all these state leaders going to Beijing without saying anything about the repressive environment in which the Games are being held," he added. The Olympics were far from the minds of the Zhengding farmers when they took on authorities a little more than a year ago. As is frequently the case in China, their problem was a decision by local authorities to seize their land to make way for economic development, specifically an expansion of the airport for the nearby city of Shijiazhuang. The land was taken, they said, but the full compensation never made its way into their pockets. After a series of protests, 10 of the disgruntled farmers were arrested in June 2007. They were tried in a local court and convicted in November of illegal gatherings and disrupting social stability. But in January, relatives said, an appeals court in Shijiazhuang overturned the convictions, citing lack of evidence, and they were released pending a retrial. In releasing them, police also warned that the protests had to stop, particularly during the Olympic period. When they refused to back down -- and after a Beijing reporter inquired about their fate -- the 10 were arrested again last month. One took sick and had to be hospitalized, neighbors said, and another was released after convincing authorities he would be quiet. The other eight were confined to the Zhengding Detainment Center on the edge of town, where a notice posted at the entrance says that during the Olympic period, their families cannot visit or bring gifts, "except cash." Human rights activists said many of those imprisoned during the Olympic crackdown are being held for short periods without formal legal proceedings. "Thousands of people, including petitioners who have gone to Beijing seeking justice from the government, have been swept up in efforts to clean up the city before the games," Amnesty International said in its report issued Monday. Traveling to Beijing to complain has a long history in China, dating from imperial times and carried on since the Communist Party took over in 1949. Chinese upset with their local party and government leaders almost invariably express belief that national leaders would solve the problem if only they were aware of it. With increasing urgency, however, the central government has urged local party officials to solve such problems on the spot to reduce the number of people showing up in Beijing. As a result, party officials in Zhengding and other such towns have organized a series of meetings recently to receive citizen complaints. But the other side of the coin has been reinforced determination by security forces to prevent travel by dissidents determined to visit the capital anyway. Li Zijing, a 46-year-old surgeon who complained that a hospital in Jiangxi province botched his kidney treatment, said he went to Beijing in March for the second time to petition for redress. But Jiangxi officials took him into custody and made him return, he said, and since the beginning of July four or five people guard his house lest he try again. "No matter where we go, they follow us," he said. "They said they were hired by the hospital, and surveillance will last for the next four months. It is said the Olympics are approaching so they worry about us petitioners." Security forces seem determined to prevent those and other dissidents from finding an echo in the media, human rights activists said, particularly the foreign media that have been reinforced in China during the Olympic period. To do so, they said, authorities have devised a panoply of measures ranging from warnings, intimidation, surveillance, travel restrictions and house arrest to outright detention. A well-known human rights activist in Beijing, for instance, sent this cellphone message Wednesday afternoon: "The police come to my place, waiting outside, and I do not know what they want to do with me." The activist was detained for 18 days last month on suspicion of planning protests during the Olympics. This time, she said, the police went away after she refused to leave home. Similarly, Yuan Weijing, the wife of imprisoned activist Chen Guangcheng, said the number of guards watching her home in the Shangdong province town of Linyi has risen from 10 to more than 40. "Because of the Olympics approaching, people like me -- nothing more than a rights defender's wife -- are being specially protected by the government," she said in a statement disseminated by Human Rights in China. Two longtime activists were put under detention last week in what amounted to unexplained extensions of earlier terms. Du Daobin, a dissident Internet writer, was ordered back to jail July 24 after a court revoked an earlier suspended sentence just as the probationary period was about to end. Authorities said he had violated terms of the probation by posting comments on the Internet and receiving unauthorized visitors at his Hebei province home. Ye Guozhu, a housing rights activist in Beijing, was detained last Saturday on suspicion of disturbing public order just as he was scheduled to be released after serving an earlier jail term connected to his anti-government agitation. Ye's brother, Ye Guoqiang, told Human Rights in China that authorities notified the family on the day of his scheduled release. "Ye's brother said authorities refused to explain how Ye Guozhu could gather a crowd to disturb public order while in prison," the rights group reported. "Ye Guoqiang believes they intend to block possible foreign media contact with his brother and will keep him in custody at least until after the Beijing Olympic Games have ended."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/world/asia/02china.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all Despite Flaws, Rights in China Have Expanded By HOWARD W. FRENCH Published: August 2, 2008 SHANGHAI — For the past two decades, China’s people became richer but not much freer, and the Communist Party has staked its future on their willingness to live with that tradeoff. Much remains unfree here. The rights of public expression and assembly are sharply limited; minorities, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang Province, are repressed; and the party exercises a nearly complete monopoly on political decision making. But Chinese people also increasingly live where they want to live. They travel abroad in ever larger numbers. Property rights have found broader support in the courts. Within well-defined limits, people also enjoy the fruits of the technological revolution, from cellphones to the Internet, and can communicate or find information with an ease that has few parallels in authoritarian countries of the past. “Some people will tell you, look at the walls, and say they are still pretty high, while others will tell you that there is a lot of space between the walls,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a China specialist at Human Rights Watch. “Both things are true.” Chinese who try to challenge the one-party state directly say authorities are no more tolerant of dissent than they were in the 1980s, and in some cases they are tougher on citizen-led campaigns to enforce legal rights or stop environmental abuses. On the other hand, the definition of what constitutes a political challenge has changed. Individuals are far less likely to run afoul of a system that no longer demands conformity in political views or personal lifestyles. The shift toward a more diverse society helps explain some anomalies in perceptions of life inside China. Amnesty International, the human rights group, reported this week that the rights situation had deteriorated significantly in the months before the Olympics despite China’s pledges to improve its record as a condition for hosting the games. But a survey conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project this spring and issued last month found that an astounding 86 percent of Chinese said they were content with their country’s direction, double the percentage who said the same thing in 2002. Only 23 percent of Americans polled in the survey said they were satisfied with their country’s direction. The speeches of China’s leaders, with their gray imagery and paternalistic phrasings, have changed relatively little, emphasizing unity, harmony and economic growth under party rule. The reality on the ground, though, has been transformed, partly because a more dynamic economy necessitates a more dynamic society, partly because money gives people options they did not have when they were poor. Arguably the most dramatic change in the freedoms enjoyed by most Chinese has been the gradual erosion of a population registration system that tied people to their places of birth, preventing internal migration or, at its height, even tourism. China has not formally abandoned the system, known as hukou, and it can still prove a nuisance. But as hundreds of millions of people have moved from the inland provinces to wealthier coastal cities in search of economic opportunity, authorities in one place after another have found themselves making concessions to this new reality. Song Daqing, who lives in a single-room home here with his wife and three children, counts himself as a beneficiary of these changes. Born into poverty in Sichuan Province, he worked as a cattle herder, bricklayer and coal miner, earning as little as 60 cents a day before coming to Shanghai in 1998. His early years in this city were marked by frequent mass roundups of migrants by the police, and he was twice held in crowded detention centers before being expelled from the city. “Now we all have residence permits,” said Mr. Song, who supports his family by selling vegetables. “The police don’t check our paperwork anymore, and even if they found you without a permit, they won’t arrest you, but rather would suggest you get one as soon as possible.” Reality Trumps Ideology The relative flexibility the government has shown in allowing this to happen is more a matter of pragmatism than any overt ideological shift, a grudging concession to economic reality. “China’s economic development relies on the flow of migrants into cities,” said Wei Wei, the founder of Little Bird, an organization that runs a special phone line to help migrant workers protect their rights. “The country’s growth depends on it.” Little Bird itself is an example of incremental openness. It is a nongovernmental organization, one of thousands addressing social, economic and environmental issues that the party once insisted it could handle by itself. The leeway private groups have to influence public policy is still limited. Those that cross unwritten lines into political opposition often are shut down. But China’s bureaucracy is more contentious than it was under Mao. Policy advocates within the government — including officials representing weak bureaucracies, like those charged with fighting pollution, improving education and broadening women’s rights — often seek popular support to increase their clout. A recent example involved a revision of a law covering rights for the handicapped, which the government undertook after several organizations banded together in 2004 to advocate change on the issue. The activists also contacted Chinese legislators and provided a report to the official Chinese Disabled Person’s Federation. The government never publicly acknowledged the citizens’ action, but a revised law incorporating some of their recommendations was enacted earlier this year. “The pressure came from both inside and outside,” said Wu Runling, director of the Beijing Huitianyu Information Consulting Center, one of the groups involved. “You can’t tell me that our appeal and calls for revision of the law had no meaning at all.” Although a powerful system of censorship remains a fact of life, and journalists are frequently jailed and detained, feisty publications with mass audiences in print and on the Internet report forthrightly about ills in society. Greater access to information has emboldened people to assert some rights. Homeowners in cities like Shanghai and Chongqing have resisted government development schemes with some success, and the proliferation of petitioners with all kinds of grievances presents the authorities with an informal check on their power. “After 30 years, everybody knows about democracy and freedom,” said Wang Xiaodong, a researcher at the China Youth Research Center, a wing of the Communist Youth League. “They know that as taxpayers, we support the government, not the opposite.” Before the Olympics, Beijing demolished a favorite pilgrimage spot for petitioners who flow to the capital from all over the country to seek redress from perceived injustice. According to a recent report in a Hong Kong magazine, Phoenix Weekly, the government has also hired thugs to intimidate or kidnap petitioners to prevent them from making their cases. Critics of such abuses say that in an indirect way, the state is acknowledging the power of such protest. “Human rights has become more than just a theory for the public,” said Jiang Qisheng, a student leader during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and former political prisoner. “In the past they petitioned and complained about injustice, but that wasn’t about defending their rights. They let the higher authorities to decide their rights. “What they are asking for now is a change in the system, and this reflects a widespread change in attitude,” he said. Even in the best of times, China’s human rights improvements have been so gradual as to be almost impossible to discern in any month-to-month sense. And in the tense environment before the Olympics, which China fears could invite uncontrollable protests or blemish its international image, the climate has become noticeably more restrictive. Lawyers have been sternly warned not to represent clients involved in delicate political cases. Tibetans and Uighur Muslims have been subjected to arrests and “re-education” campaigns. Hu Jia, a Beijing-based political activist who campaigned for years on behalf of AIDS patients and for greater political openness, was arrested late last year and sentenced to three and a half years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power.” Many other dissidents have been warned to stay away from Beijing, or have seen state surveillance and harassment extended to their family members. The government relies on unwritten laws: political confrontation with the ruling party remains a no-go area, and state stability trumps nascent notions of human rights. Blogs Subvert Propaganda Yet even as the police tightened security before the Games, the power of new information technologies to chip away at the official line was still on display. In a poor county in Guizhou Province in the south, a teenage girl died under mysterious circumstances, and rumors of police malfeasance and a cover-up spread widely on the Internet, prompting public protests to demand a new investigation. Local authorities initially tried to suppress news of the protests, which turned violent, and impose an official account of events there. But people wielding video cameras uploaded material to YouTube, and some Chinese journalists disputed official accounts that the riots had been put down peacefully. One of them was Wu Hanpin, a radio reporter who took pictures of the riot. They showed that the police had fired rubber bullets and teenagers in detention whose bruised foreheads suggested beatings. “I saw a gap between the official story and the reality, which was mind-blowing, like the presence of the armed police,” Mr. Wu said. “So I put some of these things on the Internet, on my personal blog.” Four days later, after registering hundreds of thousands of visitors, his blog was closed by censors. “The media has made a huge step forward from the ’80s,” said Sun Jinping, a veteran senior editor at a Beijing newspaper. The riot in Guizhou Province, he said, “would have been impossible for the public to know about in the past.” A View of the Outside For others, the impact of information about other countries has been just as great. He Weifang, a professor of law at Peking University, said that before the economic reform era began in 1979, the country was much like North Korea, where people were indoctrinated to believe that Chinese were the better off than people anywhere else. “Today, even the farmers in remote areas have satellite TVs,” Mr. He said. “So whenever they see an election, such as the one held in Pakistan recently, they may wonder why, even though we have approximately the same economic conditions, they can elect their top leaders, and we can’t even vote for the leader of a small county. I think a consciousness of political rights has increased more than anything.” Even China’s party-run legal system is a fulcrum for experimentation, though in an ambiguous way that highlights the uncertainties in the country’s transition. Judges do not have the power to rule independently in China. Yet the country now has 165,000 registered lawyers, a five-fold increase since 1990, and average people have hired them to press for enforcement of rights inscribed in the Chinese Constitution. The courts today sometimes defend property rights and business contracts even when powerful state interests are on the other side. In criminal law, progress is more grudging. Yan Ruyu, a former Beijing police officer who quit the force and became a lawyer after the violent crackdown on protesters at Tiananmen Square, said such cases remained unpopular with most lawyers because the likelihood of prevailing over the state remains so slim. “There has been progress, but it’s so slow that sometimes one becomes pessimistic,” he said. “It’s empty talk to speak of having an independent judiciary if the party leads everything.” On the other hand, Mr. Yan says, party control turns every criminal case into a human rights case. That gives every criminal defense lawyer the chance — and for some of them, the incentive — to inch the system forward. Li Zhen contributed research from Beijing, and Fan Wenxin and Zhong Zijuan from Shanghai.
China almost HAS to crack down ahead of the Olympics. There are a lot of people who want to embarrass the government with the spotlight on. I have no doubt that some will still be successful. So the crackdown is surprise at all. Starting about now, the government is collectively holding it's breath that no major events happen until after the games are over. The sigh of relief after the closing ceremonies will be heard around the world. Please understand I am not condoning these extreme measures, but just saying they are predictable and at least somewhat understandable. I believe the long-term net effect of the Beijing games will give a boost to China opening up to the world and loosening things up at home. But if something major ends up happening that embarrasses the government or the country, uh oh.
Good article and I think it is undeniable that things have gradually been opening up in the PRC regarding freedom of speech, media and rights. It would be almost impossible for them to maintain the economic progress if they stuck with the old Maoist level of control. That said I question the pace of reform and while I understand that the PRC feels it is walking a delicate tight rope and feels giving more freedoms will lead to chaos I think there inevitably will come a realization that central control, lack of transparency in governance, questionable dedication to the rule of law is antithetical to running a vibrant economy and such a vast society.
I can understand what you are saying and agree that the PRC government is looking at things that way. The problem that I see is that it seems to me the more they crack down the more controversy, and in turn embarrassment, they are bringing on them. IMO it would be a much greater statement for them to allow a greater degree of freedom during the Olympics even at the risk of protests. One thing that I disagree with the Chinese leadership, and many Chinese, is this idea that everything could and should be harmonious. In a complex society and World that's never going to be the case. IMO it is better to allow dissent some level of free expression, including public protests, rather than sweep things under the rug.
You can thank Russia's crash for at least a part of that concern. Glasnost and perestroika set an example they vowed not to follow (according to some friends of mine). Well down the line, the risk of allowing more freedoms will decrease and the obvious downsides of stifling free expression will become more obvious. The one thing I agree with Ross Perot on is about China: Time is on our side. Progress will inevitably continue and perhaps the biggest concern is just avoiding huge setbacks. Living in America, we will always want China to move faster, but slow and steady (at their own pace) is best.
Rather than starting another thread I thought I would append this to this thread. From Reuters http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25992828 Olympics protesters must give 5 days’ notice Three parks set up in Beijing for officially approved demonstrations BEIJING - Foreign and local protesters who want to speak out against the Beijing Olympics are required to apply five days in advance, and not harm “national interests,” the security chief for the Olympic organizing committee said. Accused of repressing dissent, China recently said it would allow officially approved demonstrations to be held at three parks in the capital. Liu Shaowu, security chief for the Beijing Organizing Committee, detailed the steps necessary on a statement posted on the official Olympics news Web site Saturday, but warned that China has a broad ban against gatherings deemed “harmful” to national interests. “Assembling to march and protest is a citizen’s right. But it must be stressed that when exercising this right, citizens must respect and not harm others’ freedoms and rights and must not harm national, social and collective interests,” Liu said in the statement. Chinese citizens must turn in a written application to police while foreigners must submit an application to the border entry-exit administration. Police will inform applicants whether they received approval at the latest two days before the protest, he said. If they don’t hear from the police, that can be taken as approval, Liu said. China has always been wary of protests of any kind. But the government apparently agreed in hopes of blunting criticism that the Summer Games allowed for no public protests. The protest areas are in public parks several miles from the main Olympic stadium. Tightened visa checks have prevented or deterred foreign groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists from coming to Beijing, although Dream for Darfur said its visa application was pending. Overseas broadcasters, such as NBC which paid hundreds of millions of dollars to air the games, are still wrangling with organizers over restrictions on live coverage around the city.
