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NEWS & LETTERS, August - September 2008
World in View
Many faces of Beijing Olympics
NBA star Yao Ming carried the flag to lead China's athletes opening the Olympics, alongside a little boy who kept up with his long strides on the march. We were told he dug himself out of the rubble of his collapsed school after the earthquake that hit Sichuan on May 12, then returned to rescue schoolmates because it was his duty as class monitor. Government organizers used the face of a child, equipped with a story on the model of the selfless heroes promoted in Mao Zedong-era campaigns, to misdirect world attention from the man-made disaster within the natural disaster.
Before the Olympics, officials had forced settlements on parents of the nearly 10,000 schoolchildren killed in shamefully shoddy buildings that had been erected with the connivance of contractors and officials, to end the parents' widening protests and demands for investigations.
Authorities had instituted new press rules permitting foreign journalists freer access, but roughed up journalists in the earthquake zones, and rescinded access to Tibet and areas with large Tibetan populations--police have stopped more reporters' activity this year than in all of 2007. Reporters arriving at the press box for the Olympics found websites blocked, even the BBC, contrary to promises of unfettered internet access.
China had the technology to block websites, which has been used to restrict access for dissidents and ordinary citizens alike, because companies like Google and Yahoo provided it as the price of doing business in China. Much as Hu Jintao's regime seeks to control its image abroad, the focus remains on quashing opposition within China.
The migrant workers who had largely built the Olympic facilities had been evicted from Beijing, along with other homeless people. Of 77 requests to stage protests during the Olympics by citizens, not one was approved. Most notoriously, two Beijing women pushing 80, whose houses had been demolished and who were trying to demand compensation, received sentences of a year in a labor camp.
--Bob McGuire
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