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The Olympic Dream Fades
Falun Gong Deaths Escalate as Olympics Approach Clinton Urges Bush To Boycott Olympic Opening China Slams Jail Door on Olympic Dissent Tibetan Representative Contradicts Chinese Regime on Protests New Book Details Chinese Spy Effort ahead of Olympics Activists Warn China's Olympic PR Woes Set to Deepen China crisis as Steven Spielberg quits Olympics over Darfur China: Crackdown Violates Olympic Promises China Shirking Olympic Pledge, Pressure Needed: HRW China Cracks Down on Dissent Ahead of Olympics China's Dismal Human Rights Record Says No Prince Charles Not Attending "Games of Shame" The Heroism of the Burmese, the Shame of China China Takes Tough Line on Olympics Protests Crackdown on Reporters Covering Olympics Olympics Should Go to Athens... Amnesty Accuses China of Reneging on Olympic Rights Vow Canadian Olympics Committee Accused of Neglecting Human Rights Issue Reporters Without Borders Stages Demo in Hong Kong Chinese Dissident Delivers Olympic Rights Petitions Why Canada Should Boycott the Beijing Olympics |
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China's Dismal Human Rights Record Says No Article Launched: 08/13/2007 07:08:26 PM PDT Olympics, has already stirred worldwide protests because of China's many human rights violations against its own people as well as China's large-scale financial partnership with Sudan, perpetrator of the continuing genocide in Darfur. In the story "Roses Are Red" (July 19) in the Pasadena Weekly, Joe Piasecki reported that both local and international human rights organizations are urging the Tournament of Roses Association and the Pasadena City Council to speak out about how the Olympics in China will be a chilling caricature of what Tournament President C.L. Keedy - justifying the inclusion of the float in the parade - said: "The Olympics, which brings nations together, is the epitome of a global celebration - providing a worldwide spirit of cooperation, supporting athletes in peaceful competition." But there are no celebrations among the many victims of China's chronic cruelty. The acutely controversial float is sponsored by the Pasadena-based Avery Dennison Corp., which, the Pasadena Weekly reports, "employs more than 10,000 people in factories it owns in China," making office and consumer products. Among the gathering critics of the Avery float are international human rights organizations Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Watch. Sophie Richardson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Asian Division, points out, accurately: "The people who are organizing the parade should be fully aware that the Chinese government uses this kind of opportunity not for just promoting the Olympics, but for real political propaganda purposes. The float will certainly be construed as not just support of the Olympics, but for the Chinese government's staging of it." The supporters of this particular float are very likely to claim that protests about China's complicity in human rights violations - including the ongoing genocide in Darfur - have become irrelevant by citing China's support of the unanimous July 31 Resolution by the U.N. Security Council. The resolution will purportedly send 26,000 U.N. and African troops and police into Darfur to begin to end the genocide. But before that Security Council vote, China greatly undermined the resolution by stripping from the original language a clause pledging sanctions against the government of Sudan if it prevented the implementation of the resolution. Sudan's president, Gen. Omar al-Bashir, has broken every agreement he has signed to end the horrors that have cost the lives of more than 450,000 black Africans in Darfur. On that record, the genocide will continue. This acclaimed but deeply flawed July 31 U.N. resolution also prevents the disarming of the al-Bashir's militia, the Janjaweed, responsible for most of the mass murders of the people in Darfur, and the huge numbers of gang rapes of Darfur's black women. Because of lethal holes in this U.N. resolution, the growing international campaign to shame China, Sudan's largest investor and supplier of arms, into pressuring its genocidal partner to really end the atrocities there is continuing. On Jan. 1, the world will see the shaming on television and in international newspapers if the Avery Dennison Corp. floral float remains as a focus of the Rose Bowl Parade, billed as "The Passport to the World's Celebrations." However, it is not too late for the Tournament of Roses Association and Pasadena city officials to clearly disassociate themselves from the float's propaganda value for China's dictatorship. In a letter to Tournament of Roses President C.L. Keedy, Robert Menard, secretary-general of the invaluable champion of international press freedoms, Reporters Without Borders, showed how the Tournament of Roses can greatly add to the campaign to disgrace China into pressuring Sudan to end the mass murder. Menard urged Keedy and Pasadena officials to "say clearly to the Chinese authorities that you will not allow the Rose Parade to be associated with the Chinese Olympics by hosting the Avery float until the Chinese (Olympic Committee) organizers, who are for the most part also senior (Chinese government) officials, release prisoners of conscience, reform repressive laws and end censorship." A similar letter, reports the Pasadena Weekly, has been sent to Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard. This public focusing on China as one of the pariahs among civilized nations will also put increased pressure on China - even if its Olympics float is not removed from the Rose Parade - to compel Sudan to stop the Darfur genocide so that China will no longer be identified with these atrocities, which British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told The New York Times is "the greatest humanitarian disaster the world faces today." Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights. http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/search/ci_6614042?IADID=Search-www.pasadenastarnews.com-www.pasadenastarnews.com TOP An Unsporting Beijing Olympiad By Peter Navarro, The Providence Journal IRVINE, Calif. — Wednesday marked the start of the one-year countdown to the 2008 Olympics. To prepare for these Games, Beijing has lavished billions on the more than 30 Olympic venues and almost 60 Olympic training sites needed. Beijing is also pouring billions more into the construction of a new Olympic Village, a shiny new convention center, a significant expansion of Beijing's subway and airport systems and other public-works projects. Here in the United States, Beijing's construction boom has helped to significantly drive up new housing costs by inflating the cost of everything from cement and steel to timber and copper. But that is small potatoes compared to what's happening to the Chinese themselves. By some estimates, a staggering number of Chinese — over 1 million — will be displaced by the construction process and the Games themselves. While protests against such evictions have been ruthlessly suppressed by the government, outside of China there are other storm clouds gathering. To mark the one-year countdown to the Olympics, protesters around the world are raising their banners. These highly diverse groups include pro-Tibetan organizations, Christian groups protesting China's religious persecution, journalists decrying the lack of free speech, environmentalists raising awareness about China's role in global warming and, with some high-profile Hollywood support, human-rights groups protesting China's role in genocide in Darfur. Symptomatic of the country's totalitarian mindset, various Chinese intelligence agencies have been aggressively monitoring the activities of many of these groups; and the odds of any of the protesters getting a visa to attend the Games are worse than buying a winning lottery ticket. Against this backdrop of protest and espionage, China also faces at least two other headaches as it prepares for what many see as China's coming-out party to the world. One purely logistical issue is air pollution, which in Beijing is two to three times higher than levels deemed safe by the World Health Organization. In fact, Beijing's air can be quite damaging to high-performance athletes. It includes both ozone, which inhibits the ability of the lungs to absorb air, and fine particulate matter, which causes coughing and wheezing and longer-term damage. To ensure a blue-sky Olympics, China is removing over 50,000 taxis and buses and relocating several hundred local factories. This approach, however, is only a half measure because at least half of the pollution in Beijing comes from hundreds of miles away in China's industrial heartland. Chinese officials are also worried about the prospects of significant domestic unrest. The number of riots and protests within China have been rapidly rising as Chinese dissidence gathers momentum from peasants tossed off their land to make way for development, farmers fed up with government corruption and, China's worst nightmare, the Falun Gong religious movement. Ultimately, Chinese officials believe that if they can contain these problems, their multibillion-dollarinvestment will have a huge political and economic payoff. Not only would a successful Olympics legitimize Beijing's totalitarian regime. The Games may also vault both Beijing and Shanghai into the top tier of world-class Asian cities. The big-money payoff here is a highly lucrative tourist trade, and at least some experts predict that, after the Beijing Games and the 2010 Shanghai world's fair, China will replace France is the world's top tourist destination as early as 2014. It is equally true that the rest of the world has its perhaps last and best opportunity to exert considerable pressure on China over a wide range of issues. In this regard, one would do well to remember the enormous propaganda benefits that Adolf Hitler derived from the 1936 Berlin "Nazi Olympics." While it would be hyperbole to compare China's misdeeds with Hitler's, these truths about China we should all hold to be self-evident: By trading arms for oil and shielding the Sudan from U.N. sanctions, China has played a major role in the ongoing Darfur genocide. China remains the world's largest prison for journalists and world's biggest cyber-censor. China has no legitimate claim to Tibet and has killed thousands of Tibetan citizens and religious leaders to maintain its stranglehold over the kingdom. China is the world's largest pirate nation, the biggest employer of slave labor and it is flooding the world with defective and dangerous products. China has emerged as the world's biggest global warmer. It is for all of these reasons that the 2008 Olympics should be about a lot more than athletes and sporting games. Peter Navarro is a business professor at the University of California-Irvine, a regular CNBC contributor and author of "The Coming China Wars." E.W. Scripps Co. The Heroism of the Burmese, the Shame of China These protests have exposed Beijing’s own fear and failure October 1, 2007 When China joined Russia last January to veto a fairly mild United Nations Security Council resolution calling on Burma to free political prisoners and improve its abominable human rights record, Beijing’s Ambassador at the UN helpfully explained that “no country is perfect” and that “similar problems exist in other countries”. Including, as he of course did not say, China. The parallels may not seem all that obvious this week. Leaving aside the contrast between China’s boom economy and the misery inflicted on all Burmese by the military regime’s cruelty and incompetence, political repression in China these days stops short of organised mass rape and (outside China’s vast lao gai “reform by labour” camps) systemic forced labour. Yet the “problem” on the Chinese leadership’s mind, then and more acutely now that the desperate courage of Burma’s defenceless citizens has been on international display, is the containment of popular discontent in the age of the internet and, beyond that, the question of political legitimacy. Burma’s monks are its people’s truest representatives, symbols of all they hold in reverence. By corralling them in their monasteries and brutally clearing their supporters off the streets, General Than Shwe’s junta has handed China a terrible foreign policy dilemma, even harder to handle than the nuclear roguery of North Korea. Neighbouring Burma puts to the test, far more sharply than China’s cosseting of more distant Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, Sudan and Iran, the pledge, implicit in Hu Jintao’s “peaceful rise”, that China will use its power responsibly. In Burma, China has influence that it is under intense international pressure to use. Yet Burma’s popular uprising is a strong reminder of its own “crowd control” problems; for Beijing is annually confronted by tens of thousands of local protests, some violent. What can the world do about the situation in Burma? Will it make any difference? Who, if anyone, can really have an influence? China’s discomfort and irritation with the Burmese regime concern methods, not objectives. The Burmese junta’s settled conviction that only the military can run the country has its mirror image in the Chinese Communist Party’s obsession with preserving its monopoly on power. To grasp how Beijing would react to long columns of cinnamon-robed monks on its own streets, calling for change to the political order, think only of its iron repression of the equally peaceable, quasi-religious Falun Gong movement. China may genuinely wish, as it finally said yesterday, for “domestic reconciliation” and “development” in Burma; it is acutely worried that the regime’s stubborn refusal of all dialogue will lead to its downfall. But for all their lip-service to “democracy” as a desirable Burmese development, China’s leaders have not the remotest interest in an outcome that might encourage China’s own democracy activists, above all in the run-up to the Olympics. If democracy is good for Burma, after all, why not for China? Hence China’s continued insistence that it does not intervene in Burma’s “internal affairs”. This is hogwash. Burma is not just China’s neighbour; it is a heavily dependent client state that is close to becoming a virtual Chinese province, so heavily are large swaths of the country and the economy becoming sinicised. Burma’s problems are, increasingly, a Chinese “internal affair”. China’s hegemonic thrust into Burma is not merely, or even primarily, driven by its worldwide quest for minerals, oil and other resources. The two regimes have been partners in crime since the late 1980s, when both were in the international doghouse for massacring thousands of people demanding democracy, Burma in 1988 and China in 1989. At friendship prices, China has sold Burma rocket launchers, guns and other military hardware; Burma has reciprocated by providing China with listening posts and, soon, a naval base on the Indian Ocean. This does not mean that Beijing is not interested in Burma’s natural wealth, far from it. It is actively exploiting Burma’s timber, bamboo and furniture, rubber, tea, mining and fisheries and China’s actual or planned investments include 40 hydroelectric projects, 17 oil and gas concessions, major upgrading of its roads and a £1 billion, 1,000-mile oil and gas pipeline from the Bay of Bengal to China’s Yunnan province. An estimated million Chinese farmers, construction workers and businessmen work and live in Burma and, particularly in the north, many towns and cities are more Chinese than Burmese in character, using Chinese currency and dominated by billboards in Chinese characters. China reportedly agreed recently to rebuild the old British road connecting southern China with northeast India, bringing in 40,000 Chinese construction workers. What all this amounts to is a merging of the two economies, a takeover that serves two Chinese goals. The first is to develop its own southwestern regions by making Burma to all intents and purposes an extension of China. The second is to thread Burma securely into China’s “string of pearls”, the network of alliances, westward into Central Asia and south into the Indian Ocean, through which it aims to extend its strategic reach. China has bones to pick with Than Shwe, over heroin trafficking, his dalliance with North Korea, and above all his deal with Russia to build a light-water nuclear reactor; but he is a willing salesman of Burma’s birthright. If the junta fell, or even if Than Shwe were ousted by younger officers, Burmese nationalism could reassert itself and the southern strand of China’s string of pearls might snap. With an eye on the Olympics, China is reluctantly talking the talk about reform in Burma. It is sufficiently alive to the disgust the regime inspires that it has hedged its bets, meeting repeatedly with members of exile opposition groups and even half-heartedly supporting the release of Burma’s great figurehead of freedom, Aung San Suu Kyi. But so long as India and Burma’s South-East Asian neighbours play softball with the junta – in large part, ironically, because of their worries about China’s slow-motion takeover of Burma – Beijing has no need to walk the reform walk. These countries must stop covering China’s back. If the unbelievable bravery of the Burmese gets them nowhere yet again, China will take the blame. It will underscore China’s denial of freedoms to its own people. But the shame will be “civilised” Asia’s to share. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/rosemary_righter/article2563025.ece TOP FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 15, 2007 Human Rights Torch Relay Calls for Justice for Burmese People, Renounces Chinese Regime’s Support for Violent Dictatorship (October 15, 2007) The Human Rights Torch Relay Steering Committee today released the following statement in support of the human rights of Burmese citizens: On behalf of the Human Rights Torch Relay, members of the Steering Committee offer our steadfast support for the Burmese people in their struggle to assert their right to live in a free society and to break free of the shackles of military dictatorship. The world watched in horror as the ruling junta violently suppressed Burmese citizens and brutalized the Buddhist monks who provide spiritual sustenance for the people of Burma. The Burmese military is able to act without compunction, due in no small part to the unconscionable support of the Chinese government. The Human Rights Torch Relay hereby calls upon the Chinese regime to repudiate the Burmese junta’s harsh suppression of the Burmese people. We urge freedom-loving governments around the world to view China’s acceptance of a watered down version of the U.N. Security Council resolution in light of its support for the brutal, totalitarian governments of North Korea, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. The Human Rights Torch Relay (HRTR) is a year-long international effort to beam the spotlight on the Chinese government’s human rights violations. The relay, which will travel to 37 countries and through 150 cities, includes concerned individuals, faith leaders, government officials, civic and professional groups, as well as non-profit organizations that are committed to universal human rights. HRTR’s founding premise is: The Olympics and crimes against humanity cannot co-exist in China. Events unfolding in Burma are painful reminders that humanity has a tenuous hold on fundamental human rights. The Chinese regime’s support of the military government in Burma undermines the Olympic principle of “promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.” The Human Rights Torch Relay Steering Committee urges world leaders to hold China’s leaders accountable and boycott the 2008 Olympics. - end - For more information about the Human Rights Torch Relay, please visit: www.humanrightstorchusa.org. Top Chinese Attorney Kidnapped Following Letter to Congress Gao Zhisheng, one of China’s most prominent human rights lawyers and a member of CIPFG was seen being taken away by secret police from his Beijing home on Sunday according to eyewitnesses. Gao had broken China’s biggest taboo by publicly calling for an end to the persecution of Falun Gong. The apparent kidnapping came less than 48 hours after Gao published an open letter to the United States Congress. The letter called on the U.S. to boycott the Olympics over the Communist Party’s ongoing campaign against the Falun Gong. “The eight-year long suppression of Falun Gong is so far the most long-lasting and the most serious human disaster in China and in the world,” Gao, a Christian, wrote, adding that he has published the findings of his investigation of secret torture chambers. Gao wrote that he longs to see the Olympics in Beijing. “But when I think about Chinese society’s current environment and how the Olympic Games will be used here, my conscience and sense of justice make my heart ache.” The letter came the day after an international press conference about him was held in Washington DC’s Rayburn House Office Building. Speakers at the Thursday press event included Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), former Canadian Secretary of State (Asia-Pacific) David Kilgour, and European Union Vice-President Edward McMillan-Scott. “There are few in the world who are more acutely aware of Beijing’s severe shortcomings in the area of human rights than the famed human rights lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Mr. Gao Zhisheng,” said Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen. Gao’s New Book |
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