Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom - World Press ...

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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means of independent verification. At one point, Premier Wen promised to take a group of
international media to Lhasa. The bad news is they decided not to invite the BBC.
The reason? Many in China are annoyed at the way the Western media have reported the
story. More than a million people have signed a petition complaining at the coverage on
channels like CNN and the BBC. The irony of course, is only a handful will actually have
been able to read or watch the BBC’s coverage themselves. Much of the BBC’s content
remains blocked.
So what should we expect in China in the summer? To some extent the jury is still out.
The situation in Tibet may have calmed down - order and a degree of equilibrium may
have been restored. But then we’ve seen the protests across Europe during the Olympic
torch relay. “Face” is everything to the Chinese. There’s no greater crime than to cause
China to lose face. And yet from Athens, to London, to Paris, Beijing has found itself
embarrassed, the Olympic torch the focus of dissent rather than celebration. So much for
“One World, One Dream.” What was supposed to be the year when China showed its best
face to the world, has seen parts of the globe turning its back on China.
There is one irony in all this. Just as the authorities in Beijing were interrupting
transmissions of BBC World and hunting down BBC correspondents in places like Gansu
province, they unblocked access to the English-language section of the BBC News web site
for the first time in a decade. We now have thousands of readers inside China. Typically,
fewer than 100 people read stories from Chinese computers - on the first day, that figure
jumped to more that more than 20,000 - not all that many in a country that boasts a
population of 1.3 billion. But it does provide a valuable, alternative perspective on the
protests and our reporting of them.
Beijing’s air and water:
call for long-term solutions, not quick fixes
Huang Xiaolu/Wang Weiluo
Environmental experts
Huang Xiaolu presented two summaries, on air and water quality in Beijing, by Dr. Wang
Weiluo, a Chinese engineer now living in Germany. He took part in the 1980s in the
Territorial Plan for the Three Gorges District where the controversial Three Gorges Dam on
the Yangtze was to be built. In his book, “Fortune and Misfortune,” he criticized many
aspects of the giant project’s flood control, navigation and resettlement policies.
Ms. Huang is the daughter of the late Huang Wanli (1911-2001), a distinguished professor
of water engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China’s most prestigious university.
He had predicted ecological disasters if the Three Gorges Dam were built. He was publicly
attacked, isolated and sent to hard labor over his opposition in the 1950s to the
Sanmenxia Dam on the Yellow River. After he argued that that dam was bound to fail,