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

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
5
Introductory speech
Reporting the good and the bad:
a help to China’s development
Merle Goldman
Professor Emerita of History, Boston University; Research Associate,
John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University
China's leaders had hoped that holding the August 2008 Olympics in Beijing would draw
attention to the great achievements that have taken place since the death of Mao Zedong
in 1976. The occasion would mark China's arrival as a world power and show off its
physical modernization and dynamic economy.
But in the lead-up to the Olympics, China's actions have produced just the opposite effect.
They have focused attention on its repressive policies in Tibet and the Tibetan areas in
China's provinces as well as in the Moslem areas in the northwestern province of Xinjiang.
In the past few weeks, Beijing's policies in these areas have sparked protests and violent
repression. The protests of Buddhist monks in Burma a few months earlier focused
attention on China's support of the repressive and militarist regime in Burma.
Steven Spielberg's resignation as the director of the opening ceremonies for the Beijing
Olympics drew world attention to China's activities in the Sudan. Here, in addition to
developing energy supplies and infrastructure, China has been supplying Sudanese agents,
the Janjaweed militias, with arms with which they attack the Darfur region, leading to the
killing of more than 200,000 people.
Moreover, in the process of building the facilities for the Olympics in Beijing, it is estimated
that more than a million people have been evicted from their homes with little
compensation to make way for stadiums, sports facilities and new roads. These events
have diverted attention from the image China's leaders seek to project to the outside
world of its economic achievements and a society living in “harmony.”
While those events have received the most attention, there are other important events
going on in China on the issue of human rights that have not received much attention and
that even more contradict the image China seeks to portray.
In the negotiations for the Olympics, Foreign Minister Liu Jianchao promised to improve
China's human rights record. Yet, in the runup to the Games, China has cracked down on
a number of critics of the Communist Party. This internal crackdown has received much
less attention in the media than the events in Sudan and Tibet and the interrupted journey
of the Olympic torch. But this phenomenon of internal dissent in the long run may be
more important in determining what happens in Tibet and the Sudan than the anti-
Chinese demonstrations that went on all over the world.