The ****trait of a Burning "Olympic Host" -- Will the Olympic Torch Burn
China? / Time
Sunday, Apr. 06, 2008
Will the Olympic Torch Burn China?
By Simon Elegant/Beijing
China is dealing with visible and invisible opposition in the months
before the Beijing Olympics begin. The visible was front-and-center in
the world media as the OIympic torch made its way through various
countries on a circuitous route to the Games. Everywhere Chinese
security is on guard against activists prepared to disrupt the flame's
progress to protest China's human rights record in Tibet and in the
enormous province of Xinjiang. In London, a protester tried to grab the
flame away from its official bearer; at one point, the torch had to make
its way through the city within the protective confines of a bus.
Earlier, when the flame traveled through Istanbul, Turkish police
arrested a man who made a move toward the torchbearer. And in Paris on
Monday, officials actually took the step of extingui****ng the torch amid
protests.
But it is the invisible opposition, what Beijing prevents the rest of
the world from seeing, that elicits the most concern. Recent re****ts
indicate that s****adic violence in Tibet continues despite a massive
Chinese military crackdown that has now lasted almost three weeks.
According to Tibetan exiles and activist groups, Chinese police on April
3 fired on monks from the Tongkor monastery in Ganzi, Sichuan Province,
killing an unknown number. China's official Xinhua News Agency confirmed
that disturbances had taken place but did not re****t any deaths.
Meanwhile, in what is certainly a deeply worrying development for
Beijing, the unrest has spread to other ethnic minority areas, the
Chinese authorities confirmed, this time in the far western
Muslim-dominated province of Xinjiang. As usual, accounts of what
happened by overseas activists and the Chinese authorities were poles
apart. But there is no doubt that significant unrest over Chinese rule
has occurred in Xinjiang, involving hundreds and possibly thousands of
protesters. There have also been roundups by security forces in which
scores have been detained.
The puzzle is what are the Communist Party cadres in Beijing feeling as
they watch these events unfold ? Anger certainly. And worry about how
the staging of the Olympic Games in August could be affected. But by all
accounts, they have also been surprised, shocked at how resentment over
Chinese rule has suddenly exploded, threatening to spoil what was
supposed to be a positive, peaceful run-up to the Games.
And therein lies something of a mystery. How could Chinese authorities
have missed the potential for Tibetan violence? It was no secret that
groups ranging from disaffected Tibetans to human rights activists would
try and take advantage of the approaching Olympics to exercise some
leverage for their causes when Beijing seemed most vulnerable. And yet,
China's leaders appear to have been completely unprepared to respond to
challenges with anything but brute force and harsh words.
Indeed, if Beijing was caught flat-footed by the scale and scope of the
Lhasa protests it has been equally unready to change its policies on the
human rights front, despite knowing almost from the day the Games were
awarded to Beijing in 2001 that hosting the Olympics would ****ne an
increasingly bright spotlight on its dismal rights record. On April 3,
activist Hu Jia was sentenced to three and a half years' imprisonment
after being found guilty of "inciting subversion of state power."
Prosecutors had advanced as evidence essays he wrote linking the staging
of the Games with human rights, as well as interviews he gave on the
issue with foreign re****ters.
Hu's sentence was the latest in a string of recent convictions and
imprisoning of activists apparently designed to stifle even the
slightest sign of dissent ahead of the Games. Even China's huge online
population of some 230 million, which is often cited as the country's
most powerful force for greater openness, has felt the heat. Thousands
of websites have been shuttered while government controls and blocking
of sites outside China has intensified significantly in recent months.
As Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International put it in a
re****t released on April 1, despite promises by both the International
Olympic Committee and Chinese officials, "The crackdown... has deepened
not lessened because of the Olympics."
Beijing's stance has left many observers puzzled over its inability to
mount a more measured response: to practice better crowd control, to
manage the media better, to try negotiation instead of knee-jerk
repression. Some of the reasons are straightforward: the Communist Party
is deeply secretive and highly bureaucratic, and its members are steeped
in a longstanding culture of self- preservation. "Part of the
head-in-sand problem has to do with entrenched bureaucratic interests,"
says sinologist Perry Link of Princeton University. "People who have
devoted the last 25 years of their careers to 'opposing splittism' can't
stop chanting that mantra without puzzlement over what to say instead
and without a bit of panic about their own rice bowls and even, almost,
their own identities."
Link points out that leaders such as President Hu Jintao are of a
generation that got "Soviet-style educations" in the 1950s. "They don't
have the knowledge or imagination to make better decisions," Link says.
Leaders operate under a system of collective decision making that
constrains the state's ability to be flexible in the face of new
challenges. Hu is painfully aware that his political position may well
rest on the outcome of moves he ratifies on big issues like Tibet, where
he served as Party Secretary during the last flare-up of protests in
1989. "Like the bureaucrats beneath them," Link says, top officials "are
frightened about their own positions and don't want to been seen as
making 'mistakes,' especially mistakes of softness."
This insecurity underlies the central government's heavy-handed tactics
and rhetoric, even though repression reduces the country's stature in
the global community. "When the rest of the world looks at China, they
see this increasingly powerful and confident country spending more and
more on its military, its economy booming, its financial power overseas
growing," says Wenran Jiang, director of the China Institute at the
University of Alberta. "But when Chinese leader****p looks at the country
they see the exact opposite: weaknesses everywhere from Tibet to
Xinjiang, to rising inflation and civil unrest, environmental disasters
and corruption. So the overall mentality of the central authorities is
very insecure and nervous." Jiang argues that the only way to move
toward a solution in Tibet is to negotiate with the Dalai Lama. But he
says leaders are now trapped by their own words, which have fueled
passionate nationalist sentiments among ordinary Chinese, who fervently
believe that Tibet is Chinese territory. Any appearance of compromise by
Beijing would likely be intolerable to the public, Jiang says.
This lack of flexibility in spite of the looming Olympics is worrying,
says Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher with New York City-based
Human Rights Watch. "Especially now with the Lhasa protests," he says,
"they are facing a pressure-cooker period." Beijing will have to keep a
lid on Tibet. But Beijing's problems are not confined to Tibet. There
have also been rumblings of dissent in Xinjiang province, populated
largely by the Uighur Muslim minority group. Protests by thousands of
Uighurs, the Muslim ethnic group that speaks a Turkic language, over
religious issues were re****ted by rights groups in late March. The
Chinese press meanwhile has re****ted several recent clashes with
separatist rebels in the province; in early March, the press re****ted
that a Uighur woman had attempted to bring down a domestic passenger jet
with a homemade bomb. Add to that widespread discontent throughout China
over issues such as corruption and rapidly worsening inflation (prices
of ****k have gone up by two-thirds in the past year) and you have what
Bequelin calls the makings of a perfect storm.
It's a storm that threatens to blow in just when everyone's watching ¡ª
and deciding whether they want to participate in China's Olympics. The
Prime Minister of Poland has already indicated he will boycott the
opening ceremony because of events in Tibet; French President Nicolas
Sarkozy has said he wouldn't rule out a similar move. U.S. President
George W. Bush called his Chinese counterpart Hu to urge Beijing to
engage the Dalai Lama in a dialogue. Others could seek to distance
themselves from the Games, if only as a precaution against "being seen
on television dining with Chinese leaders as the dark reality of what's
going on trickles out," as Bequelin puts it. For China, the fear is that
what it hoped to keep invisible will become visible to everyone in the
world.
The authorities will no doubt make it virtually impossible for
journalists to enter Tibet in the months leading up to the Olympics. But
it remains unclear exactly how they intend to deal with the estimated
30,000 foreign re****ters expected to witness the event, all of them
eager to take advantage of Beijing's own regulations specifying that
they can interview anyone Chinese who agrees to talk. "They still don't
have any idea what is going to hit them or how bad they will look to the
outside world," comments one senior Western academic who has close ties
to the upper echelons of the Beijing establishment. If its conduct over
the past year is anything to go by, Beijing's instinctive reaction to
new problems will be to use its heavy hand once more.
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