The Shameless Face of Beijing Olympics -- Beijing’s Bad Faith Olympics /
NYTimes

The New York Times

August 23, 2008

Editorial

Beijing’s Bad Faith Olympics

The Beijing Olympics still have one more day to run. But the final gold
medal ― for authoritarian image management ― can already be safely
awarded to China’s Communist Party leadership.

Beijing got what it wanted out of this globally televised spectacular.
It reaped a huge prestige bonanza that it will surely use to promote its
international influence and, we fear, further tighten its grip at home.

It pocketed these gains without offering any concessions in return. When
it increased repression ― rather than loosening up ― a supine
International Olympic Committee barely offered a protest. Most world
leaders, including President Bush, were nearly as complicit.

In Beijing for the opening ceremony, Mr. Bush seemed eager to play the
role of the apolitical sports fan, instead of publicly pressing China’s
leaders on the ongoing Olympics crackdown. That nicely fit into the
Chinese script of talking up sports while shutting down politics.

To win the right to host these Games, China promised to honor the
Olympic ideals of nonviolence, openness to the world and individual
expression. Those promises were systematically broken, starting with
this spring’s brutal repression in Tibet and continuing on to the ugly
farce of inviting its citizens to apply for legal protest permits and
then arresting them if they actually tried to do so.

Along the way, government critics were pre-emptively rounded up and
jailed, domestic news outlets tightly controlled, foreign journalists
denied full access to the Internet and thousands of Beijing’s least
telegenic residents were evicted from their homes and out of camera
range. On Friday, the Chinese police confirmed that six Americans
protesting China’s rule in Tibet had been sentenced to 10 days of detention.

Surely one of the signature events of these Games was the sentencing of
two women in their late 70s to “re-education through labor.” Their
crime? Applying for permission to protest the inadequate compensation
they felt they had received when the government seized their homes years
ago for urban redevelopment.

A year ago, the I.O.C. predicted that these Games would be “a force for
good” and a spur to human-rights progress. Instead, as Human Rights
Watch has reported, they became a catalyst for intensified human-rights
abuse.

Mr. Bush has taken some note of China’s appalling human-rights record
this summer ― privately meeting with Chinese dissidents in Washington
just before his visit to the Games and gently nudging his hosts on
religious freedom while in Beijing. With these repression-scarred
Olympics now drawing to a close, Mr. Bush and other world leaders must
tell Beijing that its failure to live up to its Olympic commitments will
neither be ignored nor forgotten.

The medal count and DVD sales cannot be the last word on the Beijing Games.