China Digital Times

SECTION: Beijing Olympics 2008

• China Listed U.S. Athletes As Possible Troublemakers

  

  From USA Today:

  China’s government was so concerned about the possibility of athlete demonstrations in the Beijing Olympics that it created a list of nine U.S. athletes and one assistant coach it thought might cause trouble at the Games, according to an internal U.S. Olympic Committee e-mail obtained by USA TODAY.

  The names included softball players Jennie Finch and Jessica Mendoza and soccer player Abby Wambach, who broke her leg and missed the Olympic Games. It also included two Paralympians, one athlete who wasn’t a member of the 2008 softball team and a top female collegiate golfer. Golf is not an Olympic sport.

  “We viewed these concerns as being entirely unjustified and unwarranted,” USOC spokesman Darryl Seibel said in an e-mail Wednesday. “As such, we rejected the request to address this with our athletes or transmit the letter to them. We saw absolutely no need to burden the athletes with this.”

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  • October 30, 2008 7:26 PM

• China Dissidents Eye Uncertain Post-Olympics Landscape

  

  From AFP:

  Despite hopes the Olympics would improve human rights, China’s crackdown on dissidents before and during the Games has likely set the stage for a lasting period of even tighter controls, government critics say.

  Beijing-based AIDS campaigner Wan Yanhai is back at work following a government-imposed shutdown of his activities during the recent Summer Olympics, but he’s treading carefully.

  He said police have tailed him recently and the government last month applied new pressure with a surprise tax probe of his Aizhixing Institute, which advocates for the rights of AIDS victims, a touchy subject in China.

  “With the Olympics over, it looks like they have even more time to give us trouble,” Wan told AFP.

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  • October 21, 2008 5:20 AM

• China Issues Wanted List For Olympics Terror Plotters

  

  From Reuters:

  China released on Tuesday a wanted list of eight “terrorists” it said had plotted to attack the Beijing Olympic Games and were bent on separating the restive western region of Xinjiang.

  It said the eight had also carried out attacks but did not say where.
  Resource-rich Xinjiang, strategically located on the borders of Central Asia, has been rocked by sometimes violent unrest this year, including the killing of 16 armed police just before the August Olympics, blamed by China on Muslim militants seeking an independent state they call “East Turkestan”.

  China called for international cooperation in tracking down the eight suspects, all Chinese citizens.

  » Read more
  • October 20, 2008 8:33 PM

• Beijing Olympics Building Chief May Be Executed for Corruption

  

  In another controversy surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Liu Zhihua, the man who oversaw Olympic building construction and was charged with corruption, now faces a suspended death sentence for two years. His offenses include taking bribes, living an opulent lifestyle, and engaging in promiscuous activities.

  If the defendant demonstrates good behavior after two years, his sentence may be changed to life imprisonment.  The New York Times reports:

  …in June 2006, [Liu Zhihua] was stripped of his post after being linked to a bribery scandal. He was expelled from the governing Communist Party six months later.

  Mr. Liu’s case was a major embarrassment to the party. Corruption is endemic, but party leaders had pledged that the $43 billion preparations for the Games would be the “cleanest in history.”

  

  Construction of the Bird's Nest three months after the head of Olympic Construction was dismissed. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

  …On Sunday, Xinhua said Mr. Liu had taken roughly $1 million in bribes during his tenure as vice mayor and as overseer of construction for a scientific research park in the city’s university district from 1999 to 2006.

  A 2006 article by Reuters details how Hu Jintao was personally involved in dismissing Liu from his position. Analysts believe this move was motivated by Hu’s own political agenda rather than a desire to weed out corruption.

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  • October 20, 2008 7:47 PM

• China Issues New Rules Giving Foreign Journalists More Freedom (Updated)

  

  From Xinhua:

  China issued new rules on reporting activities by foreign correspondents on its territory late Friday, allowing them to interview without application to foreign affairs departments.

  “The new rules follow the major principles and spirits of the media regulations introduced for the Beijing Olympics,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said at a late night press conference.

  The conference began 15 minutes before the expiry of the temporary Olympic rules, which were introduced on January 1, 2007 and removed media restrictions on foreign reporters during the Beijing Games.

  From AP:

  China took a further step toward opening itself to the world, announcing Friday that an easing of restrictions on foreign journalists enacted for the Olympics would become permanent.

  Premier Wen Jiabao signed the decree, which took immediate effect, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao at a late-night news conference.

  Under the new regulations, which had been anticipated by journalists, foreign reporters would not be required to get government permission to travel within the country or to interview Chinese citizens.

  Update: Press freedom groups have called on China to extend the new rules to domestic journalists as well. From AFP:

  Rights groups and media experts Saturday gave a cautious welcome to China’s decision to allow foreign reporters greater freedom and urged Beijing to extend the same rights to domestic journalists.

  [...] David Bandurski, a researcher for the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong, said the issue of press freedom in China was determined by domestic media policy rather than rules governing foreign reporters’ work.

  “This is not going to have any appreciable impact on domestic journalists,” he said.

  Photo: People.com.cn

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  • October 17, 2008 5:18 PM

• Jiang Haiyan: Did the Olympics Bring About the Cancellation of Aid Awarded to China?

  

  In this piece from Caijing Magazine, Jiang Haiyan channels the voice of Vice-Secretary of China Development Research Foundation, Tang Min, to explain what the discontinuation of foreign aid means to China.

  Min says it’s unsurprising that countries such as England and Germany are talking about discontinuing aid to China. Although the discontinuation comes up following the Beijing Olympics and the successful Shenzhou-7 space mission, it is not a reaction to these events themselves, but a logical ramification of China’s sustained economic growth. Min also points out that the amount of foreign aid China receives is miniscule in comparison to the government’s total expenditure.

  Min posits that China has reached a new stage in its development, obviating the need for financial aid. Instead, China needs less tangible aid in the form of cooperation, experience, and good ideas from the international community. This article concludes with Min’s summary, “In total, the positive aspects are greater than the negatives.”

  Min is right; the prestige and pride China gains from financial independence clearly outweigh the strings-attached pittances it receives in aid.

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  • October 17, 2008 5:14 PM

• Gym Officials: China’s 2008 Gold Medalists of Age

  

  The Olympics gymnasts who were accused of falsifying their ages in order to compete have been officially cleared, though questions remain about bronze medalists from the 2000 Games. AP reports:

  International gymnastics officials on Wednesday closed their 5 1/2-week investigation into the ages of the Chinese gymnasts at the Beijing Olympics, saying the documentation provided confirms they were old enough to compete. But two members of the 2000 squad — Dong Fangxiao and Yang Yun — remain under scrutiny.

  “The FIG does not consider the explanations and evidence provided to date in regards to these athletes as satisfactory,” the International Gymnastics Federation said in a statement.

  Dong got a Beijing Olympics credential with documents that suggest she was only 14 in 2000, said Andre Gueisbuhler, secretary general of the FIG. Her blog also indicates she was underage in Sydney.

  » Read more
  • October 1, 2008 10:24 AM

• Report: Olympic Activist Detained By China Police

  

  From AP:

  A Chinese activist who applied to protest in special zones set up for demonstrations during the Beijing Olympics has become the latest applicant to be detained by police, a rights group said Friday.

  Ji Sizun disappeared Aug. 11, three days into the Olympic Games, and hasn’t been seen since, the overseas Chinese Human Rights Defenders group said. On Thursday, police from Fuzhou City in southeastern Fujian province told a friend of Ji’s that he had been detained, the group said.

  It was not clear when he was taken into police custody.

  A man surnamed Teng at the legal department of the Fuzhou City public security bureau said he did not know of Ji’s case. He said his bureau only deals with people once there is a case against them, and Ji might have been detained by lower-level agency.

  Read also Olympics “Protest Zones” Applicant Sent to Re-education through Labor from Chinese Human Rights Defenders:

  On September 23, Liu Xueli (刘学立), a petitioner and activist against forcible land appropriation from Henan Province, was sent to a local Re-education through Labor (RTL) camp. Liu had been under residential surveillance (house arrest) after he submitted an application to protest at the “Protest Zones” in Beijing during the Olympics.

  At 2:45 p.m. yesterday, Liu was forcibly dragged into a car by policemen from Song County Public Security Bureau (PSB). Police told Liu that they were going to have a “chat” at the PSB. Hours later, Liu was told that he was to be sent to RTL. However, Liu was not presented with a formal written RTL order and was not informed of the length of, or the reasons for, the punishment.

  CHRD calls for Liu’s immediate and unconditional release. CHRD believes that Liu has been detained solely for peaceful expression of opinion and petitioning. The Chinese government has violated Liu’s right to freedom of expression, a right guaranteed in Articles 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which China has signed as well as Article 35 of the Chinese Constitution. The Chinese government has also violated Article 41 of the Constitution, which guarantees citizens’ right to complain about government misconduct.

  » Read more
  • September 26, 2008 6:06 AM

• Fu Jianfeng: “Let Me Skin Sanlu Alive”

  

  Fu Jianfeng is an editor at Southern Weekend. He wrote the following post on his blog, three days after the Sanlu Tainted Milk story was published in Chinese media. Translated by the EastSouthWestNorth blog:

  Actually, our reporter He Feng had received the information at the end of July that more than 20 babies were hospitalized for kidney stones in Tongji Hospital, Wuhan city, Hubei province as a result of consuming the tainted Sanlu milk powder. But for reasons that everybody knows, we were not able to investigate the case at that time because harmony was needed everywhere. As a news editor, I was deeply concerned because I sensed that this was going to be a huge public health catastrophe. But I could not send any reporters out to investigate. Therefore, I harbored a deep sense of guilt and defeat at the time. I tried my test to tell all the friends and acquaintances not to use the Sanlu milk powder.

  At the time, our reporter He Feng was already checking out the situations at a number of hospitals in Hubei, Hunan and Jiagxi. The doctors were highly suspicious that there was a problem with Sanlu. They reminded every family that came to the hospital to get their babies treated not to use Sanlu.

  At the time, I checked Baidu and all I could find were doubts being raised by some parents about this brand.

  We could only wait, wait, wait.

  » Read more
  • September 21, 2008 9:00 PM

• Contaminated by Toxic Trade

  

  From New Zealand Herald:

  Call it brand dilution, China-style. Any company entering a joint venture as a minority partner is aware its brand could be damaged by events beyond its control.

  Farmer shareholders would expect New Zealand’s biggest multinational, Fonterra, to be acutely aware of the risks, with its global growth strategy heavily aligned to soaring demand for dairy products in Asia, South America, Africa and the Middle East.

  These emerging markets promise infinite rewards; but you enter at your peril. They tend to lack infrastructure needed to ensure robust quality assurance; supply chains are often fragmented and subject to change; and central governments may exert little influence on behaviour in rural areas.

  Such markets may be fledgling and remote, but scandals related to product safety or quality quickly reverberate around the world and damage the brand - no matter how diluted.

  Dr Anne-Marie Brady, a specialist in Chinese politics at the University of Canterbury, writes in the Sunday Star Times:

  While Chinese mothers were feeding poisoned milk to their babies , the state was suppressing any controversies that might tarnish the Olympics.

  In the last two weeks Chinese consumers have been in uproar over revelations that local officials, the central authorities, and a major Chinese dairy producer, San Lu - 43% owned by New Zealand dairy giant Fonterra - colluded to suppress information on a massive scandal involving tainted infant milk formula. The formula was adulterated with melamine, a substance used in the production of plastics and fertiliser, which has now been linked to the death of four babies.

  Unfortunately for those ordinary Chinese consumers, strict propaganda controls on negative news relating to food safety and other politically sensitive issues have been in place in the two years leading up to last month’s Olympics, meaning the story stayed suppressed.

  But should Fonterra _ New Zealand’s biggest company and the largest exporter of dairy products in the world _ have got to grips with the crisis sooner?

  … Promoting a new image internationally was one of China’s key strategic goals in hosting the Olympics. This new image aimed to allay international fears about China’s increasing political, economic and military power, at the same time as projecting awareness of China’s renewed strength and prosperity.

  The government’s efforts to promote such an image have been closely co-ordinated with Chinese firms who hoped to use the Olympics to increase international awareness and acceptance of their products. San Lu supplied milk powder to the Olympic athletes and its managers would have been well aware of the Olympic-related propaganda bans on reporting on food safety issues.

  … Before the crisis San Lu products were rated highly - they are the official supplier of milk powder to Chinese astronauts - and its advertising was famous for boasting that its formula underwent “1100 tests, safeguards the health care of babies and is trusted by mothers everywhere”. Now the words “1100 tests” have become an ironic joke on the Chinese language internet. The Vice-Governor of Hebei Province has admitted that melamine was being put into San Lu milk as early as April 2005. Many netisens are now complaining bitterly about how the company which boasted of having so many checks could have ignored the obvious quality problems in the milk it was supplied.

  Hosting the Olympics was supposed to improve China’s image. The two weeks of the August 2008 Olympics were indeed a sporting and PR triumph for Beijing. But what we now know about actions taken behind the scenes in the preparation for the Olympics take much of the shine off that triumph.

  » Read more
  • September 21, 2008 8:40 PM

• Beijing Smog Returns After Olympics

  

  The Daily Telegraph reports that the lifting of smog restrictions in Beijing came as a cloud of grey smog descended.

  “…many drivers were already breaching the regulations on Saturday in advance of the midnight end to the rules, under which cars were banned from the city streets on alternate days depending on whether their license plates ended with an odd or even number.

  Yesterday hundreds of heavily polluting factories that had to cut or stop production for the two months were also allowed to resume normal work. Many pledged to increase output to make up for losses caused by the shutdown.”

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  • September 21, 2008 1:28 PM

• The Home Team

  

  In the New Yorker, Peter Hessler reports on the Olympics as viewed from the village of Sancha, 90 minutes outside Beijing, where he has rented a house for several years:

  For China, 2008 had been the most traumatic year since 1989, when the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred. In March, there had been riots in Tibet, followed by a brutal crackdown by the authorities. Overseas, human-rights demonstrators disrupted the Olympic-torch relay, leading to an angry nationalist backlash in China. In May, a powerful earthquake in Sichuan province killed more than sixty thousand people. Recently, there had been a fatal attack on Chinese military police in Xinjiang, a region in the far west where much of the native Muslim population resents China’s rule. All these events had contributed to the stress of the Olympic year, but I didn’t understand the concern about the Great Wall. “They’re worried about foreigners, people who might want Tibet independence,” Wei Ziqi told me. “They don’t want them to go up to the Great Wall with a sign or something.”

  It was fear of a photo op—that somebody would unfurl a political banner and take a picture atop China’s most distinctive structure. The government also worried that a foreigner might hike in a remote area and get injured, creating bad press. For this, the authorities had mobilized more than five thousand people in the region, but labor is plentiful in rural China. And these volunteers were getting paid—another difference from the city, where patriotic students were willing to donate their time to the Motherland’s Olympic effort. Peasants were too practical for that; in addition to the free shirt, each rural volunteer received five hundred yuan a month, about seventy-three dollars. In Sancha, where the average resident earned about a thousand dollars per year, it was good money.

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  • September 19, 2008 8:28 PM

• Olympics Slows Chinese Industry

  

  From the BBC:

  The rate of growth of China’s industrial output slowed to a six-month low in August, hit by the temporary closure of factories for the Olympics.

  With hundreds of facilities shut to help improve air quality for the games, output growth slowed to 12.8% last month compared with August 2007.

  » Read more
  • September 19, 2008 11:48 AM

• What We Learned

  

  Dr. Fei-Ling Wang published the following essay at the International Herald Tribune:

  The spectacular and successful 2008 Beijing Olympic Games have given the world a lot to think about. It may be still early to fully assess the impact of the event on China and its future, nonetheless, three messages have emerged.

  First, it is hard to overlook the capacity and power of the Chinese state.

  Under an autocratic, increasingly corporatist and aristocratic party, the People’s Republic has shown how much it can spend for a politically important cause, even if it is, after all, just a sporting event that has been thoroughly commercialized in other places all over the world.

  The unparalleled $43 billion price tag is just the known part of the expenses. By comparison, the last Olympic Games held in the U.S., in 1996 in Atlanta, cost only $2 billion. To ensure air quality and crowd control, a good chunk of the Chinese economy and society was shut down for two months.

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  • September 18, 2008 11:10 AM

• Greenpeace Report on Post-Olympics China

  

  Greenpeace China produced the China after the Olympics: Lessons from Beijing report to glean lessons from China’s environmental measures before and during the Beijing Olympics. From the conclusion section:

  Beijing’s tremendous efforts and investment in environmental initiatives for the 2008 Games have allowed many of the city’s bid commitments to be met. What is particularly unique about the 2008 Games is that they will leave an important environmental legacy for the city of Beijing in areas such as transportation infrastructure, energy efficiency, and in the development of renewable energy, water, and waste treatment capacities.

  However, in other areas, such as forestry and water minimization, Beijing has missed a key opportunity to use the Games to initiate world’s best practice and policies for all venues. In 2008 and beyond, it is important to look at how these successes can be adopted by other cities throughout China as well as how missed opportunities of the Games can inform future environmental policies.

  Perhaps the greatest problem in Beijing’s attempt at hosting aGreen Games is the limited engagement and minimal third party assessments of its environmental efforts. A lack of available independently verified data and limited ability for third parties such as NGOs to access information undermine the ability to evaluate Beijing’s environmental performance. More openness, transparency and efforts to engage civil society in decision making processes and environmental action could help to strengthen the development of green initiatives in the future.

  In his reflection over the question “Are ‘carbon-neutral’ Olympics possible?,” Li Taige, an editor of chinadialogue.net, comments that setting China’s environmental legacy and trajectory is more meaningful and valuable in the long run than achieving “carbon neutrality” for the event.

  » Read more
  • September 17, 2008 8:04 PM