Written by Jerome A. Cohen, an NYU law professor and adjunct senior fellow for Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, from South China Morning Post:
We will soon meet a new generation of Chinese heroes – the Olympic competitors whose gold medals and performance records will become the pride of their motherland. Yet, as the media trumpets their triumphs, the world should also recognise a group of more significant Chinese heroes – the human rights activists whose persecution, prosecution and punishment have become the shame of the motherland.
Like Olympians, many activists reside in state-supported living quarters. But theirs are police detention cells and labour camps that are very different from the comforts afforded China’s finest athletes. No famous company pays them to sponsor its brand, and their families receive no “iron rice bowl” from the state. Instead, they are treated as criminals by association. Nor are they glamorised in the Chinese press, which is prohibited from reporting their mistreatment.
Only the foreign media is free to focus on the repression of Chinese “rights defenders”. Despite the valiant efforts of internet dissidents, few of their cases break through China’s secrecy barriers, and those that do attract foreign interest are soon forgotten. That is certainly the sad fate of even Chen Guangcheng, the blind “barefoot lawyer” who, before his arrest in March 2006, had become the best-known symbol of increasingly widespread efforts by rural Chinese to challenge arbitrary official actions in local courts.
