“The Olympics are ruined. Though not due to start till August, they are already comprehensively and irreparably ruined. And not just in 2008. Because when the games go ahead in Beijing, the whole Olympic movement will be brought into disrepute forever.”
These robust words were written in The Independent by Eamonn Sweeneyy, an Irish journalist and author. His is just one of the many voices speaking out against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the biggest autocracy in the world which is set to host the Olympic games in August.
Even before the Olympics Games, Canberrans will be able to go and see the official Olympic Torch Relay as it travels through their city. But the torch might not be all they see. Relay events in Athens spiralled out of control when a Tibet protester managed to break through the barricade and interrupt the lighting ceremony, and later, another lay across the path of the Torch, covered in fake blood. In China, state-media cut the signal straight away.
The rest of its journey through Athens met with more difficulty from shouting protesters, and soon after, organisers began hastily scaling back events in Paris and San Francisco. The rest of the Torch’s “journey of harmony” around the world may be similarly beset. Chinese authorities have already requested the army escort the Torch through Canberra, which the AFP rejected, because Australia is a democracy. Many see Beijing’s use of the Olympics, and Torch relay, as a mere propaganda stunt, a means of whitewashing its human rights record. Parallels with the 1936 Berlin Games hosted by Hitler readily spring to mind.
Every major media outlet around the world has been carrying the grim news about the latest crisis in Tibet, where monks and others are being shot in the streets for protesting against the Communist Party’s decades long, systematic destruction of their culture. Journalists have been shipped out and the army shipped in. Houses are have been raided, innocents jailed and lives ruined.
But reading what the CCP says is enough to see how far out of touch with reality they are. The Christian Science Monitor recently reported the Tibet Communist Party leader, Zhang Qingli, saying the Dalai Lama was “a wolf wrapped in monk’s robes, a devil with a human face and a beast’s heart.” He added: “We are in the midst of a fierce struggle involving blood and fire, a life-and-death struggle with the Dalai clique.” Really? But the Dalai Lama is an icon of peace in the West, and is widely held in high regard. He has repeatedly made clear that the Tibetans only desire meaningful autonomy, not even independence from China. Years of violence on the side of the Communists have met with peaceful response. Indeed, the Dalai Lama is not the first target of propaganda—the same slander has been meted out to the Falun Gong spiritual practice for nearly a decade, and Uighur Muslims have also been subjected to it.
It does not stop there. The brutality being seen now in Tibet is a window into what has been going on in China for decades, but which the West has largely ignored. On the occasion of the world’s most violent regime chaperoning the revered Olympic Torch to Canberra and around the world, let us look at what is going on under the surface and reflect on our response. Inside Sport magazine published a six-page spread of 20 reasons why people should boycott the Games, and the reasons why they will not. Here now are just five and an alternative suggestion to boycotting.
Censorship
The CCP keeps a stranglehold on information circulation in China. It controls, to varying degrees, all media outlets. Journalists and editors who fail to toe the Party line in reporting faces repercussions. The Party has also set up a “Great Firewall of China”, as a way of blocking access to websites it does not want the public to see. It also jails journalists —foreign journalists may be threatened, arrested and released, while domestic journalists may languish in dungeons for years.
Darfur
Darfur is a small region in the west of Sudan. The CCP has economic interests wrapped up in the north African country, mostly involving oil. It supplies the Sudanese regime with weapons and the Sudanese supply the Chinese with oil. There is an ongoing genocide in Darfur, where militia raid the country on horseback, pillaging and burning villages, raping women and hacking people to death with machetes. The death toll is in the hundreds of thousands, and goes up every day. Darfur has made headlines recently because Steven Spielberg quit as artistic advisor to the Games opening ceremony, in protest of China’s military and economic support of the Sudanese regime.
Falun Gong
The traditional spiritual practice based on truthfulness, compassion and forbearance, hugely popular in China before 1999, until its popularity became too great and the regime turned on it. Since then, Chinese society has been turned upside down in a Cultural Revolution style campaign to vilify, bankrupt, and inflict extreme violence against practitioners. Books were burnt in the streets, propaganda filled the airwaves, and now this group makes up two thirds of all reported torture cases and over half the labour camp population. They are forced into psychiatric institutions, violently abused, raped, tortured to death, or simply executed. In 2006, shocking news surfaced that they are also victims of systematic, live organ harvesting.
Tibet
After gaining control of China, the CCP lost little time before invading Tibet. Since 1950, according to Stephen Gregory of The Epoch Times, “The Tibetans have been conquered and colonized, have had their culture relentlessly attacked, their language suppressed, and their bodies tortured, while having suffered an estimated 1.2 million dead under a brutal five-decade-long occupation by the CCP.” With the recently completed Qinghai-Tibet railway, Han Chinese are also being imported, who now far outnumber native Tibetans. And something doesn’t smell right about the recent “violent” protests. In 1989, it is known that 300 Party goons dressed up as monks, to sow confusion and make chaos. There is now also photographic evidence of the CCP having used their own spies disguised as Tibetans to stage violent protests in an attempt to depict Tibetans in a negative light, as a way of justifying the violent crackdown. This does not come as a surprise to many China-watchers.
Rights defenders and activists
A humble group of people who may stand up for any of the above causes, or even such things as AIDS, environmental degradation, or corruption. They are invariably silenced, often jailed, and sometimes “disappear”. If they do not respond to personal threats, their families are targeted. Their “subversive” actions include collecting petitions, writing open letters, getting around the information blockade, or going too far with legal proceedings against the local Party chief. In a recent case the organizer of a campaign entitled “We want human rights, not Olympics” campaign, was thrown in jail, despite the petition gaining 10,000 votes.
Truth be told, these are only some of the more prominent and widely known ills of the current regime in China. The Chinese Communist Party’s entire history is one of violence, corruption, deceit and bloodshed.
So be aware and clear about what is happening. Find out in more depth what is going on, and tell many others. Submit an article to The WORD or another independent publication. Donate to groups who print t-shirts and flyers on these issues. Sign petitions, and more.
The Olympic Torch is coming through Canberra very soon, and people are free to participate in this exciting event. It’s a great opportunity to showcase our city to the world. The object of this editorial is not to encourage a boycott of either the games or the torch relay; that’s up to the heart of every individual. But, at least be aware of the great injustices that are going on behind the scenes.
