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Monday 23 November 2009

Big Brother versus YouTube: let the Beijing Games commence

Mark Leonard, Britain’s pre-eminent analyst of modern China, says the Olympic genie is out of the bottle. The prospect of global scrutiny has actually increased repression as the authorities try to stamp out dissent. But digital technology is impossible to police

But to the surprise of outside observers, criticism from Western NGOs seems to have bolstered rather than undermined the regime’s popularity at home. Although discontent is simmering below the surface — there were 87,000 protests last year alone — Chinese citizens and intellectuals are more focused on in-equality and corruption than the concerns of the Western campaigners, which they interpret as support for ‘separatism’, ‘cults’, or a desire to keep China down. Moreover, China’s government has successfully mobilised the swelling patriotism of its citizens in campaigns against Western interference, such as the boycott of the French supermarket chain Carrefour.

Many in the West had hoped that giving the Olympics to China would — in the words of the Beijing Olympic Bid Committee’s Liu Jingmin — ‘help the development of human rights’. Some predicted that repressive laws would be lifted, political prisoners freed and the media given new freedoms. But human rights activists tell a different story about crackdowns on protesters in Tibet, the imprisonment of activists such as the land rights campaigner Yang Chunlin, housing rights campaigners Ye Guozhu and Wang Ling, and the celebrated anti-Aids activist and blogger Hu Jia. They also claim that the run-up to the Games has seen a growing phalanx of people held under house arrest because of vague crimes such as ‘separatism’ or ‘subversion’. As Amnesty International says: ‘It was hoped that the Games would act as a catalyst for reform but much of the current wave of repression against activists and journalists is occurring not in spite of, but actually because of the Olympics.’

More articles from: Mark Leonard | this section

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