Big Brother versus YouTube: let the Beijing Games commence

19 July 2008

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

The stakes for the Beijing authorities could not be higher. The Olympic genie will never be put back into the bottle. Beijing will find that its actions on the world stage continue to be held up to minute scrutiny long after the Games are over. They will need to get used to prime-time attention. Moreover, with George Bush on the way out and the promise of an American Renaissance under President Obama, global public opinion and journalists are on the look-out for a new bogeyman to blame for the world’s ills. In the last few months the media has grown accustomed to criticising China for its policies on Burma, Sudan, Tibet, Zimbabwe and climate change. If the authorities in Beijing are not careful they could find that these charges stick, and that China unwittingly fulfils a new global role; not as a modern harmonious society but as an all-purpose rogue state.

Mark Leonard is executive director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and author of What Does China Think? (Fourth Estate, £8.99).

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Water

July 17th, 2008 10:21am Report this comment

An interesting article ahh, but I must really get away from this blasted computer.

T.O. Varich

July 17th, 2008 2:03pm Report this comment

"an American Renaissance under President Obama" - an example of the famous English irony, no?

Chris

July 17th, 2008 7:27pm Report this comment

Just another reminder of how rancid the whole olympic process is. Nobody with any moral fibre could take part in this - and all so a few drug fuelled plonkers can run round in circles.

Nicholas Storey

July 17th, 2008 11:34pm Report this comment

They bid for the games. They paid the piper - and now they and all the world - will hear his tune.

Kirk, Homewood ,IL USA

July 19th, 2008 12:11am Report this comment

"an American Renaissance under President Obama"- believe me, in this case, the clothes have no emperor.

signed,
a resident of barackistan (formerly, Illinois)

LuckyBarker

July 22nd, 2008 11:09am Report this comment

"Big Brother"... :)
This is about USA... ;)
Tapping phones, perlustration, daily propaganda, institutionalized torture, murder of Afghan and Iraqi civilians and other abomination...

Orwell wrote about the USA and described such propagation as in this clause ;)