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Saturday 11 October 2008

City Life

Clear blue skies and shiny shopping malls, but Mao’s corpulent corpse still presides

Pity Beijing’s residents, though, who will suffer after the Games when factory owners and construction tycoons will urge their workforce to recoup lost time. No doubt those industries will give short shrift to the idea proposed by China’s president Hu Jintao that they should pursue a more moderate rate of economic growth that would do less harm to the environment and the population. Hu’s laudable idea has been around for a while but so far few are listening. China reported giddy economic growth of 10.6 per cent in the first quarter of 2008. The Olympics will showcase the country’s rise as an economic powerhouse but they will also provoke hard questions about the lack of basic freedoms taken for granted elsewhere. There will be a focus, for example, on why every visitor to China must register with a police station and why China’s censors block millions of internet pages. Then there’s the hot-button topic of Tibet. Free Tibet protesters, who have targeted the Olympic torch relay — and in several places including London, reduced it to farce — would argue that China’s human rights record is getting worse rather than better.

According to Hu, pesky foreigners who raise such issues in public are hurting China’s feelings. China’s leaders want us all to be dazzled by the Beijing Olympics, but convincing the world that their mega-populous nation has stepped wholly out of the shadow of Mao is proving a tougher sell than they thought. They may succeed in hiding the pollution and any sign of political dissidence for the duration of the Games, but that pasty old corpse will still preside.

More articles from: Anne Hyland | this section

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