NY Times Acknowledges Freedom is Squelched in China

Now you might think a blog called DisabilityNation would be biased toward two old ladies who are blind and need a cane. So ok, for a less, er, subjective report, the New York Times makes this story sound almost cute and normal. Note the lack of the words "freedom, liberty, dissent." Note the presence of the words "demonstrate, protest, disturbing public order". Maybe the NY Times doesn't see things so differently?
Too Old and Frail to Re-educate? Not in China
By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: August 20, 2008
BEIJING — In the annals of people who have struggled against Communist Party rule, Wu Dianyuan and Wang Xiuying are unlikely to merit even a footnote.
The two women, both in their late 70s, have never spoken out against China’s authoritarian government. Both walk with the help of a cane, and Ms. Wang is blind in one eye. Their grievance, receiving insufficient compensation when their homes were seized for redevelopment, [are you listening, Lower East Side?] is perhaps the most common complaint among Chinese displaced during the country’s long streak of fast economic growth.
But the Beijing police still sentenced the two women to an extrajudicial term of “re-education through labor” this week for applying [my bold] to hold a legal protest in a designated area in Beijing, where officials promised that Chinese could hold demonstrations during the Olympic Games.
They became the most recent examples of people punished for submitting applications to protest. A few would-be demonstrators have simply disappeared, [my bold] [yikes!] at least for the duration of the Games, squelching already diminished hopes that the influx of foreigners and the prestige of holding the Games would push China’s leaders to relax their tight grip on political expression.
“Can you imagine two old ladies in their 70s being re-educated through labor?” asked Li Xuehui, Ms. Wu’s son, who said the police told the two women that their sentence might remain in suspension if they stayed at home and stopped asking for permission to protest.
“I feel very sad and angry because we’re only asking for the basic right of living and it’s been six years, but nobody will do anything to help,” Mr. Li said.
[...] When the International Olympic Committee awarded the Games to Beijing in 2001, ignoring critics who said China should not be rewarded for repression, its president, Jacques Rogge, offered assurances that the Games would invariably spur China toward greater openness.
But prospects dimmed even before the opening ceremony, when overseas journalists arrived to discover that China’s promise to provide uncensored Internet access [my bold] was riddled with caveats. The ensuing uproar did persuade the government to unblock some politically sensitive Web sites, but many others, including those that discuss Tibet and the banned spiritual group Falun Gong, remain inaccessible at the Olympic press center.
[...] “In order to ensure smooth traffic flow, a nice environment and good social order, we will invite these participants to hold their demonstrations in designated places,” Liu Shaowu, the security director for Beijing’s Olympic organizing committee, said at a news conference. He described the creation of three so-called protest zones and suggested that a simple application process would provide Chinese citizens an avenue for free expression, a right that has long been enshrined in China’s Constitution but in reality is rarely granted.
But with four days left before the closing ceremony, the authorities acknowledge that they have yet to allow a single protest. They claim that most of the people who filed applications had their grievances addressed, obviating the need for a public expression of discontent.
Chinese activists say they are not surprised that the promise proved illusory. Li Fangping, a lawyer who has been arrested and beaten for his dogged representation of rights advocates, said there was no way the government would allow protesters to expose some of China’s most vexing problems, among them systemic corruption, environmental degradation and the forced relocation of hundreds of thousands of residents for projects related to the Olympics.
“For Chinese petitioners, if their protest applications were approved, it would lead to a chain reaction of others seeking to voice their problems as well,” Mr. Li said.
During the past two decades, China has embraced a market economy [my bold] and shed some of the more onerous restrictions that dictated where people could live, whom they could marry and whether they could leave the country. But with political dissent and religious freedom, the government has been unrelenting.
[...] In recent months, the pressure has only intensified: scores of rights lawyers and political dissenters have been detained, and even the armies of migrant workers who built the Olympic stadiums have been encouraged to leave town, lest their disheveled appearances detract from the image of a clean, modern nation. [my bold] [oh, please, I can’t S T A N D it!]
“When you have guests coming over for dinner, you clean up the house and tell the children not to argue,” Mr. Bell said.
While the demands of Ms. Wu, 79, and Ms. Wang, 77, the protest applicants, might be seen as harmless, they threatened to expose the systemic problems that bedevil the lives of millions of Chinese. Like many disenchanted citizens, the two women, former neighbors, were seeking to draw attention to a government-backed real estate deal that promised to give them apartments in the new development that replaced their homes not far from Tiananmen Square. Six years later, [9/11 First Responder Alert!] they are living in ramshackle apartments on the outskirts of the city, and their demands for compensation have gone unanswered.
On Monday, when they returned to the police station to follow up on their protest applications, the women were told they had been sentenced to one year at a labor camp for “disturbing public order.” For the moment, the women have been allowed to return to their homes, but they have been warned that they could be sent to a detention center at any moment, relatives said.
[...] At a news conference on Wednesday, Wang Wei, the vice president of Beijing’s Olympic organizing committee, was asked about the lack of protests. He said it showed the system was working. “I’m glad to hear that over 70 protest issues have been solved through consultation, dialogue,” he said. “This is a part of Chinese culture.”
But human rights advocates say that instead of pointing the way toward a more open society, the Olympics have put China’s political controls on display.
“Given this moment when the international spotlight is shining on China, when so much of the international media are in Beijing, it’s unfathomable why the authorities are intensifying social control,” said Sharon Hom, the executive director of Human Rights in China. “The truth is they’re sending a clear and disturbing message, one they’re not even trying to hide, which is we’re not even interested in hearing dissenting voices.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/sports/olympics/21protest.html?ex=1219896000&en=bbbd73a1742fcf00&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Bao Tong: A Working Class Hero

While George W. Bush and his crew eat, drink and make merry on the backs of our labor and the sweat of dedicated atheletics, it's time to recognize a Chinese hero. Bao Tong's legacy will grow stronger as we relay his story. Learn more from an April interview on RFA:

Ex-Official Slams Olympics
2008-08-06
A former top Communist Party official has slammed Beijing's hosting of the Olympic Games as being built on the back of corruption and human rights abuses. "In China, we produce miscarriages of justice and trumped-up charges like a high-intensity industrial zone," writes Bao Tong, who is under house arrest at his Beijing home.
Bao Tong at his Beijing home, April 2008.
Bao Tong, former top Communist Party aide to the ousted late Chinese premier, Zhao Ziyang, has been under house arrest at his Beijing home for nearly two decades after his boss's fall from power during the 1989 pro-democracy movement. Following are edited extracts from a three-part series of his essays about the Olympic Games in Beijing, broadcast on RFA's Mandarin service beginning Aug. 4:
It is very naive to take the number of gold medals won as an indicator of the rise of China. That sort of patriotism...has nothing to do with the Olympic spirit...There are subtle differences between China and other countries when it comes to the training and selection of athletes. Other countries use athletics as a way of training the body. China uses athletics to snatch prizes.
China has sponsored a top-down professionalized system, a totally segregated approach to athletic training. Non-Chinese may not understand the term "away from production." It has its roots in the Chinese Communist Party's experience of the 1927-37 Chinese civil war, when peasants who relied on the land for their existence took up arms as their revolutionary duty to fight for a share of it. In the process, they were torn away from their families, from the rest of society, and from normal economic activities. They were said to be taken "away from production" to fulfill this task.

China's athletes are chosen as young children...and taken away from their families, from their schools, and totally cut off from normal social activities. The door is closed, and they give up their entire youth and part of their childhoods for the sole aim of entering and winning competitions, an aim for which they are totally re-molded by the system.
Elitist training
China has the largest population of any country in the world, and therefore an unending supply of human resources with which to win glory and acclaim for country and Party. But it is a totally different thing from encouraging ordinary Chinese people to get fitter and healthier.A gold medal is just a gold medal. It is not of the same order as the well-being of the people, or the fate of the nation. The former Soviet Union won countless gold medals. The gold medals are still there today, but where is the Soviet Union?

China's array of medals and prizes was produced out of the sweat, tears, and lives of generations of athletes and paralympians...You can't use the achievements of our young people to cover up or to dilute the mistakes of the country's leaders.The Chinese Communist Party has used the Olympics as a way of suppressing all other political duties. It has put all its energy into this for the past decade, emptying out the last drop of strength. All political, economic, propaganda, and diplomatic effort has been channeled into the Olympics. The entire Party and nation has repeated the message about the importance of the Games time and again, an importance which is greater than that of the fight against corruption, disaster relief efforts, human rights, or the livelihood and welfare of ordinary Chinese.
Ordinary citizens pay the price
It is hard to see how the efforts of ordinary people will be repaid. Aside from the more obvious contributions of effort and money from those who have it, there are all those people who have had their land grabbed away from them, or whose homes have been forcibly demolished, or who have been forced to give up their...business. Those who have been forced to return to their hometown as part of the pre-Olympics "clean-up," or those who have been detained against their will. Those who have been forbidden to speak, forbidden to conduct interviews, forbidden to offer legal services, or forbidden from helping people stand up for their civil rights or property.

There is a fly in the ointment, and that lies in the fact that the Chinese government has refused to keep the promises it made to improve human rights and to allow greater press freedom when it applied to host the Games in the first place.

In the eight years since China applied to host the Games, with the continued suppression of human rights and continuing controls on the freedom of the press, those promises have turned into nothing but empty words. And an empty promise is very hard to keep.

Chinese people who have had their rights infringed know it. A lot of the international media know it. Communist Party and government officials know it too, in their heart of hearts. Who would have the gall to propose or second this motion, to talk the empty talk about "the best Olympic Games ever"?
Manufacturing injustice
The best at suppressing the news? Maybe. The best at trampling on people's rights? Perhaps. Even though the curtain has yet to rise on the Olympics, we can say with 100 percent certainty that we have lost all hope of being "the best."
There is one extremely good thing about a one-party system, and that is that it can achieve pretty much anything it wants to. That's why Deng Xiaoping said that China should never go the way of the West, because it was terribly troublesome, and that any attempt to get anything done petered out in argument. That's quite right. Who would have dared to argue with Deng or Mao? That's why Mao announced in 1976 that Deng was an enemy of the people, and why Deng announced in 1989 that Zhao Ziyang was the enemy.
History repeats itself, and the wheel comes full circle. Leaders at every level have to deal with dissenting opinion, and at every level they have the power to brand the other a public enemy. In China, we produce miscarriages of justice and trumped-up charges like a high-intensity industrial zone, rolling them off the conveyor belt at a rate no-one else can match.
We are so efficient at it: Why stop now? It is a task beloved of Chinese officials at every level of leadership. One thing they are particularly good at, for example, is allowing people they like to get rich first. All you need to get a bank loan in the blink of an eye is the favor of a local ranking official. In the blink of another eye, you can acquire a whole state enterprise for the token price of between three and five percent of its market value, which you can then transfer into your own private ownership.
One-party system
In the same blink of the eye, you can get access to a plot of land "approved" for your use, expel a large crowd of people who live on it and farm it, and begin a lucrative career as a property developer. Will anyone make a fuss? Well, that's easy to deal with. In the blink of an eye, anyone making a fuss will have lost their livelihood and received a warning from the authorities. Who will have the courage to publish such a negative news story? That would be revealing state and Party secrets, calling all sorts of trouble down on the heads of the journalist and even the whole newspaper.
In the case of a lawsuit being filed, the lawyer will either be warned off, obstructed at every turn, or have his license to practice taken away, or be convicted himself of a criminal offense. In the case of any mass unrest, the last resort is to send the security forces in to stamp out trouble. There is one of these "mass petitioning incidents" in China every five minutes, 80,000 a year, and they are all the inevitable by-product of a one-party system.
Under today's one-party system, we have a highly efficient system for an exponential increase in the gap between rich and poor, for corruption, state-sponsored robbery, oppression, and for the control of information. All these things fit together seamlessly. This is the human rights record and the state of press freedom against which it will be very hard to gain any improvements. This is the big, bad secret.
The efficiency of the one-party system can be applied in any number of ways. For example, to stop anything from happening that Party leaders do not like. China has been a People's Republic for 59 years now, but we haven't seen any progress in the direction of democracy in any of those years. The only reason China sent a delegate to the United Nations to sign the covenants on human rights back in October 1998 was because of the forthcoming application to host the 2008 Olympics.
Voting with their feet
As soon as the bid was successful, the thing was shoved into the shadows. The National People's Congress was never asked to ratify it. Putting on a show is indeed very efficient. Actually doing something is very inefficient. Thanks to China's one-party system, they really have been able to make a momentary difference to the air quality in Beijing. But as soon as the Games are over, who knows how many lifetimes ordinary Chinese residents will have to wait to get decent air to breathe again.
There is one clear barometer of how good a political system is. It's no good listening to what people say; mouths are very unreliable. You have to look at what the feet are doing. A good system will attract people. People in China may be living quite happily, and foreigners may make light of traveling a thousand miles to visit. But would they want to emigrate here? When they have seen the Olympics, seen the show, and had a chance to understand Chinese people a bit better, and to compare China to their own country, then what? I am certain that while they will say a lot of nice things about China, they are not going to start flooding in to live here. Whereas Chinese people would be leaving in their tens of thousands if the opportunity was there. That is my prediction. History will be the judge of whether I am right or not.
Original essay in Mandarin by Bao Tong. RFA Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/baotong-08062008132212.html

Creating [Warped] History

While most of us who question authority know the kind of havoc such psych ops have already produced. Case in point: the phony trashing of Saddam Hussein's statue to look like a huge crowd spontaneously participated, when in fact it was a handfull of "trained dogs." Kudos to the publishers of this study.
Fake Photos Alter Real Memories
By Andrea Thompson, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 26 November 2007 07:51 am ET
[…] To test what effect doctored photos might have, researchers from the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Padua in Italy showed 299 people aged 19 to 84 either an actual photo or an altered photo of two historical events, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing and the 2003 anti-war protest in Rome.
The original Tiananmen Square image was altered to show a crowd watching at the sidelines as a lone man stands in front of a row of tanks. The Rome anti-war protest photograph was altered to show riot police and a menacing, masked protester among the crowd of demonstrators.
When answering questions about the events, the participants had differing recollections of what happened. Those who viewed the altered images of the Rome protest recalled the demonstration as violent and negative and recollected more physical confrontation and property damage than actually occurred.
Participants who viewed the doctored photos also said they were less inclined to take part in future protests, according to the study, detailed in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology. [emphasis added]
"It’s potentially a form of human engineering that could be applied to us against our knowledge and against our wishes, and we ought to be vigilant about it," said UC Irvine psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, who designed the study. "With the addition of a few little upsetting and arousing elements in the Rome protest photo, people remembered this peaceful protest as being more violent than it was, and as a society we have to figure how we can regulate this."
http://www.livescience.com/technology/071126-faked-photos.html