Press Challenge China to Rise to the Olympics by risa
While China will try to assert itself as a new model of global development, opponents and the outside world will also see more and demand more of China. The coming year will be a tense one in Taiwan, where President Chen Shui-bian is pushing for constitutional reforms that China sees as a move towards de facto independence – something it says it will resist with force. Chen, who is at the end of his maximum term, has little to lose and he may gamble that China is so worried about the Olympics it will compromise rather than start a conflict that would overshadow the Games. The Dalai Lama will also look for some concrete results from his emissaries’ years of talks with Beijing. If there is no agreement over the future of Tibet before the Olympics, he may wonder whether it is worth continuing the negotiations.
China may wonder if the political price it has to pay for the Olympics is worth it. Civil rights groups will push harder for reform in the coming year. In the latest attempt to use the Games, Human Rights Watch called last week for a moratorium on the death penalty ahead of the Olympics.
Beijing has shown a willingness to compromise and take into account international opinion. The impact on foreign policy is already evident from North Korea to Sudan to Burma. Gone are the days when China could get away with vetoing or abstaining from every UN Security Council resolution aimed at criticising or punishing other countries for human rights abuses. Last year, Beijing signed up to sanctions against its old ally North Korea after Kim Jong-il went ahead with its first nuclear test. And, this month, China surprised many observers by agreeing to a statement condemning Burma’s crackdown on anti-government protesters. It has also reportedly put distance between itself and Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Most significantly, it put pressure on Sudan to accept a peacekeeping force after threats by US activists to call for a boycott of the ‘Genocide Olympics’.
None of these measures goes as far as Europe and America would like, nor are they all being implemented because of the Olympics. But they imply recognition by China that there are norms of global behaviour and governments can be held accountable if they transgress. More should be expected. Thirty thousand foreign journalists are expected for the Games. They will push and probe and expose China like never before.
For this reason – and after a concerted campaign by the Foreign Correspondents Club of China and foreign embassies – the government relaxed its controls at the start of this year. Under new Olympics-period regulations, correspondents are no longer obliged to get permission every time we leave our home base, which – in theory – means we will be arrested less often. Detentions are still far too frequent to say China has lived up to its promise to give the media complete freedom to report on the Games.
According to the state media, there will also be unprecedented access to the party congress for the foreign media. It remains to be seen what that means in a country that organises one press conference a year for its Prime Minister and none for its President.
Political reform still lags far behind the economic changes. However dull, the old style one-party politics of the congress needs to be placed next to the modern, dynamic nation that will be on show during the Olympics.
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