China was desperate to get the 2000 Olympics, because it wanted the ‘face’ that would thereby accrue, allowing it to walk tall on the international stage and show off its extraordinarily rapid development and re-invention as a modern, major world-influencing state. When Sydney was awarded the 2000 Games instead there was crushing disappointment in Beijing. What then went into its renewed efforts to get the 2008 Games is anyone’s guess, given that China does not observe norms of law or morality in going after what it wants; but by the time of the Moscow meeting at which the 2008 Games decision was made, Beijing was a clear front-runner over Paris and Toronto in the minds of the IOC committee, whose then-shortly-to-retire chairman, Juan Antonio Samaranch, was as keen for China to win as any Politburo member in the Forbidden City’s Zhong Nan Hai complex.
At the time many of us engaged in campaigning about China’s human rights record lobbied hard against Beijing’s candidature. One thing we understood was that success for Beijing, conjoined with China’s effect on glazed-eyed salivating Western businessmen and their governments seduced by the ‘vast potential market’ promise, would almost completely stifle interest in protests about Chinese human rights violations – and so it proved. Indeed the fact that in China’s poverty-stricken hinterlands, hidden behind the glittering economic success of the Special Economic Zones, there is frequent harshly repressed turmoil and rioting, is barely mentioned in the Western press, who do not have correspondents in the rural depths of Hunan and Gansu or the ‘minority regions’, and who ignore the samizdat news reports that filter out of them.
It would take too long to list the many respects in which the human rights of Chinese citizens are persistently and comprehensively abused – but that in any case is common knowledge: any number of reports in the public domain from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, the United Nations, the US government and other agencies, rehearse the data in detail. I shall mention just one: that the ‘laogai’ – the vast gulag of over 1,000 forced labour camps, which Harry Wu’s Laogai Research Foundation calculates has had over 40 million inmates since the first camps opened in the 1950s – continues its output of slave-made products. Like all economic miracles in history, China’s miracle also depends on slavery.
The luckier victims of China’s oppressions are not those sent without trial to ‘education through labour’ in the laogai where death is slow, but those shot for any of the more than sixty capital offences on China’s books (they include fraud, tax evasion, smuggling, bribery and ‘splittism’, i.e. advocating independence for Tibet, Taiwan, or anywhere else) – providing of course they are also lucky enough not to have their corneas or kidneys removed for transplant purposes before being shot. China executes more people annually than the whole of the rest of the world put together – and the families of the victims pay for the bullets. I have personally seen a truckload of those about to be executed in a public stadium being paraded through the streets of a Chinese city, tied up and with banners pinned to them announcing their crimes.
The occupation and repression of Tibet peaked in the news during the run-up to the Beijing Games as Tibetan activists used the occasion to get the outside world’s wavering, short-term, Attention Deficit Disorder notice back to their terrible plight. Western press coverage might rather feebly mention that there is unrest in the provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan and Xinjiang also: and yes, at the very least craniums are being cracked and kidneys kicked there too, and the trucks heading for the laogai were even fuller than usual in the run-up to the Games – and not just because of the typical and predictable re-run of the notorious ‘Strike Hard’ campaigns to ‘clean up’ Beijing and other major cities before the influx of foreign visitors, aimed at getting rid of dissidents or ‘liu meng’ or just anyone whose jib is not cut as the Party and the Gong An Ju (the ‘Public Peace Bureau’ aka police) like.