Olympic Repression
Higher, further, harsher – China is matching its investment in the physical infrastructure of the Olympics with a vast and extensive array of police power, aimed at preventing any dissent element unsettling the “harmonious” atmosphere of the games this August, or embarrassing the Communist Party leadership.
So we’ve had armed police raids on alleged terrorist plotters among the Uighurs, the Turkic people of Xinjiang or east Turkestan as a lot of them wish it was. This week, the young Beijing activist Hu Jia seems likely to go on secret trial for trying to “subvert the state” over his persistent efforts to point out the glaring abuses and flaws in China’s political system, with a guilty verdict and long jail term all but certain. And for a week now, Tibet has been rocked by angry riots and protest after efforts to mark the anniversary of the 1959 uprising, when the Dalai Lama went into exile, were blocked.China joins the dubious company of the Burmese junta in having its troops go into battle against unarmed Buddhist monks. No one would want the vast range of grievances in Chinese society – some political like those of the Uighurs or Mr. Hu, some just personal like that of the man who hijacked a busload of Australian tourists in Xi’an – turned towards any violence at the Olympics or elsewhere. Nor would a boycott of the Olympics be anything but counter-productive, deepening the xenophobic nationalism that still runs deep in a lot of Chinese after their country’s 19th and 20th century humiliations.
Visitors to Beijing this August will rightly marvel at the city’s transformation. The more discerning will also find it puzzling, and repugnant, that the leaders who organised it still cannot concede an inch of genuine autonomy to ethnic minorities like the Uighurs and the Tibetans, or accommodate gadflies like Mr. Hu.
Is it fear, or the Leninist doctrine that a party which wields infinite terror can rule indefinitely?
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 March 2008, p.14
