[+/-] : 2008 turns out to be a year of trouble for China

2008 turns out to be a year of trouble for China
By TINI TRAN, Google News

BEIJING (AP) — China hoped 2008 would be a yearlong celebration, a time to bask in the spotlight of the upcoming Beijing Olympics. Instead, the Year of the Rat has also brought a wave of troubles — both natural and man-made — that are putting a heavy strain on the communist leadership.

The 7.9 magnitude earthquake that struck Sichuan province Monday, killing thousands, is only the latest.

China has long experience with large-scale disasters — from coal mine explosions to chemical spills to floods that displace tens of thousands.

The central government prides itself on its ability to quickly react, usually with deployments from China's huge military corps. The ruling party's mandate in part rests on being able to deliver aid in emergencies.

But China's capacity to control disasters and how they play out in the media is being stretched this year. Its leaders are grappling with the fallout from multiple problems in the information-hungry Internet age when they had expected to focus only on the Olympics.

"The Olympics are an important symbol of China's effort to ... get on the same gauge with the rest of the world. So they have attached a lot of importance to them," said Roger Des Forges, a China historian at University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

"But for most Chinese people, they are secondary to the quality of life that they are trying to achieve. So these questions of disasters are uppermost in people's minds, watching how the government is going to deal with them," he said.

China was quick to show its public response to Monday's quake. Just hours after it struck, Premier Wen Jiabao flew into Sichuan Province to oversee the emergency relief effort. Speaking from Dujiangyan City, where a high school collapsed, burying some 900 students, Wen acknowledged on national TV the task will be "especially challenging."

This year, China's problems began just before February's Lunar New Year, when the worst snowstorms in five decades hit the densely populated southern and central region. They left scores dead, knocked out power across cities, and stranded hundreds of thousands during the country's single busiest travel period.

Meanwhile, its leaders also battled decade-high levels of inflation and struggled to improve the nation's image as a global manufacturer following last year's tainted drugs and food scandal and defective toy exports.

In March, huge anti-government riots erupted in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, sparking sympathy protests in Tibetan areas across western China. The violent protests were the biggest challenge to Chinese rule in the Himalayan region in nearly two decades.

The subsequent government crackdown brought sharp international criticism of Beijing's human rights record and its rule over Tibet. China has said that 22 people were killed, while Tibetan groups have said that many times that number died in the violence.

Thousands of troops were deployed across a wide swath of the country to tamp down unrest and restore order. But their massive presence continued to draw an unwelcome spotlight on China's harsh rule in Tibet.

The negative attention spilled over to the Olympic flame's around-the-world tour. Meant to be a feel-good kickoff event to the Beijing Games, the relay turned into chaos as pro-Tibet protesters mounted demonstrations from the very start of the ceremonial lighting in Greece, and at stops including London, Paris, and San Francisco.

The bad news kept coming. In May was China's worst train accident in a decade, leaving 72 dead and more than 400 injured when a high-speed passenger train jumped its tracks and slammed into another in rural Shandong province. Excessive speed was determined to be the cause, and five railway officials were promptly fired.

This month also brought a sharp rise in the number of reported cases of hand, foot, and mouth disease, a normally non-deadly viral infection that has killed 39 children this year and infected nearly 30,000 others.

Only last week's feat by a team of Tibetan and Han Chinese mountaineers in bringing the Olympic flame up Mount Everest gave China the positive publicity it craved, three months to the day before the start of the games.

Beijing's leaders had carefully chosen Aug. 8 as the opening day for the 2008 games (8-8-08), believing that it was an especially auspicious day. Many Chinese people in this officially atheist nation remain highly superstitious. The number eight, "ba" in Chinese, is closely associated with prosperity and good luck because it sounds similar to the word "fa," which means rich.

China spared no expense on its Olympic debut, spending an estimated $40 billion on improving infrastructure and building sports venues. Its money was apparently well-spent. None of the venues, 31 of them in Beijing alone, was reportedly damaged.

Li Jiulin, a top engineer on the 91,000-seat National Stadium known as the Bird's Nest — the jewel of the Olympics — was conducting an inspection at the venue when the quake occurred. He said the building was designed to withstand up to an 8.0-magnitude quake.

"The Olympic venues were not affected by the earthquake," said Sun Weide, a spokesman for the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee. "We considered earthquakes when building those venues."

Ultimately, the series of crises could prompt China to reassess its true priorities, said Des Forges.

"I think there may be some way in which these crises are reminding the government that, as important as the games are, there are perhaps more important issues that need to be addressed," he said.
Associated Press writer Stephen Wade contributed to this report.
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[+/-] : The Twin Betrayals of the Olympics in 1936 and 2008

The Twin Betrayals of the Olympics in 1936 and 2008
By Thomas Kleiber Special to The Epoch Times May 12, 2008

The Olympic Games were first held in Greece, the birthplace of democracy, and from the beginning have carried the message that nations should gather in peace and compete in sports. There is an inherent kinship between the peaceful Olympic Games and the peaceful ways of democratic and free nations, and the Olympics have had their finest moments when hosted by democratic countries.

The years 1936 and 2008 have in common the hosting of the Olympic Games by totalitarian regimes: Nazi Germany and Communist China.


Nazi Germany was a one-party regime, as is China today. Both the Nazi and Chinese Communist parties struggled to gain power and the Nazis endeavored, just as the Chinese regime is endeavoring today, to establish a good reputation by hosting the Olympic Games.

Nazi Germany invented the tradition of having a torch relay, which served to connect and bind as many countries as possible to the event in Berlin. It was a propaganda campaign, one that continues to have an impact.

China has taken the torch relay to the extreme by planning the longest torch relay ever in history, including going high up atop Mount Everest. At every step the Beijing torch is protected by "torch guards," whose presence is already a break with the Olympic spirit.

These totalitarian Olympics may put a parenthesis around the torch relay: After the protest-plagued 2008 Olympic torch relay, the IOC is considering ending the tradition that started in Berlin.

Before holding the Olympic Games Nazi Germany had started to persecute the Jewish community, although it did not begin the "final solution" until several years later. The Nazis didn't even dare to officially exclude Jews from participating in the Games (although Jews were prohibited from representing Germany in the Games).

The Chinese regime has not only started to persecute a group of people for their religious beliefs, but is even very frank about its policy of persecution. At the end of 2007 a spokesperson for the Beijing Olympic Committee stated that practitioners of the Falun Gong are excluded from all Olympic activities.

All human rights organizations and governments know that Falun Gong is one of the main victims of state-sanctioned persecution in China. Several thousand adherents have been tortured to death because of their beliefs.

In Nazi Germany, Dr. Josef Mengele started human experiments on Jews after the Berlin Olympics, during the Holocaust.

In today's Communist China medical doctors have for several years been extracting organs from living Falun Gong practitioners for profit. The live organ harvesting is believed to have started in 2001, the same year that China won the bid for the 2008 Olympic Games.

Nazi Germany needed all countries to come to the Olympic Games in Berlin as a sign of the legitimacy of the Nazi regime. Nothing less is the case in China: The attendance of government officials from around the world at the opening ceremony is considered a measure of approval for the Chinese regime.

The fascist German regime and the communist Chinese regime would appear to be opposites, although similar in betraying the Olympic spirit. However, the communist regime in China has adopted so many capitalistic measures that it cannot be considered communist anymore. Since 1989 it has transformed itself into a fascist regime that uses the Communist Party to dominate society and ruthless capitalistic measures to provide sustaining fuel for the Party's rule.

Of course, the Chinese regime doesn't have a Führer like Adolf Hitler, who was the leader of a movement that sought to vindicate Germany's greatness. However, in China, the Communist Party plays a role similar to that of the Führer, demanding all serve it as the embodiment of China's national destiny.

In the debate about whether the Berlin Olympics should have been boycotted, some claim that Jesse Owens competing in the Olympics refuted Adolf Hitler's racist theories. However, Owens' four gold medals were not able to stop the Holocaust in which an estimated 8 million were killed. In looking back, we might ask if a boycott of the 1936 Berlin Games would not have been more successful in helping avoid World War II and the Holocaust.

In 1936, there were no precedents for how to deal with an Olympic Games held in a totalitarian country. In 2008, we once again face the question how to deal with a totalitarian host of the Olympic Games.

The Chinese regime argues that sports and politics should be separated.

The Olympic Charter speaks of placing "sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity."

The Charter also speaks of "respect for universal fundamental ethical principles."

By describing as "politics" any objections to systematic violations of human rights that retard the harmonious development of man, deprive society of peace, destroy human dignity, and violate "universal fundamental ethical principles," the Chinese regime is not separating "politics" from sports. It is separating the Olympic Games from their hallowed purpose. And it is doing so even while increasing the persecution against groups like the Tibetans and the Falun Gong.

It is fitting that the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up under communism in East Germany, should be one of the first national leaders in her actions to show an understanding of the significance of the Beijing Olympics. She knows that basic human rights cannot be considered independent from other issues, much less the Olympics, and she has lead the way for other European leaders by announcing she will not attend the Opening Ceremony in Beijing.

In 1936 the world, when confronted with a betrayal of the Olympics by a totalitarian regime, failed to uphold the fundamental principles central to the Olympic movement. This year the world gets a second chance. The nations of the world may choose to participate in the self-promotion of a brutal regime and in doing so to betray the Olympic spirit or they may insist that the Olympics must be kept true to itself.
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[+/-] : China's Olympic Lie

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