China e os Jogos Olimpicos

Email enviado por um colega C10, sediado na Agencia Lusa em Beijing.
(um pouco extenso mas vale a pena ler, para se ter uma ideia da verdadeira China "livre" e em crescimento economico)

"Um artigo de opinião escrito por um dos líderes dos protestos estudantis que resultaram no massacre (ou será 'incidente' como lhe chamam as autoridades chinesas?) de 1989 em Tiananmen, que está exilado desde então em Taiwan."


China Mocks the Olympic SpiritSeptember 2007

by Wu'er Kaixi

When the Olympic Games take place in Beijing next summer, I will not be there. The obvious reason for this is that I was a student leader in the protests of June 4, 1989 that resulted in the Tiananmen Square massacre. I have been in exile ever since. But the less obvious corollary is that I—and untold numbers of freedom-loving people—will not be there because China has not embraced the Olympic spirit.

think it is safe to say that, if the Chinese government had embraced the Olympic spirit of unity, inclusiveness and equality, many of us who are exiled from our homeland would return to be in Beijing next year. After all, it would be an opportunity not only to enjoy the Olympic festivities, but also to be reunited with our families. But this cannot happen, and that fact makes a mockery of China's "One World, One Dream" slogan for the Beijing games, and its pretensions to being a mature member of the global community.

Mine is only one of countless stories of exile from the country with the world's fastest growing economy; but I think, in view of Beijing's triumphalism at hosting the world's premier sporting event, my exile and what it means for me personally is worth mentioning. Not only will it not be possible for me attend the Olympics, but the communist government will continue to hold hostage my family that I have not seen in 18 years, and will no doubt continue to refuse to issue them passports so that we could be reunited in a foreign country.

Many people who attend the Olympics next year will be aware that despite the newly sanitized streets of Beijing (involving the eviction of an estimated 1.5 million people), the awe-inspiring sporting facilities, and the grand panoply of ceremonies, there is a dark side to the festivities. But, just as the International Olympic Committee did when it awarded the event to Beijing, those people who attend the games no doubt will have rationalized their decision based on the misguided belief that China has made great strides towards becoming a better place in the years since Tiananmen, and so deserves a chance.

I wish this were true. If it were, I would be joining family and friends in Beijing next year. The subtitle of the 2008 Olympics has already been written: They are to be "China's coming-out party." Nineteen years after the world watched the student occupation of Tiananmen Square, China's record-breaking economic growth is poised to culminate in a spectacle calculated to awe the world and marginalize its hecklers—those who point to China's poor human-rights record; its petrodollar complicity in genocide in Darfur; its occupation of Tibet; and its aggressive stance on unification with Taiwan.

Every Olympics since the 1936 Berlin meet has been politicized in one way or another. During that dreary summer, athletes were expected to shout sieg heil as they marched past Adolf Hitler. In 1972, 11 Israeli athletes died as a result of an attack by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich games. In 1984, the U.S.S.R. boycotted the Los Angeles Olympics. But it seems likely that the Beijing Olympics, despite the hecklers, will go ahead without any boycotts, and—if Beijing has its way—without incident in the city itself.

The reason for this, I believe, is related to the complexities of the West's perceptions of and relations with China. Westerners seem to hold one of two opposing views of China: they see either the one-party state that denies basic human rights and imprisons or exiles dissenters; or as a global economic powerhouse, home to 1.3 billion potential customers.

When Beijing hosts the Olympics next year, it is the latter view the Communist Party is looking to capitalize on. It is very possible that the government will be successful in this endeavor, but as one of countless exiles from modern China who will not be able to be there in person, the summer of 2008 promises to be a major betrayal of the Olympic spirit.

For Pierre de Coubertin, who was responsible for the revival of the Olympic Games in 1900, one of the four principles of the games was to achieve a truce: "a four-yearly festival of the springtime of mankind." In reality, Beijing has no plans for a truce of any kind. The intention is for China to parade itself to the rest of the world as the China everybody is doing business with; the China eagerly caring for its open, harmonious and peaceful society; and the China that is finally taking its rightful place as a global leader. Anything, in fact, but the truth of the matter: that the government rules by slogans and an iron fist.

The idea behind this four-yearly festival is that the world would put its conflicts to the side and come together, nation by nation, in a spirit of unity. In Beijing, that will not happen. Any Chinese national who has a grievance with the country's one-party government will have no part to play in the celebrations. That list includes anyone who campaigns for greater autonomy in Tibet, my homeland of Xinjiang, my adopted home of Taiwan, anyone who has struggled to expand participatory politics in China, or anyone who has dissented publicly from whatever the current Party line happens to be.

There should be no mistake about this. China's coming-out party is nothing of the sort. The party in Beijing will belong to the Communist Party. And if the Party were to come out truly, the free world would stand aghast. That's just why the government has long seen participating in the Olympics as a legitimizing maneuver, a public-relations coup not only on the world stage, but also in terms of winning glory for the Chinese nation, playing on nationalism and simultaneously conflating China the nation with the one dictatorial party that rules it. As the famous saying goes, "without the Communist Party, there would be no modern China."

Beijing's eye has long been fixed on the Olympic grail. With tremendous alacrity and
tremendous expenditures of resources, China has transformed itself into an effective sporting nation. It was not until the Los Angeles games in 1984 that the P.R.C. managed to win its first gold. But by the 2004 games in Athens, China was in third place behind the United States and Russia, sweeping up 32 gold medals. Winning the right to host the Olympics, then, is the final act in this more than two-decade crusade by the Communist Party to achieve legitimacy through international sporting prowess.

Of course, the Chinese government itself knows that its motives have little resonance with the Olympic spirit, and as a result it is cloaking the event in the familiar, fuzzy rhetoric of unity we see in the official slogan, "One World, One Dream," which the official Web site helpfully explains, "conveys the lofty ideal of the people in Beijing as well as in China [sharing in] the global community and civilization and [creating] a bright future hand in hand with the people from the rest of the world."

This is the message—meant to establish the legality and validity of the Party's rule—that China broadcasts to the world. But at home the Chinese government is using the Olympics to repress dissidents and activists. The terrible pity of this is that the Party is exploiting national pride, and denying the Chinese people the right to enjoy the true spirit of the Olympics. Meanwhile, the world's participation in the event is an act of collusion with a political party that in recent years has presided over a remarkable period of economic growth, but has nevertheless throughout the past six decades since 1949 been responsible for far more setbacks than it has successes. It also continues to be as oppressive as it was when I was forced into exile in 1989, despite the veneer of Westernization that can be seen in the major cities.

When China made its most recent Olympics bid, it promised the IOC that it was prepared to make substantial improvements in human rights. But just four days after winning the bid, then Deputy Prime Minister Li Lanqing announced that China should step up its efforts to counter the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement whose members are routinely imprisoned–at least 100 are thought to have died in detainment. Next, then Vice President Hu Jintao weighed in, saying it was essential for China to counter separatist movements "orchestrated by the Dali Lama and the world's anti-China forces."

This should come as no surprise to anyone, least of all the IOC, which took the surprisingly naïve position that holding the Olympics in Beijing was likely to improve China's human rights. The opposite was always bound to be the case. For Beijing to pull off the kind of Olympics it would like to, it is forced to repress anything of a political nature that might mar its moment of glory. Amnesty International, for example, is calling for the immediate release of Ye Guozhu, who was arrested in December 2004 and is serving a four-year prison sentence for attempting to organize a demonstration against forced evictions in Beijing, after two restaurants he owned were demolished in 2001 to make way for Olympics-related sports facilities. His relatives say he has health problems after having been tortured in prison, and it is claimed he was beaten with electro-shock battens in Beijing's Chaobai Prison.

An equally high-profile example is human-rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who was convicted of "subversion" in December 2006, and is now under house arrest. While under formal arrest, he claims to have been treated harshly by police. Meanwhile, in April this year, four pro-Tibetan independence protesters were arrested after they hung up a Free Tibet banner at Mount Everest base camp, protesting the government's plans to relay the Olympic torch through the Tibetan Himalayas.

According to the Olympic Charter, sport must be "at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity." But groups protesting against, or calling for boycotts of next year's Olympics point to a host of Communist Party transgressions against both a peaceful society and human dignity.
A commitment to reform or abolish China's policy of "re-education through labor" appears stalled, possibly for the purposes of cleaning up the streets of Beijing of vagrants and drug-users ahead of the Olympics. Meanwhile, Amnesty reports that the lead up to the Olympics has seen "moves to expand detention without trial and 'house arrest' of activists, and … a tightening of controls over domestic media and the Internet."

For the most part, the foreign community seems to have found it relatively easy to ignore these domestic affronts to the spirit of the Olympics. The issue of Darfur is proving somewhat more problematic for China. Names such as Bob Geldof and Mia Farrow have publicly criticized China for supporting the atrocities in Darfur through massive subsidies to oil-rich Sudan. In March this year, Ms. Farrow wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal that popularized the term "the genocide Olympics." A Google search for that phrase, five months later, produces close to 1.5 million hits. (Read Joe Malchow's interview with Mia Farrow on the Olympics and China at www.feer.com/miafarrow.html)

For my part, if I were permitted to return to China for the Olympics, I admit I would seize the opportunity–it would be my chance to see the aging parents and the brother I have not seen in close to two decades. But the long-awaited family reunion will have to wait a bit longer.

Mr. Wu'er Kaixi, a Tiananmen student leader, works for an investment fund in Taipei.