Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom - World Press ...

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Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 4 Introductory remark: Mark Bench Executive Director, World Press Freedom Committee You may wonder why certain organizations are not represented here. The Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (BOCOG), the International Olympic Committee, the Internet Society of China, the Chinese Delegation to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization here in Paris, and various Chinese official or semi-official media all declined to come or ignored our repeated invitations. NBC, the Olympic television rights-holder, and the sports manufacturers and Olympic sponsors Nike and Adidas also declined. I should also inform you that the conference has been subjected to a hacker attack from a source that our computer experts have traced to Hong Kong. Messages have come in over the past couple of weeks with return addresses mimicking that of the conference site. If you download them, they will deliver a Trojan onto your computer - that is to say, they will make your programs vulnerable to future attacks. The hacker uses the conference site address, but, unlike ours, his address ends with the postscript “Yahoo.” So don't open anything looking as though it comes from us, but ending in “Yahoo.”
Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 5 Introductory speech Reporting the good and the bad: a help to China’s development Merle Goldman Professor Emerita of History, Boston University; Research Associate, John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University China's leaders had hoped that holding the August 2008 Olympics in Beijing would draw attention to the great achievements that have taken place since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. The occasion would mark China's arrival as a world power and show off its physical modernization and dynamic economy. But in the lead-up to the Olympics, China's actions have produced just the opposite effect. They have focused attention on its repressive policies in Tibet and the Tibetan areas in China's provinces as well as in the Moslem areas in the northwestern province of Xinjiang. In the past few weeks, Beijing's policies in these areas have sparked protests and violent repression. The protests of Buddhist monks in Burma a few months earlier focused attention on China's support of the repressive and militarist regime in Burma. Steven Spielberg's resignation as the director of the opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics drew world attention to China's activities in the Sudan. Here, in addition to developing energy supplies and infrastructure, China has been supplying Sudanese agents, the Janjaweed militias, with arms with which they attack the Darfur region, leading to the killing of more than 200,000 people. Moreover, in the process of building the facilities for the Olympics in Beijing, it is estimated that more than a million people have been evicted from their homes with little compensation to make way for stadiums, sports facilities and new roads. These events have diverted attention from the image China's leaders seek to project to the outside world of its economic achievements and a society living in “harmony.” While those events have received the most attention, there are other important events going on in China on the issue of human rights that have not received much attention and that even more contradict the image China seeks to portray. In the negotiations for the Olympics, Foreign Minister Liu Jianchao promised to improve China's human rights record. Yet, in the runup to the Games, China has cracked down on a number of critics of the Communist Party. This internal crackdown has received much less attention in the media than the events in Sudan and Tibet and the interrupted journey of the Olympic torch. But this phenomenon of internal dissent in the long run may be more important in determining what happens in Tibet and the Sudan than the anti- Chinese demonstrations that went on all over the world.
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