They’ve been passing out medals liberally in Beijing since the Olympics began, so why not award a few more – for marring the games with authoritarian abuses and cruelties.
We’re not talking about trivialities like having Han Chinese masquerade in the costumes of embarrassingly unhappy ethnic minorities, or having a cute girl lip-sync the haunting voice of an embarrassingly less photogenic girl.
Those small insults didn’t even make it to the starting line.
The medals go to appalling attacks on human freedom and dignity.
Start, though, with a special honor for pre-game enabling. The champion in this event was International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge, who appears to have taken at face value all the Chinese government’s promises of humanity and openness.
In July, for example, Rogge said, “For the first time, foreign media will be able to report freely and publish their work freely in China. There will be no censorship on the Internet.”
Unrestricted reporting and Internet access are precisely what didn’t happen in Beijing.
Web sites critical of the government remained largely blacked out within the country. Journalists were arrested and sometimes roughed up when they tried to report pitiful protest attempts; photographers had their cameras or memory cards confiscated.
China took home the silver in media suppression – it fell short of the gold only because its performance was eclipsed by such savage regimes as North Korea and Burma.
Yet China earned the gold for suppressing any kind of dissent.
After promising the IOC they would allow demonstrations in three designated parks, Chinese officials refused to approve any. Seventy-seven groups applied for protest permits; 75 of the applications were rejected and two were put on hold. No permits were issued.
Those who attempted unapproved demonstrations were quickly mobbed by police.
One Chinese man dutifully applied for a permit to say publicly that China “still has problems.” He visited the police, as the process required – and was arrested.
What secured China’s victory in this event, though, was its treatment of two women, 77 and 79, one of whom was nearly blind and both of whom needed canes to walk.
They petitioned the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau five times for permission to protest their evictions from their homes. They weren’t given permission. Instead, they were given a one-year criminal sentence – suspended for now – of “re-education through labor” for “disturbing the public order.”
The authorities essentially threatened to work these women to death for merely asking to demonstrate.
Finally, China won the gold for duplicity. Looking back, it’s clear it got the honor of hosting the 2008 Olympics under false pretenses; the IOC never would have given the games to Beijing had the world known the communist regime would break so many of its promises of decent behavior.
The Beijing Olympics deserve to be remembered by another name: The Bait-and-Switch Olympics.
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