Get ready for the blackout Games if China has its way. With the Olympics less than three weeks away, news organizations are nervous, including host U.S. broadcaster NBC, about the restrictions being imposed on news coverage as the communist country with a capitalist bent seeks to put the best light possible on itself.
One of the most common hypothetical questions NBC officials have bandied about involves the opening ceremonies on Aug. 8.
Hundreds of athletes will parade into a stadium in front of world leaders, including President Bush, and a huge global television audience. If an athlete holds a protest sign or waves a Tibetan flag, how will the Chinese hosts react? Will the television networks show the scene? How will the Chinese handle the media for the rest of the Games?
One IOC official told the New York Times that Chinese officials had “put a tourniquet” on the Olympics. This official also made an interesting comment:
“Had the I.O.C., and those vested with the decision to award the host city contract, known seven years ago that there would be severe restrictions on people being able to enter China simply to watch the Olympics, or that live broadcasting from Tiananmen Square would essentially be banned, or that reporters would be corralled at the whim of local security, then I seriously doubt whether Beijing would have been awarded the Olympics,” the commissioner said.
Some are already calling these the “no fun Olympics” for the rigid restrictions being put on visitors and the media. This example from The Age in Australia takes the cake:
Beijing police have been visiting bar owners in the popular Sanlitun area and asking them to sign pledges agreeing to not serve black people or Mongolians and ban activities including dancing.
Bar owners said that police have been clamping down on black people and Mongolians, who are sometimes implicated in drug dealing and prostitution, as part of an Olympic clean-up campaign that they and locals fear will make for a secure but sterile Games.
None of this should have been a surprise since China remains very much a country controlled by the state. This is the same country that is trying to control the weather during the Olympics. If Chinese authorities have no fear of taking on Mother Nature, what’s a few reporters or Mongolians? –Jim Buzinski
on Jul 23rd, 2008 at 1:31 AM
Never heard any thing more stupid than this blog. You believe everything you heard of? Where is you brain? Ban blacks and Mongolians? Can you even tell the difference from a Mongolian and a Chinese?
on Jul 25th, 2008 at 3:06 AM
My best friend owns a restaraunt a kilometer away from the Gongti Olympic football stadium, not far from Sanlitun, the most famous bar area of Beijing. It is a western restaraunt. He was told by the police he could not serve black people — they did not say anything about Mongolians (as the previous writer has referenced). I don’t know why my friend would make up such a story, which on the surface sounds ridiculous, but when you know that most of the people dealing drugs in the Sanlitun area are of African descent, with black skin, then you come to appreciate the police connection.
Six months ago para-military police raided the Sanlitun area and summarily beat blacks loitering in the area. My friend who was in Sanlitun that night witnessed this. The message was to stop dealing drugs — and it seems to have worked. You seldom see these dealers there anymore. But at what cost? To be sure some of the beaten were dealers, but, at least, one was the son of an African country’s ambassador. How many other innocents were caught at the wrong place and at the wrong time, to be judged and sentenced, not by a court or a judge, but, rather, by paramilitary police, beaten, purely based on the color of their skin.
Is this the side of China the people of this great land want to show to the world during the Olympics? That people, based on the color of their skin are not given the right to due process. I think not.
I don’t know what outcrys my friend may endure if during the Olympics he refuses British, American or German blacks in respect of the police order and how this may look to the world. What if they turn out to be Olympic athletes?
on Apr 29th, 2010 at 10:21 AM
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