China, IOC stand firm against boycott calls

By Bill Smith Aug 2, 2007, 10:06 GMT

Beijing - The New Zealand Green Party, Amnesty International, trade unions, Tibetan monks, North Korean refugees and Chinese dissidents are just some of the diverse groups that have urged the international community to push China harder to improve its human rights record before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Several groups favour an international boycott of the games, with a recent focus on China's influence on the conflict in the Darfur region of southern Sudan.

When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded the games to China in 2001, top IOC officials promoted the idea that more engagement would automatically lead to improvements in human rights and democracy.

Some supporters of Beijing cited the example of Seoul in 1988. The international attention brought by the build-up to the 1988 Seoul games prevented a crackdown on the South Korean democratic movement, the IOC's 'sport first' optimists claimed.

China played to this politics-free sports lobby, assuring IOC delegates that unspecified human rights improvements would follow the award of the games to Beijing, but many rights groups doubted that the 'Seoul effect' would be repeated in Beijing.

Now, six years later, there are few signs of significant change in China. IOC officials are forced to rely mainly on the old 'keep politics out of sport' argument.

Chinese police kept many dissidents and relatives of jailed dissidents under virtual house arrest to prevent them contacting the IOC team during inspections of Beijing prior to the award of the games.

This practise is expected to be repeated in the run-up to this autumn's five-yearly congress of the ruling Communist Party in Beijing and in the weeks before next year's Olympics.

The government has promised greater freedom for foreign journalists during and before the games, introducing temporary regulations until October 2008. Yet the regulations do not apply to Chinese journalists, and controls over state media and the internet appear to be as tough as ever.

The issues of Taiwan and Tibet were linked to the Olympics in April, when China and the IOC announced the planned route of the 2008 torch relay.

The government of Taiwan, the island regarded in Beijing as a breakaway Chinese province, rejected a route that would make it the last of international leg of the relay.

Taiwan's ruling Democratic Progressive Party argued that the route would allow China to claim the leg over the island as part of the domestic stretch of the torch relay.

Many overseas Tibetan groups and independence activists also oppose the 2008 torch relay passing through the disputed Chinese region of Tibet, arguing that the government will use it for political purposes.

Some Tibetan groups advocate moving the Olympics from China and plan more protests and an 'alternative games' next year.

Whatever propaganda accompanies the torch parade in Tibet, there are signs that IOC officials may be proved correct in asserting that the Communist Party will resist directly promoting its own cause during next year's Olympic events.

Many of the Olympic construction sites have hung banners promoting party leader and state president Hu Jintao's 'socialist ethics Eight Honours and Eight Disgraces' and 'building a harmonious society, but the government has generally left political propaganda out of most public events related to the Olympics.

Hein Verbruggen, head of the IOC's coordination commission for the 2008 games, told dpa last year that he believed China would honour its commitments to the IOC by ensuring that no similar slogans appeared at Olympic venues during the games.

This week, China reacted to a labour report by the trade union-based PlayFair 2008 campaign, in a possible indication that the government may be responding to international pressure on specific issues, while leaving basic human rights for Chinese citizens untouched.

PlayFair 2008 had alleged 'gross violations of basic labour standards' at four southern Chinese factories making souvenirs for the 2008 games.

The government announced that it had punished the four companies for breaching labour regulations, cancelling the licence of one firm found to have used eight children to package non-Olympic goods.

Some analysts believe China has also started to play ball on Sudan following intensified international pressure, including a celebrity campaign led by actress Mia Farrow.

China had used its power as one of five veto holders on the UN Security Council to hold up sanctions and largely looked away when Sudan was accused of committing genocide in Darfur over the past four years.

Its stance was attributed to a growing need for Sudan's oil to help fuel its rapidly expanding export economy.

Then, when Hu Jintao visited Khartoum in February to sign economic deals, he called on Sudan to accept the joint UN-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur.

The Chinese envoy on Darfur, Liu Guijin, said in early July that many people urging a boycott of the Beijing games over Sudan 'knew little of the efforts made by the Chinese government' and that some of them displayed 'Cold War era' thinking.

'One of the basic principles of the Olympic Games is to separate politics from sports,' Liu told reporters.

With its major sporting event looming on the horizon, the IOC has, not surprisingly, joined China in firmly resisting calls for a boycott.

IOC President Jacques Rogge told the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung two months ago that calls for a boycott were a 'completely wrong approach'.

'A boycott would isolate China,' Rogge told the newspaper. 'There would be no freedom of press.'