By Bill Smith Aug 6, 2007, 15:13 GMT
Beijing - Chinese officials and rights activists on Monday said they expected an intensified battle over issues including media freedom and Tibet in the final year before the 2008 Olympics.
Four members of media rights group Reporters Without Borders said they held a small, unauthorised press conference in Beijing on Monday to protest against the Chinese government's imprisonment of about 100 journalists, Internet dissidents and free-speech advocates.
The group said the protest, just two days before Beijing marks the one-year countdown to the start of the games, was part of its global campaign to pressurise China over the next year.
'There is still one year to improve the human rights [in China], especially relasing journalists and cyber dissidents,' Vincent Brossel, the head of the group's Borders Asia desk, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
Beijing organising committee (BOCOG) vice president Jiang Xiaoyu on Monday said the Chinese government expected more criticism over the next year but opposed 'politicisation' of the Olympics.
'We have already heard many different voices from many different sides, and we are mentally prepared for these voices to get louder,' Jiang told reporters.
BOCOG welcomed foreign media that 'objectively, fairly and comprehensively' report on the preparations for the Olympics, he said.
'We welcome more constructive criticism on faults and problems,' Jiang said. 'But we absolutely oppose a politicisation of the Olympic Games.'
The Reporters Without Borders protesters said they wore T-shirts showing the Olympic rings transformed into handcuffs to symbolize repression in China.
'You cannot hold such a big sports event as the Olympic Games in the shadow of Chinese prisons,' Reporters Without Borders secretary- general Robert Menard said in a statement issued after he joined the protest.
'This is not about spoiling the party, quite the contrary,' Menard said.
'But Beijing has not kept its promises to improve the human rights situation and yet continues cynically to refer to the Olympic spirit,' he said.
Police who arrived just after the protest had ended questioned about 12 foreign journalists for two hours, Brossel said.
The London-based Free Tibet Campaign also plans a 'global day of action for Tibet' on August 8 and deliver petitions to the International Olympic Committee and the British government, urging them to 'demand that China allows immediate and unrestricted media access to Tibet.'
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both plan to release new reports on China's human rights this week as part of their pre- Olympic campaigns.
China announced new temporary regulations in January allowing foreign journalists greater freedom of travel and the right to interview any Chinese citizen who accepts a request in the run-up to the Olympics.
But the new rules offer no improvements for Chinese journalists, local implementation has been patchy, and they still make foreign reporters visiting Tibet subject to the same restrictions as all foreigners.
Despite the controls on travel to Tibet, Lhadon Tethong of New York-based Students for a Free Tibet urged foreign reporters to visit the disputed region.
Foreign journalists in Tibet 'need to see the thinly veiled reality that exists there' by trying to find out as much as possible independently of their Chinese government chaperons, Lhadon Tethong told dpa.
'For Tibetans the key is that journalists do everything they can to get the real story out,' she said.
She said the special rules show that China believes it needs to 'control the image of Tibet that the world sees'.
'What the special rules for Tibet show is that the Chinese rule there is not stable,' she said.
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