How China has consistently lied

Seven years ago,when China was awarded the Olympic Games, its government was aware of the misgivings of many nations about the morality of awarding the Games to a nation whose human rights record has been so consistently appalling. It made promises to the International Olympic Committee and to the world that the Games would be a means to expedite human rights reforms and would open China to the world through greater press freedoms.

What has happened in those intervening seven years has proved that those promises were nothing but a sham. China still executes approximately 6000 people a year for a range of nearly 70 crimes including fraudulent VAT receipts. It has summarily arrested human rights protesters and subjected them to torture and long terms of imprisonment. It has demolished homes to make way for Olympic stadia and arrested those who have protested about their subsequent homelessness. It continues to harvest the organs of executed prisoners without permission from relatives and sells them in the medical market place.

China's promises of wider personal freedom have proved a joke. The country has the worlds most powerful internet firewall which blocks off thousands of sites which carry political messages the Chinese government does not want its people to hear.



Amnesty International has, quite rightly, condemned not just China's government but the International Olympic Committee for, having accepted China's promises as genuine, then not followed up on them to ensure they were being acted on. The IOC has done very little to turn the screw on China, presumably because the cost of going through the whole ritual of finding another venue would be both politically and economically damaging.

Instead of being a liberating force, the Olympic Games has proved to be a pretext for China clamping down even harder on dissidents to avoid adverse publicity before the Games begin. This is simply not acceptable.

Today it has been announced that the promise to journalists of unfettered internet access during the Games has been broken. Instead of the freedoms some naively expected China has heightened its checks and curbs on any sites which may provide negative vibes about the country. Foreign journalists who have in the past been even mildly critical of the regime have been kicked out of the country.



One other promise made by the Chinese government at the time was that in those seven years they would green up the environment so athletes would have a happy and healthy competition. One look at the pall of smog that hung over Beijing this week told all you needed to know about the truth of yet another promise.

The unhealthy acrid smog, however, is just a visible symbol of the poisonous gloom which hangs over the entire Olympic movement as , yet again, superficial promises are taken at face value for the sake of prestige, and another unpleasant authoritarian regime is set to gain much international kudos from a world event while unacceptable, inhuman behaviour goes on behind the scenes.