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A controversial suggestion

But hear me out. Britain can’t afford it, doesn’t have the resources, manpower, or infrastructure. She also harbours dozens of terrorists rubbing their hands with glee at the opportunity to make a bang in the spotlight. Old Blighty badly needs an exit strategy, and this is it: send the Games back to where they came from.

Setting aside the pettiness of China’s hollow promises with regard to press freedom, the shabby treatment of many of its own citizens for extra presentation points, and some questionable practices in the name of gold, Beijing’s organisation of the Games themselves was outstanding. Plus, and here’s the real clincher, they’ve got a birdsnest lying around with nothing better to do other than accommodate the occasional interest of structural engineers looking for cracks in the architecture. Well, make ready with the Polyfilla boys, because you might be needing the nest for one more gathering of hatchlings.

The ultimate joint venture

Britain can spin it as the spirit of cooperation in a globally interdependent age and Beijing can propagandise the whole thing as ‘the west needs our help; benevolent, peace-loving China heeds the call’. Just imagine; both flags flying side by side. Hu and Brown (assuming he’s still inside No. 10) singing the Internationale at the opening ceremony, which would naturally include re-enactments of the Boxer Rebellion, the Opium Wars, and the handing over of Hong Kong. Personally, I would prefer a contemporary re-working of 6/4 with London buses replacing tanks. Probably a non-starter.

The possibilities are endless. Sino-UK relations can be cemented with the ceremonial return of a relic or two – a couple of opium pipes perhaps. On the athletic front, Liu Xiang would have a second chance on home soil, and He Kexin would get an opportunity to compete as a legally-aged gymnast. Further, Beijing taxi drivers can look forward to a gathering of easy victims the like of which they thought they’d never see again in their lifetimes.

And Beijing needn’t trouble itself over the cost of a fireworks display, they can just run the same footage as last year and call it ’environmental pyrotechnics.’ Residents of the capital will be delighted because the sky will turn blue again and they’ll be able to see their neighbours’ houses when they open the curtains in the morning.

Sure, there will be a few issues to smooth over - at which point the opium pipes might come in handy - but it’s a marriage made in heaven, I tell you. Somebody please forward this proposal to Boris, Seb, and Gordon right now. Seriously, can anyone see a downside here?

She moved back to Lhasa, found a job at Tibetan Literature, a government-run journal, and began delving into the history and folklore of Tibet. In 2003, a publisher in Guangzhou put out her first book, “Notes on Tibet,” a collection of prose and short stories that quickly sold out. It was just before the second print run that the authorities took notice. They promptly banned the book, saying it contained “serious political mistakes.”

In their condemnation of the book, her employer, the Tibetan Literature Association, said she had glorified the Dalai Lama, harmed the solidarity of the nation and “exaggerated and beautified the positive function of religion in social life.” They demanded a confession of her errors. She refused, and found herself unemployed.

Since then Woeser has become a more vocal critic of the Chinese government’s Tibetan policy. And well she might, for unlike a billion of her countrymen, she’s seen the consequences for herself.

Well well! Whatever next? The king of martial arts mayhem has developed a latent tendency for brown-nosing by making some CCP-esque comments about freedom in China:

“I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not,” Chan said. “I’m really confused now. If you’re too free, you’re like the way Hong Kong is now. It’s very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic.”

Chan added: “I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want.”

Secretly, Chan has clearly always fancied himself as a tank driver. He’d have done a great job 20 years ago. 

Thankfully, those pesky, anarchic students in Hong Kong have got a different, less anally oriented message for China’s leaders: be accountable; do it now!

Students at a Hong Kong university have called for the Chinese government to be held accountable for events in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago.

The booklet will now be made, after students from eight universities in Hong Kong criticised what they said were efforts to suppress freedom of speech.

Only 79 out of almost 2,000 students in the University of Hong Kong students’ union voted against the motion.

Correspondents say the result shows the continued strength of feeling about the killings in Tiananmen Square.

The university vote has garnered a lot of local media attention, especially during this sensitive period for Beijing in the run-up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen protests.

“We have had lots of discussion at the university and have realised there is a lot of diversity of views,” said Vincent Fok, council chairman in the students’ union.

He said Hong Kong students were more well-informed about the events than their counterparts from the mainland.

The union leader, Ayo Chan Yi-ngok, is under pressure after saying that some student leaders in the 1989 protest had acted irrationally.

At the City University, a plan to issue a booklet about the Tiananmen Square protests was initially quashed by students who said the 1989 events were of little relevance.

Gotta be proud of those HK students as the CCP net draws tighter around them.

On a related note People’s Daily (what a crappy name for a dictator’s mouthpiece) is censoring the names Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang. That’s what happens when a child’s mind controls the media.

Update

Predictably, there has been a backlash from people in Taiwan and Hong Kong (at whom Chan’s comments were directed) against Chan’s support for state repression. Silly bugger; I could have told him it’s a bad idea to upset your fan base. Need a new PR man, Jackie?

There’s a very intelligent discussion going on at cnreviews following Kai Pan’s article on this story. He is basically taking issue with the ‘western media take’ on Chan’s remarks. It’s well worth a read, as are the comments that follow, even if I can’t quite agree with his angle.

We’re a couple of months away from remembering the 20th anniversary of one the bloodiest atrocities of modern times. The Times today ran the following article from its archives of two decades ago. The numbers quoted are open to question, but reading the article provides a flashback to Tiananmen ‘89 and the sick brutality of a regime that turned the army on its own people and got away with it:

June 11, 1989: with up to 7,000 already dead, the killing goes on

Jon Swain in Beijing

I WITNESSED the sickening reality of murderous repression last Friday morning and checked my watch. It was 11.42am, five days after the People’s Liberation Army launched its devastating assault on Tiananmen Square.

Pinned to a wreath was a simple statement: “June 4, the darkest day in the history of the motherland.”

Then, the soldiers stabbed and slashed at students and onlookers with their bayonets, shot them with their pistols and rifles before tanks mangled their bodies in an act of barbarity that will be remembered as one of the darkest days in China’s history.

More than ever last Friday morning, Beijing was a city of anguish and fear. Troops and secret police were out in force to arrest anyone suspected of involvement in the pro-democracy movement.

CCTV, the state television network that just a week before had been broadcasting honest news about the pro-democracy demonstrations, was again fettered, giving telephone numbers for people to denounce and rat on “counter-revolutionaries”. In a grim exercise in propaganda it showed pictures of people being led away to confess their crimes.

With the hardliners of the Communist party under Deng Xiaoping, China’s senior leader, relentlessly gathering power this was, above all, a moment to remain inconspicuous.

For one young man whose world had collapsed on bloody Sunday in Tiananmen Square, the struggle against oppression went on despite the reign of terror. He fearlessly rode his bicycle out of a side street on the east side of the square, waving a red student protest banner in a lone act of defiance against the crackdown.

He was only in his twenties, dressed in slacks and a white shirt. As he emerged onto the main Boulevard of Eternal Peace, two armed policemen seized him and tore the banner from his hand.

There was no struggle and no time to cry for democracy or liberty. With sickening thuds, truncheon blows rained down on the young man in full view of a gathering crowd. He was dragged to an army tent beneath the high red walls of the Forbidden City. From there came a single shot.

A few in the crowd shouted angrily. Abrupt orders to disperse, backed up by a menacing wave of rifles, stilled the dissent.

By such an event one knows that China has reverted to a police state, its ideal of more democracy crushed. The People’s Liberation Army is supposed to love the people, but since the massacre a week ago its soldiers, with rare exception, have been behaving like a foreign army of occupation.

After the slaughter, western diplomats say the army now arouses as much dread and hatred as the Gestapo did in occupied Europe. At a bus stop in the centre of the city on Friday a man said: “This is a fascist state. If we had guns we would overthrow it now.”

The trigger-happy soldiers, who had gunned down people with abandon throughout the week, had by Saturday occupied positions across Beijing. “They have a knife at the city’s very throat,” said an attendant at one leading hotel. “I was in Tiananmen on Sunday morning and my best friend was killed.”

Estimates of western intelligence officials range from 3,000 to 7,000 dead and 10,000 wounded. It seems bizarre, but the first event that led to the bloodbath was a traffic accident. Until that moment, despite the imposition of martial law, both sides had shown remarkable restraint.

Then a police vehicle crashed into cyclists, killing at least one. As word of the accident spread, it generated fresh anger and revitalised the flagging protest movement.

Many atrocities were committed by troops that night. A western military attaché told how a young mother in the Avenue of Eternal Peace had pleaded with the troops to shoot her but spare the baby in her arms. A soldier bayoneted her to death.

One had only to stroll through a residential area of Beijing yesterday to gauge the revulsion for the regime. A statue to youth and vitality was garlanded with wreaths in memory of residents who had been cut down by the army. They included a six-year-old girl and a member of the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament. 

Read that last bit again. The “revulsion for the regime” has been swept away through repression and propaganda to the extent that today’s Chinese youth (and most of their parents) thank the regime for saving them from criminals. The rest of us aren’t so easily fooled. Get ready to remember.