For their high-security Beijing Olympics, Chinese police have their bomb detectors and metal detectors. They could do with an absurdity detector, too.
Take the example of blacklisted author Yu Jie. Because the games are in town, police are keeping him under close watch at his Beijing home, 24/7, with plainclothes officers stationed outside in three rotating shifts.
Yu says that only by police car, under escort, is he allowed to leave the gated middle-class community where he and his wife are raising their 4-month-old boy, Justin, who was born in the United States. So much for the Olympic spirit.
The Beijing Games aren't much fun and games for those rights activists, public critics of the government and outspoken freethinkers like Yu who aren't welcome at the party, are under watch or have been driven out of town. "I was uncomfortable and I felt unsafe," outspoken AIDS activist Wan Yanhai said, explaining why he has quit the Olympic city for the duration.
"I didn't want to see police follow me every day." Even in authoritarian China, there's no legal grounds for such harassment.
But China's police are a law unto themselves, regardless of the eyes of the world turning to Beijing. In the case of Yu, who met with U.S. President George W. Bush at the White House in 2006, the police agents seem aware that they are on shaky legal ground.
He says they told him he should look upon their surveillance as a "service," not as a constraint. With gas prices high and Beijing traffic subjected to Olympic restrictions, it is cheaper and easier to ride in our car, Yu says the officers have told him.
Over the years, Yu has learned that it's sometimes best not to resist. These guys can get nasty.
They have previously threatened to kill him and make it look like an accident, he says. And so, during the games, Yu will ride with the cops when he needs to go out.
He doesn't like it but is keeping a brave face. "It's cheaper than a taxi, I don't have to pay," he said.
Yu says he hasn't been authorized to publish any of his writings in China since 2004. He suspects that's because he was detained by police for one night that year with two other government critics.
They were preparing a study about human rights in China and seemingly alerted police monitors by discussing their plans by e-mail. Yu is also a Christian and prays weekly with friends in an unregistered and thus technically not legal congregation.
Yet the police still obligingly took him across town this past Sunday for worship. Yu said the two officers waited outside for 3½-hours until he was done and then escorted him home, paying the cab fare both ways.
A police escort to an unauthorized gathering: absurd, no? The real irony is that Yu is the most unlikely of threats to the Olympics: he's totally disinterested in the games, is turned off by doping and the commercialization of sports, is convinced that the International Olympic Committee is corrupt, and lives way out on Beijing's eastern outskirts, near a drug rehabilitation prison, where any protest would almost certainly go unnoticed. Yu and other activists have said it was never their intention to make trouble during the Aug.
8-24 games. Perhaps the smarter thing for the communist government, which hopes the Olympics will burnish its image, would have been to leave people like Yu alone.
It certainly would have been less of a news story for the thousands of foreign journalists in town, and given the government's foreign critics less ammunition, had Yu and others been able to say that they were being allowed to simply live their lives as the world's athletes compete. At the U.N. General Assembly, China has helped push through a resolution which urged all nations to observe a truce during the Beijing Games.
Could it not have called an Olympic truce with its domestic critics, too? To be fair, China is freer in many ways than it was when Beijing was picked as the Olympic host in 2001, sending jubilant crowds out onto Beijing's now tidied-up and rebuilt streets. Some of that progress is Olympic-related: Eased restrictions on foreign reporters meant there were no problems chatting with Yu for an hour, in a bookshop within the limits of the neighborhood where he's confined.
Under IOC pressure, Chinese organizers have also unblocked some Internet sites at the main press center and Olympic venues, although others remain censored. Although public critics like Yu are still only a tiny and mostly unheard minority in China, they are like the birds that coal miners used to carry with them to test for bad air down the pit.
Despite the hype from Chinese authorities and the IOC that the games will help make for a more progressive China, more at ease in the world, the harassment of activists campaigning for better human rights and peaceful political change shows there's still a long way to go. ___ John Leicester is an Olympics columnist for The Associated Press.
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