Failing the real Olympic test

August 08, 2008/The Australian/TibetPress

When the Chinese Government last week reneged on its pledge to offer unfettered internet access to foreign journalists in Beijing to cover the Olympic Games, the flashpoint issue of press freedom in China moved once again to centre stage. But the tizzy over new curbs on the foreign press also came off as remarkably self-obsessed, as though the whole question of press freedom in China hinged on whether Western reporters were able to access dissident websites from the comfort of their suites in the Olympic media village. Of course these are important concerns and China should be pressed to live up to its promises. That's why I was disconcerted, though not surprised, to learn independently from several foreign reporters in Beijing that Chinese authorities were blocking email transmission of my own recent investigative report on internet controls in China, written for the Far Eastern Economic Review. Yet the boisterous ghettoisation of the press freedom issue during the past week also got me thinking. When exactly was it that the burning question of free speech and the Olympics in China became all about us? That was, in fact, seven years ago. When China was awarded the Games in 2001, it pledged that there would be no restrictions on media. But this openness applied only to the 20,000-odd foreign journalists who would descend on Beijing for the festivities. Wang Wei, head of Beijing's organising committee, pledged at the time: We will give the media complete freedom to report when they come to China. And what about the hundreds of thousands of Chinese journalists who were already there? They were quarantined from the Olympic pledge, along with more than one billion Chinese citizens. While a promise was made to foreign journalists, China's media had only the cold assurance, based on bitter experience, that they would face during the Olympics the same tightening of controls that precede any event of profound circumstance in China, where the Communist Party continues to see information control as critical to its hold on power. To honour China's Olympic promise, a senior Chinese minister pledged in December 2006 a constructive and co-operative partnership with foreign media and a relaxation of restrictions that would extend through to October 2008. Soon after the announcement of the new rules for foreign journalists, an influential commercial newspaper in China expressed a timid yearning for a similar deal for Chinese journalists. If this light were to shine in all directions, touching domestic Chinese media too, it said, this would earn worldwide admiration. The light, of course, has not been shared equally. And who bears the burden of blame for this? Yes, certainly China's leadership. It has demonstrated again and again that its promises are little more than fetching slogans it can interpret as suits its broader political ends. This was clear again last week as BOCOG spokesman Sun Weide responded to concerns over the blocking of internet sites: "Our promise was that journalists would be able to use the internet for their work during the Olympic Games. So we have given them sufficient access to do that." Ah, so the slogan of media freedom was really about "sufficient access"? But as we criticise China's Government for its cynical actions, and as we harp incessantly on the Olympics as a test of media freedoms in China, aren't we glossing over our own duplicity? Our promises resound like empty slogans, too. We talk about human rights in China, about its commitment to media freedoms. But we seem to have forgotten how meagre the promise was that we levied on the Chinese in the first place as a condition of playing host to this year's Games. David Bandurski appears in The Wall Street Journal and received a Human Rights Press Award in 2008 for an investigative piece on China's use of professional associations to enforce internet censorship. David Bandurski