Watching You
China’s intelligence services are gearing up for next year’s Beijing Olympics, gathering information on foreigners who might mount protests and spoil the nation’s moment in the spotlight.
Government spy agencies and think tanks are compiling lists of potentially troublesome foreign organizations, looking beyond the human rights groups long critical of Beijing, security experts and a consultant familiar with the effort said.
They include evangelical Christians eager to end China’s religious restrictions, activists wanting Beijing to use its oil-buying leverage with Sudan to end the strife in Darfur and environmental campaigners angry about global warming.
The effort is among the broadest intelligence-collection drives Beijing has taken against foreign activist groups, often known as non-governmental organizations, or NGOs. It aims to head off protests and other political acts during an Olympics the communist leadership hopes will boost its popularity at home and China’s image abroad. [AP, Charles Hutzler]
It’s going to get interesting if thousands of foreign tourists who happen to be politically active on Darfur, North Korea, Tibet, religious freedom, or human rights are denied visas or turned away on arrival, or if they’re followed, harassed, or arrested when they’re there. Can Beijing stop every poster and leaflet from getting into every event? Can they keep sufficient control over the foreign media to prevent multiple small “guerrilla” demonstrations from being staged before cameras? What kind of publicity will it mean for China when the police arrest them and further publicize their causes? The AP found one of the Thought Police to give this disingenuous response:
“Demonstrations of all kinds are a concern, including anti-American demonstrations,” said the consultant, who works for Beijing’s Olympic organizers and asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
The government, he said, is “trying to find out what kinds of NGOs will come. … What are their plans?”
I have to wonder how likely it is that anti-American demonstrators would pick Beijing as their ideal site, unless of course the Chinese government decided to stage anti-American protests as a distraction. I certainly don’t put that past them.
What we are talking about here is peaceful speech and assembly, things that are tolerated everywhere in the civilized world. We’re about to find out just how far China will go to silence it. What we’ve seen is that China is increasingly prepared to censor views it doesn’t like right here in the United States. Yet ironically, stories like this are starting to make me more glad than disappointed that Beijing was chosen as the site of the Olympics. No, I wouldn’t go. No, I wouldn’t urge others to go. Yes, I hope the games are a financial and public relations flop of historic proportions for China. But I see the potential for this to plant revolutionary seeds in Chinese society and publicize the very issues that China want to remove from the public discussion.