Transcript

Host: This is “On the Line,” and I’m Eric Felten.

Chinese officials said that over six hundred people had “surrendered” to authorities following riots in Tibet. China’s crackdown on demonstrators pursuing autonomy for the region has led to strong international condemnation and even the suggestion that some countries might consider boycotting this summer’s Beijing Olympics. French president Nicolas Sarkozy said, “Our Chinese friends must understand the worldwide concern that there is about the question of Tibet.” U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States would not tie participation in the Olympics to China’s human rights record:

McCormack: “We view this as a significant international sporting event. We’re going to treat it as such. And we would also encourage China to make use of the fact that the world is watching the Olympics, and in this important international event, to put its best face forward, not only during the Olympics, but in the run-up to as well as after the Olympics.”

Host: Will the upcoming Olympics burnish China’s image as a great nation, or tarnish it, as the event draws international attention to the state of freedom in the country? I’ll ask my guests: Sophie Richardson, Asia Advocacy Director for Human Rights Watch; and joining us from our New York studio, Gordon Chang, author of the book “The Coming Collapse of China.” Welcome. Thanks for joining us today.

Sophie Richardson, “The Washington Post” had a recent editorial that read: “It looks increasingly likely that the Olympics will serve to remind the world not of China’s emerging greatness but of its continuing denial of freedom to its citizens, its repression of minorities, and its amoral alliances with rogue states.” Are things not turning out the way China had hoped or planned with regard to the Olympics?

Richardson: I think this is precisely the situation in which the Chinese government had hoped not to find itself with just a few months left to go before the Games. An enormous amount of energy, time, money, resources has gone into portraying a very particular image of China as a modern, open, cosmopolitan nation -- one that’s re-emerging on the world stage and is claiming its rightful place. And as a way of making this rhetoric match the reality, we’ve seen a systematic effort over the last six months to literally remove from the streets of Beijing people the government doesn’t want seen -- protestors, dissenters, that sort of person -- but also efforts to engineer a particular kind of press coverage in these last few months.

Host: When you say “engineer a particular kind of press coverage,” is this domestically or internationally?

Richardson: Both. There’s certainly no better example of this domestically in the last couple of weeks than the Tibetan -- the security forces in Tibet and Tibetan regions outside the TAR moved very quickly to expel foreign journalists from those regions as soon as the protests got under way. Indeed, we have some information to suggest that the Chinese government has made interventions to international media outlets about discussions that have been held on shows such as these, that those not proceed because they are hurtful to the Chinese government.

Host: Gordon Chang, are you there in New York?

Chang: I am, Eric.

Host: Do you think that the Chinese government thought that it could control what international media coverage there would be of the Games and the lead-up to the Games?

Chang: It’s hard to believe that they thought they could. But, you know, this is a government that does control things inside its borders, and it has a history of dictating what will be done and what will be said and what people will do. So, perhaps maybe they did think that they could do the same thing with the foreign journalists and broadcasts around the world. But, obviously, they can’t, because there is a reality of what’s happening in China. Obviously, people are going to comment on that. It’s an abhorrent reality, and, therefore, there’s going to be criticism in the media regardless of what the Chinese government wants.

Host: Sophie Richardson, part of this campaign that you’ve mentioned of trying to keep dissenting voices out of the way, we have, just in the last week or so, the conviction, the sentencing to five years in prison, of Yang Chunlin, who had started a petition, collecting signatures, on a simple statement saying, in China, “We want human rights, not the Olympics.” For this, he’s given a five-year prison term on charges of subversion. How does that come across to places like the European Union, where Yang Chunlin had been invited to deliver an address?

Richardson: I think this is a very clear example of the enormous gulf between what most of the rest of the world thinks of as normal, healthy, free speech and free expression -- criticism that carries no threats of violence or any other sort of serious challenge to the government -- but the Chinese government responds to, very harshly, in part because it is tied to its international profile. I think that’s why we’ve seen a noticeable increase either in the use of subversion charges against critics like these, sentencing them to long periods in jail, or an increase in the use of house arrest to simply keep people who have ties, particularly to the international media, from speaking to those kinds of journalists and getting these sorts of criticisms reported internationally.

Host: Gordon Chang, doesn’t the Chinese government hurt itself more than help itself by doing things like locking up Yang Chunlin for five years on subversion charges?

Chang: Of course it does. This just shows us that there is such a gap in perception with what the Chinese government thinks and, really, what the rest of the world thinks. And this is a problem going forward for us because we approach the Chinese government with certain assumptions about the way they’re going to react, what we think they should do, and everything else, but, obviously, there is this, just, difference in, just, mind-set. It’s important because we have to craft important policies, and, of course, China is an increasingly important country.

Host: Sophie Richardson, on this question of China’s sense of how things are perceived and how they’re perceived, in regard to Tibet, there’s now been a campaign to demonize the Dalai Lama, who is held in rather high regard in the West and around the world. You had a Chinese Communist Party chief in Tibet saying, of the disturbances in Tibet, that it was being done by the Dalai Lama and calling the Dalai Lama “a jackal in Buddhist monk’s robes, an evil spirit with a human face and the heart of a beast. We are engaged in a fierce battle of blood and fire with the Dalai clique.” Is there any sense of how that sounds to ears outside of China?

Richardson: I think it sounds -- I’m struggling for the right adjective here. But I think to people who follow China, it’s sort of an alarming, knee-jerk use of almost Cultural Revolution-era rhetoric. I mean, really one of these very dramatic, politicized, derogatory terms. You know, someone suggested to me the other day that it would be an interesting experiment to use that kind of rhetoric but swapping in Hu Jintao’s name instead of the Dalai Lama and seeing what sort of response that elicited from the Chinese government. But I think words or terms like that, especially applied to a Nobel Peace Prize winner here, sound quite anachronistic.

Host: Gordon Chang, along those same lines, you had Shan Huimin from the public security ministry saying of the Tibetans that “their evil purpose is to produce turmoil to interrupt and destroy the 2008 Beijing Olympics, whose theme is peace, and to destroy our country’s good stability and unity in order to reach their evil goal of splitting the mother country.” What are we supposed to make of this kind of response?

Chang: The interesting thing about that statement is that Beijing is tying every event in the country to the Olympics. Obviously, for Beijing, the Olympics are an extremely important event. But for many people inside China, they’ve got other things that they’re interested in. The Tibetans demonstrated because it was the anniversary of the 1959 uprising. I don’t know if they specifically thought that it would be good to try to tie this into the Olympics, but if they did, they probably would have done it later in the calendar, much closer to the opening ceremony. So, I think that it shows that the government has completely focused, like a laser, on August 8, 2008, when the Games begin, because, for them, this has really been the focus of almost eight years of efforts on the part of the Chinese government.

Host: Sophie Richardson, is it really the Chinese government, then, that’s tying things to the Olympics more than even people outside?

Richardson: It’s hard to see the developments of the last couple of weeks as anything other than a self-inflicted wound. Many of the reasons that have prompted the protests to escalate across Tibetan regions have to do with policies that have been implemented by the central government, many of them actually under the direction of Hu Jintao when he was Party secretary in Tibet. And, really, at the end of the day, by linking so many of its different important international policies to the Olympics by insisting on inviting fifty heads of state to come to the opening ceremonies, which is not standard protocol for past Games, it’s really Beijing itself that has welded these issues together in a way, I suspect, they’re going to be fairly sorry about.

Host: Gordon Chang, what’s going to happen with the invitations to heads of state to visit the opening ceremonies to the Games?

Chang: One thing it’s doing, as you pointed out in your opening comments, is that it is giving leaders around the world the opportunity to comment about what is happening in China today. The French president talking about Tibet and the opening ceremony and possibly boycotting it is something that, of course, Beijing does not want to see. But, as Sophie has mentioned, the government itself is tying all of these events together. Now you have the British prime minister who’s going to meet the Dalai Lama in May. You have all the leaders around the world commenting in one way or another about this. And, of course, your “Washington Post” editorial mentioned that President Bush should be more forceful in speaking out. So, Beijing is really creating this vortex for itself, and where it ends, we don’t know. But, clearly, the headlines are coming much closer together. They’re becoming much more virulent, and, certainly, this is not what Beijing wanted but certainly is what Beijing is getting.

Host: Sophie, the president and his spokesman, given the opportunity to say that there might be some, you know, possibility in which the U.S. would launch protest or boycott or something has made a point of trying to keep that off the table. And yet, then, not long ago, we had the State Department put out an advisory to people who travel to the Olympics in which it pointed out that even in the privacy of your hotel room with the door closed, you cannot expect privacy in China and that you can expect that you will be under surveillance. Is the State Department trying to say: “We may not boycott, but we are going to use the opportunity to point out the state of human rights and privacy rights and those kinds of freedoms in the context of the Games”?

Richardson: I think the administration really wants to have it all sorts of different ways. In a way, the Chinese government couldn’t be blamed for feeling like the U.S. position is pretty schizophrenic at this point. Even specifically on the Tibet issue, six months ago, we see President Bush awarding the Dalai Lama the Congressional Medal of Honor. And now, at a moment when American intervention could, at least rhetorical intervention, could help enormously, the president can’t seem to find his voice in support of this man. The State Department’s directives have really been quite contradictory. They’re concerned about how these sorts of abuses might negatively affect Americans who are going to the Games. But they don’t want to have to talk about them publicly or really challenge the Chinese government on it. I think they, too, have created a real problem for themselves by being weak on this in the past.

Host: Gordon Chang, what’s your sense of how U.S. policymakers are handling these issues?

Chang: I think they’re a little bit concerned about angering Beijing. Clearly, as Sophie says, the president has not yet found his voice. But that has created certainly criticism, not only in the human rights community but among analysts all across the country. This week alone, we’ve had editorials in “The New York Times” and “The Washington Post” commenting on the Bush Administration’s posture on Tibet and the Olympics. And you can be sure that we’re going to see more and more of this in the future. Right now, President Bush seems to be following his compatriots among Western leaders. At some point, I think the pressure is going to be on the President to be a little bit more candid in his views about what’s happening in Tibet and what’s happening throughout China, also in connection with the Olympics.

Host: Sophie Richardson, what kind of pressure is building not only on political leaders but also on the Western companies and other international corporations that are heavily invested in the Beijing Olympics? We’ve seen Samsung, which is one of the eight major sponsors to the Olympics, issue a statement saying, “We believe the Olympic Games are not the place for demonstrations, and we hope that all people attending the Games recognize the importance of this.”

Richardson: First of all, I think that’s a fairly extraordinary statement from a South Korean-based company where human rights and the Olympics very much converged and where a labor movement with a proud history of protests was at the forefront of bringing democratic rule to South Korea. To see the Koreans trying to equivocate on that matter is really alarming. I think the pressure right at the moment is perhaps worst on the sponsors who are particularly underwriting the torch relay and especially those who are underwriting the leg of it that is supposed to go through Lhasa at the end of June.

Host: Which is part of the Tibet region there.

Richardson: Exactly. Lhasa is the capital of Tibet. All of the companies that are sponsoring the Games have extensive corporate social responsibility commitments. These are publicly articulated, and yet we’ve seen almost no sort of reiteration of those principles, any sort of public certification that those companies’ investments inside China, aren’t in any way perpetrating or contributing to things like labor abuses in the supply chains. I think the response of these companies has been, as Gordon just said of the U.S. government, in an effort to protect their favor with the Chinese government has been very weak.

Host: Gordon Chang, some time ago, the prominent Hollywood film director Steven Spielberg had made an agreement to film the Beijing Olympics and actress Mia Farrow, who’s been outspoken on China and Darfur and China’s actions in Darfur, publicly called out Steven Spielberg on this and said that, in an editorial in “The Wall Street Journal,” that he would be “the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Olympics,” referring to the German film director who filmed the Olympics in Berlin under Hitler. And ultimately, Steven Spielberg did bow out of filming the Olympics for Beijing. Is that a bellwether of what may end up happening with similar protests and pressure on other participants in the Olympics?

Chang: Just about three months ago or so, it looked like the one issue that was going to be linked to the Olympics was Sudan and Darfur. All of a sudden, Tibet comes along and now Western leaders are talking about Tibet and the Olympics. The real issue for Beijing is, in the four or five months to go between now and August, “What’s going to be the next issue and the issue after that that people are going to try to link to the Olympic Games?” So, I think that it’s going to be very hard for Beijing because everything now has become politicized. Everything in China is linked to the Olympics and partly, as Sophie has said, because of the efforts of the government itself there. So, it’s going to be one thing after another. There are about a dozen people or a dozen organizations that have called for boycotts over various things, such as the use of fur and Taiwan. Any number of these things could occur, and we’re going to see a very, very difficult period between now and August 8th.

Host: Sophie Richardson, what’s your sense of what the prospects are for any kind of official boycott happening, and what would China’s reaction be to that?

Richardson: I think a full boycott, meaning not sending any of the athletes, is extremely unlikely. Indeed, that’s something that a lot more would have to go wrong before we even were supportive of that position. At the same time, I think there is growing momentum and pressure on heads of state, particularly in Europe, not to attend the opening ceremonies. This robs the Chinese government of a kind of international legitimacy and validation that they’ve really sought all along. I think if that actually happened, we could probably expect to see some fairly serious retaliation out of Beijing. Normally, there’s quite a bit of bluster, as was the case when German chancellor Angela Merkel met the Dalai Lama last year. At the end of the day, really, relations were not terribly badly disrupted and a few delegations were canceled, but there was no suspension of full diplomatic relations or anything of that order of magnitude. But I think the Chinese government has invested so much of its own pride and its own legitimacy of the Party with respect to its own people that having that challenged by other countries would trigger a pretty strong response.

Host: Gordon Chang, what’s your sense on that?

Chang: Sophie, the thing that I think that’s important, though, is that if there is going to be a boycott of the opening ceremonies, it’s not just going to be the French president and it’s not just going to be the German chancellor. It’s probably going to be all of the heads of state in Western Europe. China, although it may want to retaliate against a France or a Germany, it’s not going to retaliate against all of the European Union and perhaps the United States, plus a good part of the rest of the world. This is something which is going to be interesting to watch, because if the world is united on this, I don’t think the Chinese are going to be able to retaliate just because they depend so much on the world, when you look at not only the diplomatic support they’ve received but also their trade relations. So, I don’t think the Chinese have that much leverage. I don’t think they have that much room to get angry. They may get angry, but it’s going to be their problem, not ours.

Host: About fifteen seconds left. Last words, Sophie.

Richardson: One hopes -- Certainly, Gordon, I agree with everything you just said. One hopes that the logical response out of Beijing is to do what everyone is asking -- negotiate, open a dialogue, uphold your own autonomy laws, show the world that you’re serious about your own commitments, both about Tibet, about human rights, about the Olympics, about your trade deals.

Host: I’m afraid that’s going to have to be the last word for today. We’re out of time. But I’d like to thank my guests: Sophie Richardson, Asia Advocacy Director for Human Rights Watch; and joining us from our New York studio, Gordon Chang, author of the book: “The Coming Collapse of China.” Before we go, I’d like to invite you to send us your questions or comments. You can reach us through our website at www.voanews.com/ontheline. For “On the Line,” I’m Eric Felten.