The Beijing olympics: China's critics

Also in Prospect's Olympics coverage: read David Goldblatt's guide to the political and cultural landscape of the Games; and his special online accounts of the Olympics from Athens 1896 to Athens 2004, as well as of the best Olympic books, films and websites.

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Christian Tyler interviews Wei Jingsheng

The man sitting opposite me in a Turkish restaurant in London is well qualified to talk about China's Communist leaders. He has been a keen student of them for more than 30 years, 18 of which have been spent in Chinese jails.

As you might expect, Wei Jingsheng is not an admirer of the regime. But his view of China's rulers as they prepare for their Olympics comes as a surprise. Where most western observers see a confident, dynamic, prosperous country celebrating its coming of age as a world power, Wei sees a faltering dynasty, afraid of its subjects and fearful for its future, for which the games may prove a serious political gamble.

In 1978 Wei designed a poster calling for political freedom which caused a sensation when it appeared on Beijing's "Democracy Wall." He is 58 years old now and lives in forced exile in Washington DC, where he heads a pressure group for democracy in east Asia. I ask him if he thinks he will ever go back to China.

"Why not? The Communists are afraid they may not make it even to the Olympics."

"You mean that party might collapse?"

"It's possible. Even they have that feeling. They understand that their reputation has reached the very bottom. If they don't retrieve it, they could easily collapse."

For years, western pundits predicted that economic freedom in China would bring democracy in its train. Now they are not so sure. And in the west, Wei Jingsheng, once a hero decorated for his dissidence, now seems to have become something of an embarrassment. Almost none of the politicians, civil servants or academics he met during his visit to London wanted their names mentioned or their photographs taken.

Wei says this apologetic stance is the result partly of China's growing commercial importance to the west, but also a successful image-boosting campaign by the Communist party itself.

"People have got the wrong idea," he tells me. "The economy is not really open. Look at foreign trade, which is still controlled by the government. Economic freedom is only for corrupt officials and their relatives. For ordinary people there's no free economy. It's very hard to do business there. And it is not only the poor who are upset. A lot of rich businessmen are not happy either. Officials change every year, and the old officials are afraid that their money will be grabbed away by the new ones. That's the main reason so much money is being sent overseas. It's not safe in China."

The government's reputation has certainly taken a beating this year. The Tibetan riots in March prompted an unusual act of defiance from 368 Chinese writers, scholars and lawyers inside China who signed a letter criticising the party's conduct, which was published in the New York Review of Books this May. Then followed the public relations fiasco of the Olympic torch relay and the mysterious accompanying men in blue—the paramilitary bodyguard—culminating in a private parade in Lhasa for a handpicked audience, while everyone else was told to stay indoors.

In May the Sichuan earthquake struck. In an attempt to regain face, "Uncle" Wen Jiabao, the premier, went to console the survivors. But behind him came armed police to remove distraught mothers demanding to know why so many school buildings had collapsed, killing thousands of their children, while government offices had managed to withstand the tremors.

"Right after the earthquake, ordinary people were very angry," says Wei. "When I look at the history of China, I find that when authority is weak, a natural disaster may put an end to the dynasty."

In the background are the hundreds of unreported protests against corrupt tax-gathering and the expropriation of land, against forced abortions, arbitrary arrests and unexplained prison deaths. Perhaps President Hu Jintao's recent Q&A session with China's internet users—a medium his government tries so hard to censor—was, like Gordon Brown's phone calls to random British voters, a sign of slipping confidence.

And the stifling security blanket thrown round Beijing and the Olympic park suggests Muslim terrorism is not the only thing the regime fears.

Wei Jingsheng knows how politically crucial it was for the Chinese leadership to win the Olympics. In September 1993, he was suddenly paroled from his first, 15-year, jail sentence: nine days before the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was due to vote on Beijing's bid to host the 2000 Games.

In spite of long years of isolation, beatings and illness, Wei refused to leave the jail without his copies of the letters—most of them never delivered—he had written to his family and high-ups in the Communist party. He predicted, correctly, that party bosses were so desperate to let him out before the IOC vote that they would accept his conditions.

And so survived some of the most remarkable prison writings to emerge from the China gulag: The Courage to Stand Alone (Penguin, 1997). By turns sober, mocking, stern and humorous, these letters are a devastating critique of the totalitarian mentality. They show how Wei, a former ardent Maoist and PLA soldier, a student of Marx, Lenin and Mao, had entirely rethought the world around him.

China failed in that millennial Olympic bid, and within six months Wei was back in jail, with another sentence—14 years this time—which seemed likely to kill him. Thanks to an international outcry, however, he was released on "medical parole" after three more years. He was driven directly to the airport and put on a plane to the US.

When I accused Wei of wishful thinking about the imminent death of the Chinese Communist party, he laughed good-humouredly. "It is not just me who says it. The party think the same. And they listen to what I say, because in the past I have got it right."

Wei may underestimate the leadership's ability to stay on top. After all, they have the power that grows from the barrel of a gun (as Mao put it), an aggressive propaganda machine and, it seems, an increasingly deferential western clientele. Wei says the Olympics are "a big opportunity" for opposition groups inside as well as outside China. And he is not alone in thinking that if protesters succeed in spoiling the games there would be a political crisis in Beijing.

Come the day, citizens of the free west will not begrudge China's athletes their haul of gold medals, nor the national pride those medals will bring. They might, however, reflect that the people most counting on gold at these Olympics are not athletes or spectators, but the worried mandarins of the Chinese Communist party.

Jimmy Lai on China: Physical strength, moral poverty

When the Olympic Games begin in Beijing, China will show the world its physical strength, but also its moral poverty. This is unavoidable because the Olympics are more than just a sporting event; they are about aspirations and man's faith in the value of pursuing those aspirations. That faith gives the games a moral dimension that, despite all the gold medals won by authoritarian regimes, remains incompatible with dictatorship.

On China's mainland, the pursuit of one's aspirations remains extremely limited. Ever since the market liberalisation initiated by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, the Chinese government has opened its markets to the world's goods and technology but has kept the social and political spheres tightly sealed. The gradual opening of the Chinese market has led to an influx of foreign business and investment, thereby lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. But because the Communist party has impeded the development of civil society and democratic institutions, this new affluence has not led to a renaissance in culture or morality. When the spotlight of the Olympics shines on China, this emptiness will become apparent to the world.

Yet despite my scepticism about Beijing's ability to turn the Olympics into the public relations success story it so strongly seeks, I remain optimistic about China in the long term. I even dare to hope that the clash of values that will be on display at the Olympics will play some role in breaking Beijing's stranglehold on people's minds. The reactions of the half million or so foreigners thronging into China to watch the games, as well as the billions more who will watch on television throughout the world, could be a huge wake-up call to China. The realisation that the rest of the world will not swallow the myth of a "harmonious society" propagated by the Communist party could unleash a healthy round of soul-searching.

The market opening has been good for China. But the market is just a single part of a human society, one that cannot exist in isolation. If a government focuses on economic expansion alone—as Beijing has done, considering this its primary mandate to rule—the market will eventually become pathological and a threat to life itself. China's constant struggle with contaminated food, fake medicines and faulty goods are cases in point. Freedom in its true sense derives from ordered liberty: its roots lie in the values of trust, honesty and integrity. China needs the complementary development of civil institutions and moral infrastructure, so that the market can play its proper role.

In its single-minded focus on efficient economic development, the Chinese government has relied on political repression to achieve its ends. For instance, when the government needs land for development or roads, it takes over people's farmland or demolishes their homes, with very little compensation to the owners. Such actions betray a callous indifference toward the wellbeing of its own people; equally, the government can also show a ruthless side in dealing with individuals who are seen as having damaged China's image among business and consumer circles abroad.

In 2007, reports that Chinese companies had repeatedly shipped contaminated food abroad were threatening to seriously damage the reputation of the country's exports. Beijing stunned observers by executing Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of the Chinese Food and Drug Administration, who had been convicted of bribery charges. Many foreign commentators saw Zheng as a scapegoat for the government's own failures, but Beijing felt it could show the mortified populace at home and abroad a bloody head on the spike and get on with business.

In recent decades, China has been focusing on the development of its economic and military power. It has neglected to cultivate its "soft power," the more subtle means of influence. Many observers tend to exaggerate China's rising influence, because they ignore its lack of soft power. Soft power is not about what businessmen or their governments think, but about what a country is perceived as standing for. Astute observers know that there is more to China than just its GDP growth. They know also that Beijing keeps 3,900 political prisoners and 29 journalists in prison, more than any other country, and that the government censors the press and internet with deadly efficiency. They know that such behaviour is not only deeply immoral, but also cancerous within the state organism. In the long term, freedom of ideas and expression is as important as freedom of markets.

The 2008 Olympics will take place in Beijing and a number of other Chinese cities: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Qingdao, Tianjin, Shenyang and Qinhuangdao. Visitors will experience first hand China's dismal environmental record. Thirteen of the world's 20 most polluted cities are in China, which has overtaken the US as the world's largest source of carbon dioxide emissions. China's environmental problem is not just a symptom of regulatory laxity, but also a moral disease. When a government focuses on rapid economic expansion regardless of the human cost to its own people, how much would it care for the air, the water, the forests and the animals?

In 2006, there were more than 80,000 social uprisings of varying scales throughout the country, and the gap between the poor and the rich was still widening despite—or maybe as a result of—the pace of economic growth. Because economic development is driven and directed from the top, the people in power retain most of the benefit. The richest 1 per cent control 60 per cent of China's domestic wealth. China is struggling to find the solutions required by its emerging social problems. It becomes clearer every day that social changes are urgently needed. Can the Olympic Games help break this logjam?

They might. The fact that China's society is in a moral vacuum also means that there are no entrenched intermediate institutions; people are less inhibited and can accept new ideas and values with ease and speed. The isolation of Chinese society from the system of democratic values shared by an ever larger part of the outside world is possible only as long as the workability of the economic-expansion-alone-is-enough paradigm is taken for granted. But if this paradigm is impeded by the incompatibility of its current solutions to emerging problems, coupled with a desire for more democratic values spurred by the interaction with the outside world on the Olympics, it could disintegrate and give rise to people's awareness of the need for a new set of alternative solutions.

The Olympic Games will provide a unique opportunity to deliver a strong message to Beijing: in the long term, China cannot expect to be a major player in the global market without being a respected member of the world community. If China is the future, it has to look more like the west, not so much in its appearance and physical structures, but to build a firm foundation based on democratic values, healthy civil institutions and basic protections of human rights.

Jimmy Lai is the founder of Next Media, the largest listed media company in Hong Kong and the publisher of leading newspapers and magazines in Hong Kong and Taiwan, including Apple Daily and Next Magazine. Born in Guangdong province, he smuggled himself to Hong Kong on a boat at the age of 12, and worked as a child labourer in a garment factory before becoming one of greater China's best known clothing and media entrepreneurs. This commentary is adapted from a chapter in the new book China's Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges, ed Minky Worden (Turnaround /Seven Stories Press). More at china.hrw.org/chinas_great_leap