Olympics in China

[BridgeTroll]

Welcome to the world of communism...such restrictions are expected and no surprise.

Yeah I agree, wouldn't they all know this going in? Why dig up trouble anyway? Just cover the games and leave, why stir up issues?

Because it should be exposed...  Many think Marx, Mao, and Lenin are cool......... They are not.

[BridgeTroll]

Apparently Muslim extremists dont like the Communist Chinese either...


Chinese border assault kills 16
Sixteen Chinese policemen have been killed in an attack on a border post in the restive Muslim region of Xinjiang, state media say.

Two attackers reportedly drove up to the post in a rubbish truck and threw two grenades, before moving in to attack the policemen with knives.

The attack came four days before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.

Both attackers were captured during the raid near the city of Kashgar, Xinhua state news agency reported.

Kashgar, known as Kashi in Chinese, is some 2,500 miles (4,000km) from Beijing, near the border with Tajikistan.

Xinhua said the attack happened at about 0800 (0000 GMT), as the policemen were jogging outside the compound.

Fourteen policemen died at the scene and two on the way to hospital. Another 16 policemen were hurt.

One of the attackers was reported to have been injured in the leg.

Xinjiang, in the north-west of the country, is home to the Muslim Uighur people. Uighur separatists have waged a low-level campaign against Chinese rule for decades.

Human rights groups say Beijing is suppressing the rights of Uighurs.

The BBC's Daniel Griffiths in Beijing says China has spoken in the past of what it calls a terrorist threat from Muslim militants in Xinjiang, but it has provided little evidence to back up its claims.

A spokesman for the Beijing Games Organising Committee told Xinhua he was confident that Olympic participants and spectators would be safe.

"China has focused on strengthening security and protection around Olympic venues and at the Olympics Village, so Beijing is already prepared to respond to any threat," Sun Weide was quoted as saying.

Warnings

Last week, a senior Chinese army officer warned that Islamic separatists were the biggest danger to the Olympics.


CHINA'S UIGHURS
Ethnically Turkic Muslims, mainly in Xinjiang
Made bid for independent state in 1940s
Sporadic violence in Xinjiang since 1991
Uighurs worried about Chinese immigration and erosion of traditional culture 

Col Tian Yixiang of the Olympics security command centre told reporters the main threat came from the "East Turkestan terrorist organisation".

The term is used by the government to refer to Islamist separatists in Xinjiang.

Late last month a group called the Turkestan Islamic Party said it had blown up buses in Shanghai and Yunnan, killing five people.

But China denied that the explosions were acts of terrorism.

The Washington-based IntelCenter, which monitors terrorism communications, said the Turkestan Islamic Party had released a video entitled Our Blessed Jihad in Yunnan.

In it, the group's leader, Commander Seyfullah, said it was responsible for several attacks and threatened the Olympics.

"The Chinese have haughtily ignored our warnings," IntelCenter quoted him as saying.

"The Turkestan Islamic Party volunteers... have started urgent actions."

'Evicted'

In Beijing, Chinese police and a small group of protesters clashed in Qianmen district, near Tiananmen Square.

The demonstrators complained that they had been evicted from their homes to make way for the reconstruction of the district.

The Olympic torch is due to be carried round a stadium in Mianyang, Sichuan province, which was used to house thousands of people forced from their homes by a devastating earthquake in May.

The torch will go on to the provincial capital in Chengdu on Tuesday before heading to Beijing for the opening ceremony on Friday.




http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7540138.stm

[Doctor_K]

As an unfortunate bookend to BridgeTroll's opening post in this thread, here's a related follow-up to the whole situation, courtesy of the NY Times.  Lengthy, but worth the read:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/sports/olympics/12china.html?partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss

Would-Be Protesters Find the Olympics Failed to Expand Free Speech in Beijing

By EDWARD WONG
Published: September 11, 2008

BEIJING â€" Eleven people came here to the capital on Monday, bent on protesting property losses. They were experienced, having been to Beijing before to petition the central government. They were familiar, all coming from the same town and having been locked up in the same jails. They were crafty, flying up on two planes from a third city, rather than taking the train from their own, and lying low for two days before trying anything.

But they never had a chance.

Some of the group left their hide-out, an apartment in a northern neighborhood, on Wednesday to carry out a protest outside the main Olympic stadium, called the Bird’s Nest. But there was no protest, and they have not been heard from. Later, another protester, Huang Liuhong, stepped outside with her supporters, only to find some 50 police officers from her hometown. They told her they had been watching her and the others ever since they arrived.

That night, Ms. Huang, 36, speaking by cellphone, said that she and her older sister were being driven back south to their city, Liuzhou, and that a policewoman had just stripped them naked so they would not try to run away.

“We’re surrounded by police, and there are more coming to meet us,” she said.

The case of Ms. Huang and the other disgruntled residents of Liuzhou, who came here to hold demonstrations over four cases of property seizure or destruction, shows that when it comes to freedom of protest, the Olympics changed little in the Chinese capital. The Chinese government still requires citizens to register to protest, and it has yet to grant any permits for people to hold lawful protests in three designated parks in Beijing.

Before the Olympics, the central government ordered local governments to keep protesters or troublemakers from coming to Beijing, and the vigilance of the police officers from Liuzhou shows that that order still stands.

The Paralympics run through Wednesday, and perhaps some restrictions will ease afterward. But citizens like Ms. Huang remain skeptical that there has been any real increase in freedom of speech, despite the hopes of the International Olympic Committee that awarding the Games to China would encourage the government to improve its free speech and human rights record.

“Our government is one of all cheaters,” Ms. Huang said in an interview in an apartment in northern Beijing hours before being detained. “This society isn’t ruled by law, but by people’s whims.”

Before the Games began on Aug. 8, the central government announced the opening of three protest parks in Beijing. But the government went on to detain people who applied to protest â€" including two frail women in their late 70s who were sentenced to “re-education through labor” for wanting to demand more compensation for the seizure of their homes.

That incident was echoed on Tuesday when the police in Tiananmen Square dragged away an elderly woman who was trying to hold a sit-in there, according to Ming Pao, a newspaper based in Hong Kong. The woman lived in a village near Beijing, and she was accusing the village chief of persecuting her, the newspaper reported. Police officers bundled her into a squad car.

The people from Liuzhou, a midsize industrial city in Guangxi Autonomous Region, had traveled to Beijing on Monday with high hopes.

Ms. Huang â€" on her 11th visit in 16 months â€" intended to go to Tiananmen Square with her 4-month-old son to unfurl the white banner she had prepared: “Corruption of the Judiciary Is Terrible Corruption.” And she planned to jump into the moat of the Forbidden City beneath the portrait of Mao.

Another petitioner, Chen Huiwen, 54, said in an interview before she left for the Bird’s Nest: “I’m asking for justice. I want to protest and to march.”

Ms. Chen is accusing a real estate company and the Liuzhou government of colluding with a criminal gang to drive her and eight family members illegally from their home last year. The house was torn down for a development project.

Ms. Chen said her husband, Yu Huojing, came to Beijing several times to petition officials after a local court refused to hear their case. In July, Mr. Yu was picked up by the police as soon as he stepped off the train and was sent to a detention center in Liuzhou, Ms. Chen said. He was held for 51 days.

“A government official said, ‘The Olympics are coming,’ ” Ms. Chen said.

On Aug. 15, in the middle of the Olympics and while her husband was still in detention, Ms. Chen arrived in Beijing by train and went straight to Tiananmen Square. She said her goal was to jump into the moat in front of the Forbidden City in an act of protest, as Ms. Huang planned to do. But Ms. Chen said officers grabbed her as soon as she climbed onto the railing of a curved footbridge that traverses the moat beneath the portrait of Mao.

“I was held in a jail in the Tiananmen area, then I was sent back to Liuzhou, where I was detained for another nine days,” she said.

Another woman whose home was torn down, Zhong Ruihua, 62, flew up with her daughter to apply for a permit to protest in Purple Bamboo Park, one of the three designated zones.

She said they prepared an electronic application form on Tuesday night but had yet to e-mail it. They were too scared to apply in person. “We didn’t go in person because of course they’ll detain us,” she said.

Like the others, Ms. Zhong and her daughter walked out of the apartment on Wednesday and disappeared from the streets of Beijing. They are probably being sent back to Liuzhou.

The old man who was renting the apartment to the protesters was also picked up by the police. Sitting in a police station, he told a reporter by telephone that he was being charged with harboring criminals.