Beijing Olympics: Just let us do our job
The Olympics are a big story. Some 20,000 journalists will cover the Beijing games, according to Gao Dianmin, vice president of the China Sports Press Association and a member of the International Olympic Committee Press Commission. Other estimates go as high as 40,000. The BBC alone will have 400 there.
In 1948, the BBC paid 1,000 guineas for the television rights to that year’s London games. Sixty years on, the IOC expects to get more than 2 billion US dollars from broadcasting rights for the Beijing Olympics. Another $1bn should go to the Chinese authorities and companies.
National prestige will be measured in the medals table and by how smoothly the games run. China aims to excel in both and to be seen to do so around the world. Its games website offers both unsophisticated human interest stories, like voluntary Tibetan antelope protector Xu Guohui who became an Olympic torchbearer, and hard-bitten business briefings on the battle to beat “ambush marketing” — bids by companies that have not paid to be official sponsors to sneak their way into the limelight.
Aidan White, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, says the IFJ has no particular view on the games, “except that journalists should be able to do their job — whether it’s reporting the Games or reporting China — without interference”. He advises journalists visiting Beijing to make sure they are fully briefed on China and the issues — history, politics, landscape, culture and to try to get a basic grasp of the language.
“Recent coverage of the torch rally and Tibet protests angered some in China — even some who are very sympathetic to democratic values — because they felt much of it was superficial, sensational and politically biased,” he says. “If our reporting isn’t informed and in context it will not contribute to creating a better understanding of China and its position in the world today.”
The IFJ plans to have someone on the spot to try to provide support for journalists who may find themselves in political trouble with the authorities. There is no journalists’ union in China, Aidan White points out. “There is the All China Journalists’ Association, which is a branch of the party that deals with media and the work of journalists. It’s supposed to be setting up a journalists’ centre to try to support journalists on administrative and logistical questions.”
Aidan White recommends the website of The Foreign Correspondents Club of China in Beijing (www.fccchina.org), but stresses the club has no full-time staff. The website has very thorough coverage of all the issues, written by journalists not bureaucrats. The Guardian’s China correspondent Jonathan Watts tells of his own detentions by the authorities. But his greatest concern is for Chinese sources and assistants: “The harshest retribution appears to have been meted out to Fu Xiancai — one of the most vocal opponents of the Three Gorges Dam — who was left paralysed by a savage beating after he ignored police warnings not to speak to foreign journalists,” is a typical observation.
The IFJ plans to have its own site to support journalists up soon in co-operation with www.playthegame.org.
It is calling on the Chinese government to keep in place the temporary regulations that, in theory, free foreign journalists from earlier heavy-handed control. “Having opened the door to free journalistic work, the Chinese would damage their own interests by stepping backwards, but all will depend, they tell us, on how the coverage of the Games turns out.”
Time for a fresh look at china
By David Ayrton
On Saturday 19 April more than 1,000 people, the majority Chinese students, demonstrated silently in Westminster. They were protesting about what they perceived to be distorted and biased reports of the disturbances in Tibet and the London leg of the Olympic torch relay by the BBC and other western media.
A similar protest took place in Manchester and there were rallies in Paris and Berlin.
There was and is anger among many Chinese in Britain about what they see as biased reporting. Many of the protesters had been among the thousands of Chinese who had gone to celebrate the Olympic torch’s presence in London on 6 April.
“I was one of them,” said Becky Qin, a student at Cambridge University. “We were really excited to welcome the sacred flame in London together with many local people, but we were so disappointed when we saw the news coverage of BBC. It only showed images of the pro-Tibetan independence activists in the streets, who tried their very best to ruin the torch relay.” She made her protestations directly to the BBC in an interview that was broadcast on BBC News 24, but not on the mass audience BBC News programmes.
The sense of grievance was compounded by a report from BBC Beijing correspondent James Reynolds on the night of the torch relay. It provoked wrath, not least among Chinese internet activists who responded on YouTube [http://tinyurl.com/4hkybf].
The report said: “The Chinese Communist Party has a simple rule. It will not show any pictures which ruin this country’s idea of a trouble free Games. China insists on keeping bad news away from its citizens.”
It is now acknowledged by Jon Williams, the BBC’s World News Editor, that on the evening of the London torch relay and on the next day reports featuring the disruption were broadcast on Chinese Central Television.
As developments in China unfold some might argue that stereotypes about the country need to be re-examined if the media in the developed world is to begin to come to terms with the complexity of what is the rapidly developing modern China.
Senior people in the media must take off their blinkers and start to assess events in China objectively rather than taking upon themselves the role of liberating the oppressed Chinese people.
Responding to public opinion – not just trying to control it
The earthquake in Sichuan Province, China’s worst natural disaster since the Tangshan quake of 1976, brought a new openness to the country’s media.
While China-watchers are not unanimous, most agree that the change is probably permanent. Disagreements arise over whether this represents a genuine principled shift or simply a pragmatic response to emerging web services such as Twitter, which make it increasingly difficult to control information flows.
According to a Wall Street Journal blog, Sun Wen, a reporter from Xinhua, the official news agency, was told by editors that his story about a collapsed school was too depressing and that the media should be “cheering up spirits and stabilising people’s emotions”.
He wrote about this in a Xinhua blog and while the post has now disappeared it is said to be preserved on the internet.
Recent months have seen the government lift restrictions on access to English versions of both the BBC and Wikipedia websites within China.
These developments could indicate that the Chinese government is beginning to accept a responsibility to respond to public opinion rather than attempting to control it.
The effect of the earthquake, according to the Chinese journalist Li Datong, is unprecedented: “Within a short time, donations from business people, celebrities, intellectuals and everyday people surpassed the amounts set aside for relief work by the government … Such actions show that a civil society is beginning to emerge — a society that is more than just utilitarian and pragmatic.”
China may be the only country to lose an Olympics — the 2000 games — over human rights. But politics and human rights have dominated off-field discussion for years.
In 1980 US President Jimmy Carter called for a boycott of the Moscow games. The Soviet Union won a huge medal haul but lost out in the propaganda stakes.
Four years later it led an eastern bloc boycott of the Los Angeles games that was not a great success. Yet the Soviet Union had argued that the USA had commercialised the games and robbed them of their true spirit. Few media reported that then or dwell today on the increasing commercialisation of the games.
The biggest story of the 1988 Seoul games in South Korea was the disgrace of sprinter Ben Johnson. The reporting gives food for thought. When he won the 100 metres gold, he was referred to as “Canadian”. Once he was exposed as a drug cheat he became “Jamaican”. But another big story was not adequately reported. South Korea’s Olympic bid had been put on hold in May 1980 after scores of protesters against the emerging dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan had been massacred at Kwangju in an atrocity that bears comparison with the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.
South Korea is not the only Olympic host to have slaughtered its own citizens. The Mexican government did the same on October 2 1968 in the Tlatelolco massacre in which scores more died at the hands of the military ten days before the games began.
For many the defining image of the 1968 Olympics is the black power salute (above) by two US athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Media reports concentrated on the salute, but the athletes also wore no shoes to symbolise the poverty of black people in the USA. It was a rare demonstration for human rights by talented athletes — Tommie Smith held seven world records. Both he and John Carlos paid a heavy price for their stand. They were sent home and were never allowed to compete internationally again.
Eleven Israeli athletes and a German police officer died at the hands of Palestinian Black September gunmen at the Munich Olympics of 1972.
Four years later, Montreal marked the beginning of the use of boycotts. South Africa was banned due to apartheid, but African nations boycotted the games because New Zealand had sporting links to South Africa.
- Satish Sekar is Founder of Empower Sport magazine, the first to focus on discrimination in sport. It is online at http://empower-sport.com
- Additional research by Seth Singh-Jennings