China’s Obfuscating. Are You Surprised?
This is the danger of allowing capitalism into your corrupt country. The real story always gets out. You can only hide and intimidate for so long before people from pissed-off bloggers to The Times reporters start getting the story out:
China’s iron Olympic grip starts to slip
The mystery of the half-filled stands at many events at the 2008 Olympic Games has been solved, according to Chinese internet users, who say it is the result of a policy to prevent the gathering of large and possibly uncontrollable crowds.They claim ticket sales to the public were secretly restricted. Blocks of tickets went to government departments, Communist party officials or state-owned companies, which have quietly obeyed orders not to hand them out. “People are so angry because they slept all night outside ticket booths and got nothing and now they see this,” said one blogger, Jian Yu.
Official explanations eroded swiftly because internet insurgents have rapidly identified cracks in the perfect facade constructed for the Olympics.
In the nine days since Chinese leaders presided over a grandiose - and, it turns out, partly faked - opening ceremony, one fact after another has eluded the censors and fuelled public indignation at the costs and the charade. Protected, they hope, by online anonymity, some of China’s 1.3 billion people are daring to wonder where it will all end.
At some football matches in the northern city of Shenyang, only a third of the seats were taken. Even some gymnastics finals, usually one of the biggest attractions on the programme, were not sold out.Nobody seems to have explained it to the International Olympic Committee, which is baffled by the empty seats, or to the sponsors, who are disappointed.
The IOC should have no reason to have something explained. They knew what they were getting into when they awarded China the games. The fact that there are shennangans going on should come as no surprise. It’s like giving Michael Jackson a baby to watch or asking George Bush to speak clearly. The sponsors should have also done their due diligence before agreeing to sponsor an event in China. Um - hello - it’s China! Buyer beware.
Lower-ranking Chinese officials hastily bused in paid “volunteers” to populate the stands in Beijing, appreciating the embarrassment caused by leaving them half-empty, but public relations remain a matter of indifference to most guardians of public order.Security has been heavy-handed from the start. As the film director Zhang Yimou’s extravaganza kicked off with a boom, I watched on a giant screen in a park, one of the few venues where ordinary Chinese people were allowed to gather.
They cheered as the fireworks exploded, few looking up to find that there were, in fact, none to be seen because the sequence was produced by software, not gunpowder.
They cooed at nine-year-old Lin Miaoke, hardly caring that her lyrics were obviously mimed, and as she sang they went into a patriotic delirium when goose-stepping soldiers raised the national flag. Yet even these loyal citizens could not be trusted. We were surrounded by dozens of police who locked the gates to keep us in and others out.
Chao Chanqing, an exiled journalist widely read on web-sites accessible in China, has accused Zhang, the director, of playing the same role as Leni Riefenstahl, who filmed an epic documentary for Hitler at the Berlin Olympics of 1936.
The director scorns the comparison but he admitted that a Chinese leader ordered him to make changes to the ceremony. “I had no chance to reject his opinion,” he told the Nanfang Weekend newspaper. Analysts said he was referring to vice-president Xi Jinping, heir apparent to the top job.
Government officials swept thousands of migrant workers out of Beijing – the very people who built the stadium, at least 10 of them paying with their lives. Police arrested hundreds of provincial petitioners who sought justice in the capital and sent at least 58 to labour camps for “reeducation”.
The sick were told that routine surgery was cancelled in every hospital and officials shut some psychiatric patients inside their wards.
It’s just China being China, yo.
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