After learning that police opened fire on protesting farmers in southern China, a civil rights campaigner named Li Jian (
He managed to sneak through police checkpoints and interview families in their homes. He concluded that the authorities were at fault, alleging they provoked the violence that killed at least three people and tried to cover it up by hosing blood off streets and sealing off the village. When he posted his report on his Web site in January, it created an immediate stir, both abroad and in China. The secret police, he said, showed up at his door.
"They threatened to arrest me and have me evicted," said Li, a plump 41-year-old former factory manager.
It prompted him to lie low for a few weeks at his sister's home.
"It was a big warning," he said.
The troubles of one village and one activist may seem far removed from the financial and logistical challenges of hosting the Beijing Olympics, but there's a direct connection. As the 2008 Games approach, the tug-of-war between the communist government and activists such as Li is gaining force, with both sides seeing the event as a platform from which to present their competing visions of what China should be.
The reformers are increasingly organized, forming activist groups to nudge a rapidly changing society toward a more democratic future. But they keep running up against a communist regime determined to hold on to power.
The tussle raises a fundamental question: Will the Beijing Olympics be like Seoul's in 1988, which helped South Korea's transition from autocracy to democracy? Or will they be like Berlin's in 1936, which burnished the legitimacy of a newly born monster?
"Whether the 2008 Olympics will look like the 1988 games or the 1936 games is not settled. It's still being contested," said Fan Yafeng (
"Whether China will turn to fascism, militarism or democracy, these two years will make it clear," Fan said.
The comparison is in many ways flawed. Germany in 1936 was already on a steep slide from democracy to dictatorship. China, after 25 years of capitalist reforms, is intertwined economically with the rest of the world, and the government's hold over the lives of ordinary Chinese has slipped, opening space for people to pursue their interests.
The fact that Li remains free marks a change from the totalitarian days of Mao Zedong (
Today's Chinese are starting businesses, leaving family farms for factories and increasingly forging activist networks to clean up the environment, protect consumers and promote civil rights. Officially registered non-government groups numbered nearly 300,000 last year -- almost double the 2000 level -- and many more groups don't register. Where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) once controlled everything, China is now a place where it's possible to run a charity or a civil rights Web site.
Until, that is, the government says "no."
In the three years since he set up his "Citizens Rights Defenders" Web site, Li has seen authorities shut the site down, has sued unsuccessfully to reopen it, ultimately placing it on overseas servers beyond the reach of government controls. Throughout, he has endured periodic surveillance and warnings by police.
It's the government's arbitrary punishment of domestic critics, while using the Olympics to bolster its reputation, that provokes comparisons to 1936.
"Hitler used the Olympics to show his people that his government had legitimacy," Li said. "The Chinese government wants a similar result: that countries recognize that China is a great and powerful country."
Over the past three years, President Hu Jintao's (
It's an uncomfortable position for the Olympic movement, which wavers between insisting that sports be free from politics and wanting the Games to be seen as a force for good.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded the games to Beijing in 2001 "in the hope of improvement in human rights," Dick Pound, a long-serving IOC member, wrote in a memoir published in 2004.
UN Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour told guests at a Canadian embassy dinner in Beijing in September that the 2008 Olympics should help to promote civil rights and democracy. The precedent Arbour pointed to is South Korea, whose military-backed government yielded to popular demands for elections in the run-up to Seoul hosting the 1988 Olympics.
Chinese activists, however, are not so optimistic. They expect that as they press for reform, Beijing will vigorously push back to maintain control, causing human rights infringements to grow, rather than decrease.
"Westerners can be so naive," said Yu Jie (
Beijing has many ways of enforcing its will. Besides an extensive police network, the government can turn to bulging tax revenues to offer inducements to those who cooperate. The lure of a huge consumer market has in part induced Yahoo, Google and other foreign technology companies to help China police the Internet for undesirable content.
The state's influence over substantial parts of the economy has created new alliances between officials and a rising business elite. Together they represent a powerful interest group that is bolstering the CCP and is often at odds with the urban unemployed and with dispossessed farmers -- those whom Li and other activists are trying to help.
"Chinese society has only two groups now: those with vested interests and those deprived of their interests," Li said.
That clash of interests, Li said, lies at the heart of most of the cases he's involved in, including the shooting of villagers last December in Dongzhou, where farmers were protesting against the requisitioning of their land for a coal-fired electricity plant.
"If China really wants to show the world its progress in 2008," he said, "it needs to make progress in respecting the law."
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