Beijing’s Olympic bid tests whether IOC is serious about reform3

李星玥

In 2001, Ni was at home with her husband, in her family's traditional courtyard house, as she watched a television anchor cry with joy announcing the news that China had been awarded the 2008 Olympics.

“We were very happy as well,” she said. But seven years later, Ni watched part of the dazzling opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics from a detention center, with very different emotions.

“I was very miserable,” she said, sitting in a wheelchair in the tiny one-room rented apartment where she now lives with her husband, surviving on his meager pension, their few remaining possessions stacked in cardboard boxes on top of a cupboard. “Because of the Olympics, my life became like this.”

Like more than a million other Beijing residents, Ni’s house was demolished in the run-up to the Games, supposedly to make way for a pedestrian shopping area for the Olympics. In the end, it was replaced by an imposing government building. The Olympics, rights groups say, served as the excuse for a huge land grab.

Ni lost her job as a legal consultant at a state-owned firm and has spent the past decade in prison, under house arrest or constantly on the move between rented apartments because of police harassment. At one point, she says, she was tied up and beaten for three days on end, and left with many broken bones.

As China was awarded the 2008 Games, then-IOC President Jacques Rogge said he was convinced the move would improve human rights in China, and vowed to “act” if they did not. Francois Carrard, the director general of the IOC at the time, said the movement was making a “bet on openness.”

But today it is apparent that the IOC’s bet has failed and its promise of action was hollow, critics say.

As the 2008 Games approached, China ramped up its repressive policies in Tibet, rights groups say, culminating in mass protests in March of that year that saw thousands detained and at least 100 people killed. In mainland China, dissident Hu Jia wrote a letter, along with civil rights lawyer Teng Biao, pointing out that the Games would be held in a country with no elections, no freedom of religion, no independent courts and where torture was common. Just four months before the Games opened, he was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison for subverting state power.

“I fully support and welcome all kinds of sports events,” he said, speaking by telephone from his home, where he remains under house arrest. “However, the precondition is that the games can’t be another diamond in the crown of the Chinese Communist Party. It can’t be excruciating hell for human rights.”

The IOC reacted to controversies surrounding Beijing 2008 and the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, with reforms that will oblige host governments to sign a contract with an explicit anti-discrimination clause, and pledging to protect human rights, labor rights and the environment.

Beijing’s bid is the first test, Human Rights Watch says.

But principles may be hard to enforce when the choice lies between Beijing and Almaty, and when so much money is at stake.

“Will the IOC also conveniently ignore the record of empty promises and succumb to power politics a second time?” Sharon Hom, executive director of the New York-based group Human Rights in China, wrote in an e-mail. “Will it consider the risks to its Olympic brand? The international community may not share its capacity for historical amnesia.”

李星玥

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李星玥

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李星玥

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