Boycott 2008 Communist Olympics

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PARK AVENUE PROTESTS: Protesters outside the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, where Chinese official Wen Jiabao is staying. (Mingguo Sun/The Epoch Times)

NEW YORK—Arriving for the U.N. General Assembly's 63rd session, Chinese second-in-command, Wen Jiabao, was met by groups protesting the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) numerous human rights abuses.

Nearing the United Nations Plaza in Manhattan on Sept. 23, police stood at the corner of nearly every street, while lines of police cars patrolled the roads. Growing closer, the shouts of protesters could be heard from groups gathered near where the annual meeting of world peace was being held.

It is the first appearance by a high-ranking Chinese official following the Olympics, so protesters pointed to human rights abuses during the Olympics, which added to the CCP’s already-lengthy list of atrocities. Some lined up in quiet protest, holding signs and meditating, others waved flags, while others staged performing arts pieces portraying their concerns.

Just a few blocks from the U.N. building, along Park Avenue, protesters from Falun Gong, Tibetan groups, and others had also gathered in front of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel where the Chinese second-in-command will be staying. Some waved Tibetan flags, others passed out information packets, and each side of the road was lined with banners highlighting various human rights issues.

Banners from Falun Gong banners read, "Immediately Release Jailed Falun Gong Practitioners in China," and "China Stop Persecuting Falun Gong," while others called for the arrest of other CCP leaders deemed responsible for the worst abuses, saying, "Bring Jiang Zemin, Luo Gan, Liu Jin, Zhou Yongkang to Justice."

Former Canadian Official Corroborates Deadly Acts

Speaking at a rally, former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia Pacific, David Kilgour, discussed the extent of the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong, a meditation practice that is based in the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Tolerance. Teamed with international human rights lawyer David Matas, Kilgour has conducted an independent investigation into allegations that the CCP has been killing Falun Gong practitioners and selling their vital organs.

“We amassed a substantial body of evidence and became convinced beyond any doubt that this crime against humanity has occurred and is still happening as I speak here today,” Kilgour said.

Kilgour explained that, in order to justify the persecution of Falun Gong to the Chinese people, the CCP has conducted a propaganda campaign to spread false information about the practice. “Before the persecution of Falun Gong began there were 70 to 100 million practitioners. The Party State of China began its propaganda in 1999 and it has demonized, dehumanized, and vilified the Falun Gong community across China since,” said Kilgour.

According to numerous witnesses, political prisoners and prisoners of conscience inside China are often sent to forced labor camps where they are made to manufacture products such as chopsticks and Christmas decorations exported to western countries. Kilgour commented on the issue: “This of course constitutes both corporate irresponsibility and violations of World Trade Organization rules. It’s pretty hard for Americans, Canadians, and others to compete with products from forced labor camps"

Tibetan Protests

Across the road, Tibetans had also come to protest Wen's arrival. According to the Regional Tibetan Youth Congress, since Mar. 10, leading up to the Beijing Olympics, more than 209 Tibetans were killed and over 5,714 were arrested while trying to protest the CCP’s suppression of their people.

“Hundreds of Tibetans are still in jail, still missing,” said Tenzin Dorjee, a member of Students for a Free Tibet. “As a result of the crackdown the cost was immense to the Tibetan people. Thousands of Tibetans were imprisoned and tortured, and hundreds were killed during the Chinese crackdown on the Tibetan people this year.”

Dorjee explained why the Tibetans had come to protest Jiabao’s arrival in the U.S. “This is not a protest against the Chinese people,” said Dorjee. “This is a protest against the Communist leaders and the Chinese government, which is not only oppressing the Tibetans, but also oppressing their own people. “

“We want to tell the world that they shouldn’t believe China’s lies. They shouldn’t believe the propaganda spin that Wen Jiabao is so good at putting on while he will address the U.N.,” said Dorjee.

Monday, September 22, 2008

U.S.: Chinese targeted religious groups before Olympics

Sept. 19, 2008

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Chinese government increased its harassment of religious minorities before the Olympic Games, according to a U.S. State Department report released Friday.

A Tibetan Buddhist monk in southwest China's Sichuan province.

The State Department's Annual Report on Religious Freedom singled out China, Myanmar, North Korea, Iran, Sudan, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan to "blacklist" because they are "countries of particular concern" when it comes to religious oppression.

Over the past year, "repression of religious freedom intensified in some areas" in China, including in the Tibetan region and in Xinjiang province, where the Uighur Muslims live.

As the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games approached, some unregistered Protestant religious groups in Beijing reported intensified harassment from government authorities and said the government cracked down on home churches, the report says.

The State Department found that over the past year, Chinese officials also detained and interrogated several foreigners about their religious activities, alleged that the foreigners had engaged in "illegal religious activities" and canceled their visas.

The government also undertook a "patriotic education campaign," which required monks and nuns to sign statements personally denouncing the Dalai Lama. As a result, the reports says, protests led to violence in Lhasa, Tibet, in March, and the government detained an unknown number of monks and nuns or expelled them from monasteries.

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In addition to its continued crackdown on groups such as the Falun Gong, which China considers a "cult," the government harassed Uighur Muslims and confiscated some of their passports to prevent their taking part in the hajj, the pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia.

Once again, the U.S. criticized the government of Myanmar, saying its "repressive, authoritarian military regime" had "imposed restrictions on certain religious activities and frequently committed abuses of the right to freedom of religion."

Most followers of registered religions were permitted to worship as they chose, but the government infiltrated and monitored activities of virtually all organizations, including religious ones.

The report says that although the North Korean constitution provides for religious freedom, "genuine religious freedom does not exist, and there was no change in the extremely poor level of respect for religious freedom" over the past year.

In Iran, the report says, "continued deterioration of the poor status of respect for religious freedom" last year.

"Government actions and rhetoric created a threatening atmosphere for nearly all non-Shia religious groups, most notably for Baha'is, as well as Sufi Muslims, evangelical Christians, and members of the Jewish community," the report says. "Government-controlled media intensified negative campaigns against religious minorities, particularly the Baha'is. Reports of imprisonment, harassment, intimidation, and discrimination based on religious beliefs continued."

The State Department found some progress in Saudi Arabia.

"While overall government policies continue to place severe restrictions on religious freedom, there were incremental improvements in specific areas," the report says.

However, the report goes on to note that "Non-Muslims and Muslims who do not adhere to the government's interpretation of Islam continued to face significant political, economic, legal, social, and religious discrimination."

It also criticizes U.S. allies in Pakistan and Jordan for aggressiveness toward religious minorities.

The governments of Iraq and Afghanistan were praised for endorsing religious freedom, but the State Department found that the war-torn countries have problems.

In Afghanistan, "the residual effects of years of Taliban rule, popular suspicion regarding outside influence of foreigners, and weak democratic institutions hinder the respect for religious freedom."

In Iraq, "violence conducted by terrorists, extremists, and criminal gangs restricted the free exercise of religion and posed a significant threat to the country's vulnerable religious minorities."

In releasing the report, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the United States is "concerned by efforts to promote a so-called defamation of religions concept," which has been the focus of numerous resolutions passed at the United Nations.

She was referring to the Organization of Islamic Conference, a grouping of 57 Muslim states that does not recognize the right of individuals to freely change their religion and has prevented consensus on resolutions at the United Nations that would prohibit defamation of all religions, not just Islam.

"Despite a pretense of protecting religious practice and promoting tolerance, the flawed concept attempts to limit freedom of religion and restrict the rights of all individuals to disagree with or criticize religion, in particular Islam," the report says.

"Instead of protecting religion practice and promoting tolerance, this concept seeks to limit freedom of speech, and that could undermine the standards of international religious freedom," Rice said

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Beijing Tune-Out

This show was taped on August 12, during the Olympics, and shown on public-access cable TV in Manhattan. It was part of a series by the same producers, called "Beijing Tune-Out." Most of the first 5 minutes of the video are a tape from U.S. movie star Mia Farrow when she was in Darfur and the balance is an interview with Epoch Times' John Nania.

You can watch the video here.

China’s Paralympics Shame

By Gisela Sommer
Epoch Times Staff Sep 14, 2008

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Related articles: Opinion > Thinking About China

Falun Gong practitioners display poster to raise awareness of the forced organ harvesting for profit from Falun Gong practioners in China. Jul. 18, 2008, Washington DC. (Gisela Sommer/The Epoch Times)

While China has once again dazzled the world with a glittering ceremony and opened the Paralympics with the message that all life has value and dignity, many western reporters have noted that China is a nation in which the handicapped have long suffered discrimination.

Moreover, the Chinese communist regime itself has been, and still is, the perpetrator of unnatural deaths and mass disability upon ordinary Chinese citizens. Numerous campaigns aimed at gaining control through terror which have resulted in tens of millions of civilian deaths, have become the legacy of the Chinese communist regime. Violent police interrogations, forced brainwashing and confessions through torture are still a daily reality in today’s China.

Mao’s Cultural Revolution during the 1960s and 70s was a blood bath to eliminate all and any opposition to communist rule, taking the lives of tens of millions of Chinese people of all classes. It left a severe trauma on the Chinese people’s psyche and made them careful not to stray from the Party line lest it might bring them disaster.

About every ten years the regime has reinforced this message in the minds of the next generation of Chinese citizens. In 1989 the Tiananmen students were shot in the backs and run over by tanks. In 1999 the persecution of Falun Gong began. Practitioners were being tortured to death and locked up in labor camps to work as slaves or supply organs for the booming tourist organ transplant market.

The crack-down, murder and mistreatment of Tibetan monks and nuns, Uigurs, underground Christians, human rights lawyers and more, fall into the same category. They are all victims of conscience, ordinary citizens persecuted by the communist regime for their choice of worship or their defense of that right.

Chinese leader Hu Jintao claimed on the day of the Paralympics opening, "We stand for equality, oppose discrimination, care for the vulnerable and respect human rights." Unfortunately, the history and ongoing human rights abuses of the Chinese regime expose his words as lies and will bring condemnation and shame to the regime and its leaders.

Tiananmen Massacre Survivors Not Welcome at Paralympics

Ben Blanchard, in a Sept. 6 Reuters article said, “Conspicuously absent from the Games are several survivors of the Tiananmen pro-democracy protest crackdown in 1989, including a former wheelchair discus and javelin champion, who were left disabled after troops rolled in to put down the demonstrations.”

Blanchard continued to say, “Fang Zheng, who lost both legs after they were mangled by a tank during the unrest, has been a living testimony to the use of brute force and an embarrassment to the government.”

Practitioners of Falun Gong Not Welcome Either

The Tiananmen Massacre was almost 20 years ago. It was the first time the world was actually able to watch on worldwide television the Chinese communist regime’s disregard for its own citizens. China blocked media coverage after only a few days.

Ten years after the Tiananmen Square Student Massacre the next massive campaign began to eliminate another group of ordinary Chinese citizens. This time the target was the benign Falun Gong exercise and meditation practice, a majority of which are elderly retired persons.

The internet blockade was put in place by the communist regime to prevent the world from learning about its crimes against humanity, and also to keep the Chinese people blocked from learning the truth.

Reports on Clearwisdom.net Recount Grizzly Tortures by Chinese Regime

Using sophisticated software, many Chinese citizens are able to circumvent the Chinese regime’s internet blockade. Every day Falun Gong practitioners in China post reports on Clearwisdom.net (English translation of Minghui.net) about the persecution.

The following is a list of reports posted on Sept. 11. It is representative of what is posted for any day of the year for the past few years, and brings focus on the reality of China’s human rights abuses.

Thursday, September 11, 2008 - Facts of the Persecution

Over-70-Year-Old Practitioner Dies as a Result of Relentless Persecution.

Businessman Chen Xibu Dies as a Result of Persecution.

Witnessing the Mistreatment of Falun Gong Practitioners, a Non-practitioner Asks "Where Is the Justice in China?"

Ms. Wu Suqiong and Her Fifteen-year-old Daughter Arrested, Beaten and Forced to Undergo Brainwashing.

The Persecution of Dafa Practitioner Mr. Zhang Delong.

Ms. Wang Haiqing Arrested and Brutally Tortured Mentally and Physically.

Ms. Li Fengzhen of Tangshan City, Hebei Province, Loses Her Memory As a Result of Persecution (Photo).

CCP Officials in Baishan City Harass Falun Dafa Practitioners in the Name of "Protecting the Olympic Games."

57 People Declare their Intention to Resume Practicing Falun Gong.

Journalist’s Walking Guide to the Persecution of Falun Gong in Beijing

Before the Olympic Games, the Falun Dafa Information Center www.faluninfo.net/ published a Journalist's Walking Guide to the Persecution of Falun Gong in Beijing, listing detention centers within walking distance of Olympic venues, hotels, and prominent landmarks.

Of Chinese Products, Powdered Milk Not the Only Poison

By Zhang Jianhao
Epoch Times Staff Sep 20, 2008

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Infants in Wuhang, who ingested tainted milk, wait for Type B supersonic examination on September 17, 2008. (China Photos/Getty Images)

The Chinese authorities have been hurriedly inspecting factories across China since the Shijiazhuang-based Sanlu company, which supplies nearly a fifth of China's market with baby formula, was exposed just over a week ago knowingly selling tainted milk.

Twenty-two more Chinese companies have been discovered with melamine-tainted powdered milk products since the story broke, according to information from the China General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.

The contaminated milk has caused the death of three babies, more than 6000 infants have become ill, and more than 150 children have developed serious kidney problems, according to reports from officials.

Many famous domestic powdered and fresh milk producers are among the 23 companies, who were found selling melamine-contaminated products during the recent inspections.

To make matters worse, the Sanlu company had received complaints and concerns about the quality of its powdered milk back in March, but the poisonous milk was not recalled until September 11.

The tainted powdered milk is the latest in a line of contaminated products coming from apparently unethical Chinese producers.

January, 2008, Poisonous Dumplings in Japan

Frozen Chinese dumplings from Tianyang Food Processing Plant poisoned 10 people in Chiba and Hyogo in Japan at the end of January.

Japan’s National Police Agency and China’s Police Department launched investigations in to the poisonings, but both sides denied that the pesticide was mixed into the dumplings in their country. The truth of the incident remains unclear.

February, 2007, Lipsticks Containing Sudan Red

The China General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine found a carcinogenic dye, called Sudan red, in lipstick in February last year.
Sudan red is a yellowish-red colored lysochrome azo dye that can cause contact dermatitis.

Authorities suspect that some of the contaminated lipstick might have been exported to Hong Kong.

March, 2007, Poisonous Animal Food in United States

Up to 85000 cats and dogs in the US died in early 2007 after eating pet food contaminated by melamine.

The US Food and Drug Administration found that the deaths were caused by melamine in gluten products from China.

Chinese merchants had purposely mixed melamine in wheat bran to increase its nitrogen content. Later, melamine was also found in pig, chicken and fish food across the US.

May, 2007, Poisonous Toothpaste and Cough Syrup in Panama

US media widely reported at of end of April last year the deaths of about 365 people died in Panama after after taking cough syrup from China.

The cough syrup contained false glycerin, and in 100 of the cases autopsies revealed the poison as the cause of death.

On October 13, 2006, an egg peddler at a roadside in Hetian City in Xinjiang Province attempts to attract customers by showing the egg yolk’s fresh-looking orange color. (AFP/Getty Images)

On May 19, custom officials in Panama spot-checked Excel and Mr Cool toothpaste from China and found 6000 tubes of toothpaste containing poisonous diethylene glycol. A short time later, Australian customs officials and the FDA in the US also found poisonous toothpaste from China.

May, 2007, Poisonous Textiles

In May 2007, the Australia Wool Testing Authority found excessive formaldehyde in textiles from China.

The amount of formaldehyde in the textiles was 10 times the safety standard of most countries, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Actil Commercial, a division of a renowned home product company Sheridan Australia, who imported the tainted products, had to quarantine eight containers of wool blankets that had just come from China.

August, 2007, Poisonous Toys

According to China’s Central News Agency, Fisher-Price, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the famous Mattel Inc was collectively sued by parents for selling Chinese toys contaminated with lead.

Mattel had to recall tens of millions of toys and parents were left wondering how Chinese vendors could commit such a heartless crime.

November, 2006, Poisonous Eggs Containing “Sudan”

The carcinogenic industrial dye, Sudan red, was discovered in salted eggs in Hebei Province in November 2006. Investigations later also found the dye in fresh eggs in Hubei Province.

China’s Southern Metropolis Daily listed other major food-safety scares in November 2006 which included:

“Big-head baby” powered milk was found in 2003 through until April 2004 in Fuyang City in Anhui Province. More than 100 infants were ill with enlarged heads after consuming poor-quality powdered milk. Some infants died.

Guanghai salt fish, a product special to Taishan City, was contaminated with a pesticide called dichlorovinyl dimethyl phosphate, or DDVP in 2004. This pesticide is known for its acute toxicity.

In March 2004, workers and their families at a brickyard in Jiaxing City in Zhejiang Province were poisoned after eating pork marinated in table salt. Many people vomited and fainted after eating the meat. A three-year-old girl died and 57 people were sent to hospital.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

BRIC Countries: China

(2008-09-15) by David John Marotta

Mens News Daily: In mid-September, the Chinese observe the Moon Festival. Timed to the moon’s fullest and brightest phase, the festival celebrates the abundance of the summer’s harvest. In recent years the Chinese economy has been waxing toward ascendance. It passed Japan in November 2007 and began to rival the brightness of America.

One in every five people in the world lives in communist China. Unlike other BRIC countries, the Chinese lack representative government, the rule of law administered by independent judges, basic human rights, freedom of the media, independent universities and the right of workers to move freely. Even the constitution makes clear that the government has no limits or accountability to the Chinese people.

China began its experiment of mixing explosive free-market economics with totalitarian control and repression in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping took power.

After having been purged once by Mao and a second time by the Gang of Four, Deng did not deify Mao. Rather he declared the leader to be “seven parts good, three parts bad.” Understanding that Chinese Marxism needed to be reinterpreted to allow market forces, Deng argued that “socialism does not mean shared poverty.” His most famous quote clarifies his utilitarian nature: “I don’t care if it’s a white cat or a black cat. It’s a good cat so long as it catches mice.”

Deng abandoned centralized planning and protected the unrestricted flow of goods throughout the country. The resulting competition between provinces led to significant growth in China’s standard of living. Unlike Gorbachev, who tried to institute his own reforms in the top-down approach of perestroika, Deng simply allowed freedom at the bottom. Then he sanctioned and took credit for whatever reforms worked.

Much of China’s innovation has been an investment in infrastructure. The country is spending about 12% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on infrastructure, which accounts for 43% of emerging market investments. Greater investment in infrastructure reduces the cost of moving goods and allows freer trade within the country. Estimates suggest that a 1% increase in a country’s infrastructure boosts its GDP by 1%.

So the resulting economic growth in China has been explosive. But containing an explosion is difficult if not impossible.

Free markets thrive when a country guarantees property rights and the rule of law. China possesses neither of these. All land is state owned and can only be leased. The state also owns the banks, either directly or indirectly. A majority of judges are retired military officers and directed by the party. As a result, enforcement of contracts is impossible. Party officials are effectively police, prosecutor, judge and jury for any case of importance.

Currently China is ranked 52.8% free, “mostly unfree,” in the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. Although it ranks 126 out of 157 countries, China does place highest among the communist countries, beating Vietnam, Laos, Cuba and North Korea.

Freeing selective market forces produces impressive economic gains until bottlenecks in the existing monuments to centralized power hinder progress. Without a free press and working court system, the resulting internal totalitarian monopoly of economics can’t be called capitalism. As a result, most of China’s growth stems from its participation in free-trade agreements.

Thanks to China’s growth, it will pass the U.S. economy in the near future. But because of its huge population, its average citizens will still be economically poor by American standards. And they will be politically destitute.

The Communist Party in China worries most about religious movements, which pose the greatest threat to the party’s supremacy. In 1999, about 10,000 members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement surrounded the Chinese Communist Party headquarters in Beijing. They silently meditated to protest their rejection as an accepted spiritual movement. As a result, China severely repressed Falun Gong’s leaders and practitioners.

Religious groups are obligated to register in China. Their leaders must be trained and approved by the government. Sermons and teachings are monitored to ensure they do not confront government decree. Thus spiritual movements such as the Falun Gong and unregistered house church movements provide the biggest challenge to the party’s supremacy and power.

Movement toward democracy, freedom and the rule of law is not inevitable. Since the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, government leaders have used force to remind the population of their control. China has its own gulag where labor camps reeducate, terrorize and torture. According to Amnesty International, human rights violations are pervasive in China where nearly half a million people currently endure punitive detention without charge or trial.

Although movement toward freedom is not inevitable, the yearning for freedom is universal.

China exemplifies how the free flow of information allows a developing nation to leverage other countries’ knowledge and double its per capita GDP in a decade or less. And yet China fears this freedom. It is nearly impossible to stop the flow of information, but the government continues to try. Dubbed the “Great Firewall of China,” over 60 sets of broad regulations restrict Internet content.

The returns on investments in China have been impressive, averaging 23.8% over the past five years. Despite these returns, we don’t recommend selecting China for specific emphasis. It is a component of the Emerging Market Index, which should be a small part of your portfolio. Think twice before investing in China because investments there won’t always go up. In fact, over the past year China’s return has been down 26.1%.

But you don’t need to invest directly in China to benefit from a growing Chinese appetite for goods and services. Several countries in the Far East both engage in significant trade with China and also offer exceptionally open markets. Among economically free countries in the region, Hong Kong at 42.6% reports the highest percentage of its exports with China. Australia is also significant at 8.4% of its exports. Even “mostly free” Taiwan (14.9%) or Japan (12.2%) would be preferable to direct investments in China.

from http://www.emarotta.com/article.php?ID=301

Sunday, September 14, 2008

The Olympics party is over. Now China has to clean up

The Guardian UK: The games showed off the country's power and apparent wealth, but its pollution and hidden poverty must be faced

- Isabel Hilton
- The Guardian,
- Wednesday September 10 2008
- Article history

Lavish parties tend to leave a hangover as the problems of daily life, put aside for the celebrations, come crowding back. China's Olympic party is not likely to prove an exception. The full legacy of the extraordinary events of 2008 in the People's Republic of China will take many years to emerge, but in the short term, a number of pressing problems are clear.

The Olympics, with its political project of displaying China's power as much to its own population as to the rest of the world, has been the prime focus of domestic propaganda for several years, rallying people behind the nationalist theme with the promise to situate China as a restored power. It worked: recent opinion polls have reported a strong feelgood effect, with high levels of satisfaction with the government and the direction of the country.

But when the Paralympics closes, the leadership might feel the absence of the mobilising appeal of the whole event, with its power to galvanise the country's patriotic instincts and minimise the growing divisions in income, prospects and privilege that are the breeding ground of discontent.

A colder, greyer, post-Olympic world is coming into focus, a world in which most of China's customers are cutting back on spending, inflation at home is running at least at 10% with no relief in sight, eroding the country's competitiveness, and in which China must face the new challenges of maintaining high growth and social stability with the constraints of limited resources, energy shortages, concern over climate change and environmental exhaustion.

For the past decade, China's cheap manufactured goods have helped its customers - in particular, the developed economies - to keep inflation low. Now, with its manufacturing costs rising, China is more likely to be a contributor to increasing prices internationally. Neither energy nor raw materials are likely to get cheaper, and the cost of migrant labour - hitherto the cheap input that has fuelled everything from rebuilding China's cities to servicing its coastal factories - has risen sharply as industrial zones have spread inland and workers have found jobs closer to home. Employees have already made gains in wages and conditions, and many manufacturers, including Chinese firms, are looking at cheaper production sites.

Planners know China's development model to date, while impressive in its results, is unsustainable: it is too carbon-intensive, too polluting and too inconsistent in its effects. Like every Asian tiger before it, China, the biggest tiger on the planet, has to meet the challenge of moving up the value chain, from T-shirts to hi-tech, from low-end production to high-value innovation, from energy-intensive to climate-friendly production. In recent years the early coastal industrial zones have begun to enter that stage, with waves of factory closures the harbingers of a new phase in the country's development.

Managing the transition will be a formidable task, and a race against the clock. It will demand action on the distortions created by the expensive energy subsidies that militate against efficiency and other anomalies in China's hybrid economy, all at a time when real incomes - the source of much of the satisfaction registered with the state - are being squeezed. Meanwhile, time is running short in other ways: the future pensions and labour headache of the world's most rapidly ageing population; an acute water crisis and a gathering health bill from chronic air and water pollution - these are only the most conspicuous items on the list.

A recent report found 70% of the villages surveyed in north China facing increasing water shortages, with ground water falling rapidly and agricultural production being severely constrained. Two-thirds of the cities, too, are short of water. Air quality, according to a World Bank report censored by the Chinese government, causes more than 600,000 premature deaths a year.

The great efforts to clean up Beijing for the games allowed the city's residents to rediscover the lost pleasures of clean air. But the emergency measures that proved necessary in Beijing cannot be sustained. A longer, nationwide cleanup is urgent or the cumulative costs - in health, lost production and environmental damage - will be huge.

There is potentially another unintended consequence of the Olympics. Millions of people around the world watched a display that presented China as modern, powerful, energetic and rich. The opulence of the ceremonies, the magnificence of the venues and the sheer scale of games were designed to impress, and will have changed the perception of China for many, precisely as the government intended.

But China is also engaged in the global negotiations for the post-Kyoto regime, and its participation is essential if catastrophic climate change is to be avoided. Like other developing countries, China is pressing the developed world to finance its move to a low-carbon model, an unprecedented deviation from business as usual for a country at China's stage of development. Under the Kyoto principle of the polluter pays, developed countries - which are responsible for most past emissions - acknowledge this obligation, but it was never going to be easy to persuade sceptical taxpayers to deliver.

Before the Olympics, for most western taxpayers China was a huge and rapidly developing country of which they knew virtually nothing. After the show, the abiding impression is not of the poverty that continues to afflict much of the nation: those images of deprivation in parts of China that do not measure up to the dream were not on view.

Any nation wants to present its best face at such a time, but it may prove counterproductive. If China is rich enough to stage that show, western taxpayers may ask, why do they need our money to pursue a track of clean development? Western politicians struggling to make the case for the kind of radical resource transfers required may find themselves wishing the Olympic party had been just a little less opulent.

· Isabel Hilton is editor of chinadialogue.net
isabel.hilton@guardian.co.uk

Legacy of the 2008 Beijing Olympics

By Donna Ware and Gary Feuerberg, Epoch Times Washington, D.C. Staff Sep 14, 2008

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