China's Olympic Warmup

ENLARGE PHOTO+

Older buildings are being replaced by sometimes astonishing creations, like Rem Koolhaas' cantilevered towers for CCTV (Chinese state TV).

Kadir van Lohuizen / NOOR for TIME

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But human-rights activists and preservationists say the problems of the hutongs could have been solved if the political will had been there. Instead, they argue, priorities were driven by real estate developers' huge profits and by the widespread corruption that has made stories of collusion between developers and venal officials commonplace even in China's strictly controlled media. Details may never come to light, but the scope of the corruption problem was underscored last year when Beijing's deputy mayor Liu Zhihua was arrested for what the official media described as "corruption and degeneracy." As a consequence of the rebuilding, a medieval city largely unchanged since it was formally laid out by Mongol conquerors as the capital of the new Yuan dynasty in 1267 has all but disappeared. Until the 1990s, the hutongs had been virtually untouched. Now only about 1,000 of some 6,000 remain.

"By allowing Beijing to host the games, you will help the development of human rights," Liu Jingmin, vice president of the Beijing Olympic-bid committee, told reporters in April 2001. Other officials have made similar promises. Liu even expanded his to include references to greater democracy and media freedom. Some optimistic observers abroad thought the government would be so careful to show its best side to the world in the run-up to the Games that it would ease its authoritarian habits. The Olympics could then be imagined as a journey to a destination where human rights, democracy and free media were well established.

There's not much sign of that so far. It is true that under regulations adopted at the beginning of this year, most restrictions on reporting in China by foreign journalists were lifted. Rather than apply for official interviews and trips outside Beijing through the Foreign Ministry, reporters can now interview anyone, anywhere, as long as they have prior consent. But that has been just about the single concrete advance the advent of the Olympics has brought to the cause of a free press in China, and it applies only to foreign journalists. For local reporters, conditions have actually worsened. An Amnesty International report last month described a new crackdown on domestic media, including continued imprisonment of journalists and writers, forced dismissals and the closure of publications that offend the authorities. In July, for example, authorities summarily shut down the China Development Brief, a decade-old English-language monthly.

Hu Jia, 32, a political activist who has been in and out of detention and house arrest for his views on topics such as the government's AIDS policy and Tibet, gives a quiet smile when reminded of the promises that the Olympics would advance the cause of human rights. Hu still gets a police escort when he goes outside, though the only visible guard on his fourth-story walk-up apartment in Beijing's eastern suburbs asks politely for accreditation, laboriously records the details, then waves visitors in with a smile. That smiling face, Hu says, is the one that Beijing is presenting to the outside world. But within China, he says, conditions are worse than ever. "It's a policy of 'soft to the outside, strict within,'" says Hu. He recently hosted the wife of blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng, who is serving a four-year sentence ostensibly for disrupting traffic but almost certainly because of the embarrassment he caused the government of Shandong province by publicizing cases of forced sterilizations and abortions by family-planning officials. After escaping from house arrest in Shandong, Yuan Weijing spent nearly a month holed up in Hu's apartment, fearful of being kidnapped and forcibly returned home by the carloads of policemen who stationed themselves outside. Last month Yuan attempted to fly to Manila to receive an honor given to her husband by the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation. She was allowed to check in at the airport but was then detained, forced into a van and driven back to Shandong, where she is again confined to her home.

Despite their earlier promises, Chinese officials now repeatedly complain that the Olympics are a sporting event and should not be linked to politics. If you look at the history of the Olympics--from the demonstrators gunned down in Mexico's Tlatelolco Square in 1968 to the boycotts of the 1980s and '90s--that would seem a pretty forlorn hope. Chinese activists, like others before them, have wanted to use the world's attention on their nation to reduce the iron grip that politics and ideology have held over their lives for so long. "The Olympics are about human nature," says Bao Tong, a former adviser to Zhao Ziyang, the reformist Communist Party General Secretary at the time of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. "You cannot separate the Olympics from human rights." But this is not yet a view that has commended itself to the authorities. "You are very active these days, aren't you?" a senior policeman told Hu recently. "Just you wait," the officer continued. "There'll be a settling of accounts come next fall."

While ordinary Chinese are certainly proud to be hosting the Games, there's little doubt about who has the most to gain if the Olympics pass without a hitch. China's Communist Party "only has two sources of legitimacy," says Michael Duke, a professor emeritus of Chinese studies at the University of Vancouver, "nationalism and economics, and the Olympics encapsulate both of them." China's leadership has built up the Olympics as a celebration of the party's administrative competence. Now it wishes to use the Games to confirm China's new international stature and expunge the last vestiges of the isolation into which the country was plunged after the bloody suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen protests. "A successful Games would mean that China is accepted by the international community and has become a major world power," says Yan Xuetong, who heads the Institute of International Studies at Beijing's Tsinghua University.