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Olympics in Chains

China Loses Control of the Games

By SPIEGEL Staff

Part 4: And the Screen Went Dark

According to official figures, 742 people were arrested last year for offences like "threatening state security," many of them in the Muslim Xinjiang region. "That's twice as many as in 2005," says Kamm. "The year of the Olympics, 2008, will also be a record year for political arrests."

To make matters worse, Communist Party leaders are suddenly faced with new concerns in an entirely different area, one that was the picture of success until recently: the economy. Economic data have been relatively gratifying until now. The Chinese stock index has more than quadrupled since mid-2005. Practically the entire People's Republic, including schoolchildren, students and retirees, seem to have become stock holders.

To be able to play the stock market game, millions of Chinese have taken out mortgages on their apartments, speculating that Communist Party planners will hardly allow a crash to happen before the Summer Games. Besides, Beijing has done its own part to boost the stock market. A record number of state-owned businesses have been turned into publicly traded corporations, and more and more images of success have been broadcast around the world, such as the initial public offering of the mining company Shenhua Energy last fall. Company executives were lined up ceremoniously on a red carpet, incredulous at what they saw happening on the giant electronic board above their heads. Shenhua's stock price jumped by close to 90 percent on the first day of trading.

'Why Does Beijing Do Nothing?'

But the Olympic stock fever had already cooled before the Tibetan monks revolted. A glut of new securities brought prices down again, fueling growing fears that China could also be affected by the worldwide financial crisis. The Shanghai index is down more than 40 percent from its high point last year.

"It's falling again, it's falling" -- those were the last words of a shareholder named Xie, before he died on the selling floor of a securities company in Chongqing in mid-March. The 61-year-old investor has lost four-fifths of his savings in the market. The next day, an investor, despondent over the stock market crash, jumped to her death from the 23rd floor of a high-rise building in Shenzhen. Last week a shareholder stood in front of the city's stock exchange waving a flag with the angry words: "Why does Beijing do nothing?" The man only left when the police arrived.

Premier Wen Jiabao seeks to appease his subjects almost weekly as he travels around the country. In some places he shakes hands with starving farmers and bemoans the growing gap between rich and poor. In others, he sympathizes with customers in supermarkets as they complain about rising prices, especially for pork. China's Communists are very nervous, even without the Tibet troubles. Thirty years after Deng proclaimed his new policies of reform and opened up the country, progress is creating increasingly deep rifts within Chinese society. This makes modern China more and more difficult to govern, which is precisely the reason its leaders had such high hopes for the Olympics.

China was finally headed toward a common goal, one that would have everyone rejoicing -- if it weren't for the diabolical Dalai Lama, the Tibetans he has incited and their supporters in the Western media community.

Beijing had hoped that the games would divert attention away from ethnic tensions and the dark sides of China's economic miracle. Every evening at the beginning of the news program on state-owned television, viewers are presented with a countdown to the Olympics. The newscasters fervently read the government's celebratory statements, but even this program is incapable of glossing over growing economic worries.

Problems for Sponsors

The looming recession in the United States is of great concern to China. Suddenly Beijing is realizing how dependent its economy is on the superpower across the Pacific, an important customer that also happens to be China's biggest debtor. Because China must continue providing jobs for millions of new workers year after year, even a minor economic hiccup could have a potentially explosive impact on Chinese society.

Indeed, even without Tibet, the world, including foreign sponsors of the Olympics, would have reason enough this year to take a critical look behind the Chinese façade. Only four years ago, German automaker VW could hardly contain itself for joy. The company paid an enormous sum for the right to supply the vehicles in the Olympic motor pool. But that enthusiasm has since dissipated. At company headquarters in the central German city of Wolfsburg, VW spokesman Andreas Meurer has the unpleasant task of downplaying the company's commitment. Unlike Coca-Cola or Microsoft, says Meurer, VW is not an "international sponsor." Instead, he adds, the company is providing purely logistical support that relates "purely to China."

Pulling out, says Meurer, would be "counterproductive." But VW could not withdraw anymore, even if it wanted to. In its most important foreign market, the automaker operates on the basis of a joint venture with two of China's most powerful state-owned corporations, both of which are deeply entrenched in the government's industrial policy. If VW were to boycott the Olympics, it would almost be as if Hu Jintao were to disinvite himself.

Other German sponsors, like Adidas and transportation logistics company Schenker, are also in a predicament. At home they are vilified as the paymasters of a propaganda show, but in China even restrained appeals for moderation would be interpreted as siding with the Tibetans -- possibly leading to a nationwide boycott of their products. Both in the government press and in the Internet, China's rage at Western criticism over the Tibet issue is on full display. It is as if China had turned back the clock by decades.

The chauvinism is also aired on television. TV veteran Xing Zhibin, wearing a conservative outfit and a dated hairstyle, has spent the last three decades proclaiming each new ideological direction on the evening news. Recently, she has been heading up the attacks on Public Enemy Number One: the Dalai Lama. Not a day passes without warnings of new outrages planned by the Dalai Lama. "According to our information, the Tibetan separatists now plan to form suicide units to launch violent attacks," the Ministry of Public Safety has announced.

The 'Brain-Washed' West

The propaganda falls on willing ears. For the majority of Chinese, it is not a question of democracy or dictatorship, or even of human rights. What is important to them is the unity of the fatherland and the dominance of the Han Chinese over ethnic minorities like the Tibetans. Which makes the response from the rest of the world seem like an attack. Western sympathies for Tibet evoke Chinese memories of foreign partition. European imperialists were the first, when they forcefully opened up the country during the course of the Opium War from 1840 to 1842. Later the Japanese invaded, committing massacres and subjugating large parts of China.

Now, after decades of Communist Party control, young Chinese possess a burning national pride that is easily inflamed. And the Internet is a perfect outlet for bottled-up, anti-European sentiment. "They once used cannons," one blogger writes angrily on the popular Web portal sina.com. "Now they show up with their democracy and human rights slogans." Another blogger accuses the West of being "brain-washed," a neat reversal of Western accusations against China.

Defiance is spreading, even in the most official of places. The games are an event for the whole world, not a stage specifically for China, says Jiang Yu, the spokeswoman for the foreign ministry in Beijing. "Don't think that China can be isolated if no one shows up," she adds.

It almost seems that the Chinese regret ever having taken the Olympic gamble. The Western press is firing with both barrels at China before the Games begin, writes Liu Zuokui of the pro-government Academy of Social Sciences. "The evil intentions of these people are now being uncovered," Liu adds.

Nothing Left to Chance

Chinese politicians no longer invoke images of happy relaxation for sports lovers around the world. Instead, their rhetoric emphasizes safety and the goal of "preserving stability." Their fear of evildoers was recently reinforced when flight attendants on a flight from Ürümqi to Beijing discovered a Uighur woman who had smuggled gasoline into the cabin and apparently planned to ignite it.

The authorities are combing the biographies of foreign journalists and athletes for political activities. Police officers proudly showed representatives of the press how they are able to monitor every bus stop near the stadium in Beijing. Nothing is to be left to chance. The ceremony on Tiananmen Square last week, when Chinese officials received the Olympic flame from Greece, provided only the most recent example. Police and soldiers sealed off a wide parameter around the heart of China for the event, and a large numbers of minders mingled with the invited participants and journalists.

But amid such an atmosphere, of what use are the Olympics to Beijing anymore? President and Communist Party leader Hu Jintao, for his part, showed not the slightest trace of enthusiasm when he passed on the Olympic torch to the first runner last Monday. The runner was given a police escort and was shielded from the people. "If Hu and Premier Wen could do as they wished," says a source familiar with the Chinese Communist Party, "they would cancel the games."

But that would be an unforgivable sign of weakness. Instead, the party is closing ranks, closing its eyes and persevering. Hu, rigid as a board, wearing a dark suit and red tie, strode across Tiananmen Square. A giant portrait of Mao was illuminated behind him, and in front of him was the mausoleum where the embalmed body of his predecessor lies in state. Beijing used Hu's staged TV appearance to imply that although it is permitting the Olympic flame to burn, it is only doing so within its old, ideological framework.

Beijing even censored reporting on the transfer of the Olympic flame. When Japanese network NHK, which can also be received in Chinese hotels, aired reports on protests against the torch relay, censors immediately interrupted the program. And the screen went dark.

By Rüdiger Falksohn, Detlef Hacke, Andreas Lorenz, Gerhard Pfeil, Jan Puhl and Wieland Wagner

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan