No.48 September 2006 |
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“How will China’s pervasive censorship
and control of domestic and international media and the Internet play
out when thousands of international journalists descend on Beijing? How
are the Olympic Games being used to justify the violent forced evictions
of thousands of people from their homes? As international businesses reach
out to the world’s largest consumer market, how do China’s
restrictions on labor rights affect workers on the ground? Human Rights
Watch hopes that the 2008 Olympics will be an impetus for China to demonstrate
greater respect for the human rights guaranteed to all under international
law.
Source: http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/china/beijing08 So wrote Human Rights Watch on August 24, 2004, a few days before the
city of Athens, host to the 2004 Summer Olympic Games, handed the Olympic
flag to Beijing, the 2008 host city. During the intervening two years,
as our concerns have deepened, we have continued to ask ourselves, the
International Olympic Committee (IOC) and China’s leadership the
same questions.
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Will there be censorship at the Bejing olympics?
Chinese laws and regulations narrow the space for free expression by
domestic and foreign press. Contrary to international law, which calls
for “freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas
of all kinds, regardless of frontiers,” news (Article 19, 1976)
reports must largely repeat the government’s factual account and
analysis, e-mail is selectively monitored and courts regularly sentence
Chinese editors, webmasters, reporters and bloggers alleged to have
leaked “state secrets,” “incited subversion,”
or “colluded with hostile foreign forces” to prison terms
as long as 12 years. Members of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China
(FCCC) may not be charged with those offenses but they risk harassment
and detention every time they try to cover what Chinese authorities
consider a sensitive story, which can include a major traffic jam or
an ozone-filled atmosphere (“Widespread Detentions of Foreign
Journalists…”, 2006). Existing regulations already restrict
where journalists can go and what stories they can cover.
For the 20,000 foreign journalists expected to cover the Beijing Olympics,
the most pressing issue will be their freedom to report and analyze
the Games without government interference (Kahn, 2006; Wu, 2006). Official
accreditation of journalists for the Olympics might be used, as in the
past, to reward journalists uncritical of Chinese government policies
and to punish critics. Government ownership of almost all Olympic-related
media infrastructure – outgoing and incoming wire-line and wireless
communications, including telephone and Internet connections, international
radio and television signals for broadcasting rights holders and transmission
hardware for all television and radio broadcasts destined for international
rights holders – will enable Chinese editing of offending broadcasts
and interference with their transmission.
During an August 10, 2006 meeting, Liu Qi, president of the Beijing
Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games, stressed that China would,
as promised, make it “convenient” for foreign journalists
to cover the Games. However, he added that in 2007, China would define
policies related to foreign media coverage and to employment of Chinese
citizens as assistants, both of which could restrict international journalists’
ability to report freely. To date, the most specific guideline restricting
media coverage of the 2008 Games is the Press Commission of the Chinese
Olympic Committee’s insistence that it vet all requests to interview
Chinese athletes (“China to Issue Regulation…”, 2006)
.
The IOC has not been especially critical of China’s censorship
with respect to the 2008 Games, thus lending credibility to Chinese
authorities’ actions. In May 2005, Kevan Gosper, chair of the
IOC press commission, suggested that foreign media should respect the
way “China manages its communications.” A year later, Hein
Verbruggen, head of the IOC’s inspection team, emphasized that
the media must respect Chinese law. “If it’s in the law,
then it is in the law,” he said. Most recently, IOC Communications
Director Giselle Davis admitted that media freedom has a way to go.
“No one’s denying,” she said, “that here and
now this is a challenge.” Her remarks made particular mention
of press freedom in the days before the Games officially open (“IOC
Working to Ensure…”, 2006). Recommendations
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Will olympic project workers have their rights protected ?
There are no independent trade unions in China; there is no right to
collective bargaining. All unions are affiliates of the Chinese Communist
Party’s All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). They do
little to ensure healthy and safe working conditions, adequate wages
and regular pay, or robust grievance mechanisms. There are high rates
of occupational illness, innumerable instances of workers paid below
the minimum wage, late, or not at all, and, too often, unemployment
or imprisonment for those who protest (“Unions Launch Campaign…”,
2006). Migrant workers are particularly vulnerable to these kinds of
abuse.
Large numbers of migrant workers have been contracted for Olympics-related
projects. In 2004, when the Hebei provincial department of construction
signed an agreement on behalf of more than 120,000 new migrant workers
headed for Beijing to work on such projects, the city promulgated a
series of regulations to ensure that migrant workers would be paid regularly.
But in September 2005 workers at the National Conference Center, an
Olympic site, refused to leave the site after the sub-contractor they
worked for was replaced, fearing that they would lose the three months’
wages owed them. In 2006, the Supreme People’s Court ordered that
lower courts speed up settlement of migrant workers’ law suits
and assist contractors to collect from the government (“China's
Circular Instructs Courts…”, 2006).
Recommendations
![]() Will there be redress for forced evictions and inadequate compensations
?
Construction of Olympic sites and attendant upgrading of Beijing’s
infrastructure has caused widespread forced evictions; few who have
been evicted have received adequate compensation (Ang, 2005). Lack of
transparency on the process and restrictions on media make it difficult
to assess the full extent of the impact. Nevertheless what reports there
are, combined with official information on the process, gives great
cause for concern. China is also a party to the International Covenant
on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which guarantees a right to
housing. These evictions, without adequate compensation or safeguards,
would violate those international commitments.
In March 2004, the head of the Beijing Municipal Administration of State
Land, Resources and Housing (SLRH) stated that 5,000 of a projected
6,000 households had already been moved to accommodate Olympic sites
(Li, 2004). Several projects have involved the destruction of entire
neighborhoods. One such project involves homeowners moved from the site
reserved for the Shunyi Olympic Aquatic Park. Another involved the eviction
of hundreds of peasants from their homes and fields on the north side
of Beijing. Their farmsteads were bulldozed to make way for Olympics-related
landscaping and development projects. New jobs were promised, as the
residents could no longer farm there, but not delivered, according to
one of the residents, a subsistence farmer. A media report from the
Nanyingfang section of Chaoyang district in November 2004 describes
demolition crews piling residents’ belongings into vans while
some 100 police officers watched. Journalists were warned not to photograph
residents being sprayed with foam from fire extinguishers or being taken
away by police (“Families Dragged From Their Homes”, 2004).
In addition, official plans to “beautify” the city in time
for the start of the 2008 Olympic Games, has created new projects likely
to result in further forced evictions. Reports indicate many, if not
most, victims of these evictions have been, and will be, left without
compensation. In June 2005, when the some 1,000 residents evicted for
the Aquatic Park blocked the site and demanded compensation, they were
advised that local authorities had already received payment. A local
spokesperson said: “The land belongs to the village as a whole,
so the money should not go directly to the people. The village is entitled
to make a decision on how to use the money” (Ang, 2005). The SLRH
head, in admitting that 300,000 people would be relocated to accommodate
beautification plans, disputed claims that relocations were forced or
that those associated with illegal demolitions would go unpunished.
Authorities also suggested that compensation rates and new accommodations
favor the displaced. However, the system authorities suggest is in place
to address the compensation and redress needs of the victims makes such
a claim implausible. First a top court ruled that compensation or resettlement
disputes are not a matter for the judiciary and instead litigants are
to be referred to “relevant government departments” for
arbitration. There is no evidence that this government-administered
scheme of arbitration is to be independent, transparent, or capable
of reaching fair determinations between the interests of the dispossessed
and the government. Given China’s weak record in this area, expectations
of fairness from the system are low. In addition, victims are not to
be allowed seek injunctions against demolitions but are restricted to
seeking compensation if their homes are unlawfully or improperly destroyed
(“China curbs court access…”, 2005).
Recommendations
References
Ang, A. (2005, June 14). Farmers stage land protest at Beijing Olympic
venue.
Associated Press Newswire.
Article 19. (1976). International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
(ICCPR), 999
U.N.T.S. 171, entered into force, March 23, 1976, signed by China on
October 5,
1998, but not yet ratified.
China curbs court access in house demolitions. (2005, August 12). Reuters
News.
China's circular instructs courts to help migrant workers recover unpaid
wages. (2006, 9
August). BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific.
China to issue regulation on foreign media's coverage
at 2008 Olympics. (2006, July 10). People Daily. Retrieved from http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200608/10/eng20060810_291821.html.
Families dragged from their homes. (2004, November
16). Straits Times. Retrieved from http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/sub/asia/story/0,5562,285174,00.html.
IOC working to ensure free media coverage ahead
of Beijing Olympics. (2006, 9 August). Kyodo News.
Kahn, J. (2006, July 4). Beijing official says curbs
apply to foreign journalists. New York Times. Retrieved from
http://select.nytimes.com/
gst/abstract.html?res=FB0C10FF39540C778CDDAE0894DE404482
Li, L. (2004, November 3). City denies reports on
large-scale evictions. China Daily. Retrieved from http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-03/11/content_313666.htm
Unions launch campaign to safeguard migrant workers.
(2006, June 14). People Daily. Retrieved from http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/
200606/14/ eng20060614_273873.html
Widespread detentions of foreign journalists show China unprepared
to host Olympic
press corps in 2008. (2006, August 10). Foreign Correspondents Club.
Wu, V. (2006, April 13). Watchdog says no foreign
reports: TV stations told to stick to state-run news services. South
China Morning Post. Retrieved from http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=43020.
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