May 22, 2001

The Chinese capital Peking has emerged as one of the fancied front-runners in the competition to secure the right to host the 2008 Summer Olympics. The International Olympic Committee has sent its representatives to inspect the city's preparedness to build roads, stadiums, and an Olympic Village to accommodate the athletes. A general air of satisfaction has been noted.

China has also been asked a few searching questions on human rights, and even some answers have come back. The IOC still have two months before they make their decision, so perhaps we could add the following to the lengthy list of queries: What happened to Zhang Xueling? Zhang Xueling has been sent without trial to a labour camp for three years, reported a Hong Kong-based human rights organisation last week.

According to their press release, the 33-year-old woman was incarcerated after demanding action from the authorities, following an incident in which her mother - a member of the Falun Gong movement - had been beaten to death by Chinese police.

Zhang had previously appeared under her own name in a piece written for the The Wall Street Journal by Ian Johnson. Johnson was subsequently awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his Falun Gong articles. Just under a week after Johnson was given the award, Zhang was imprisoned.

The International Olympic Committee might consider asking whether Zhang is in a labour camp, and if she is, then consider inquiring whether her arrest and the Pulitzer Prize have any connection. This is not simply to secure Ms Zhang's release, but also because the Olympics are the world's largest regularly-occurring media event. The Committee should be clear in its mind into what sort of environment it may be sending thousands of journalists.

Ian Johnson did not think it was "100% certain", and did not even seem to believe that the Pulitzer led to Zhang's being taken. Perhaps he did not want to believe it.

China regards the foreign press as its enemy and it disciplines Western journalists with lost nights' sleep, by tossing the subjects of their interviews into labour camps or sentencing them to long prison terms.

Was Zhang one such case?

Many believe that the human rights situation in China will improve if the games are granted to Peking. At least China's press freedoms are thought to be in for a boost, if the country is called upon to prepare for a gathering that will bring together several thousand reporters.

But why should China change because of the Olympics? What is the internal logic that says reforms would be forced upon a police machinery that is prone to illegal acts, if and when the country's capital plays host to thousands of athletes and TV crews?

There is not necessarily any logic that says this would happen. There are already hundreds of Western journalists living in China. Next fall will see the holding of a massive Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference in Shanghai, and this event, too, will be attended by thousands of pressmen and presswomen. In recent times China has shown no great willingness to change its press freedoms or its position on any other human rights issues, save in a negative direction.

International events have thus far without exception actively worsened the position of dissidents and others who take a critical view of China, because of the overkill tactics employed by the security apparatus.

China's President Jiang Zemin was recently named among the "Ten Worst Enemies of the Press" on World Press Freedom Day (May 3rd). At the end of last year China jailed a total of twenty-one Chinese journalists, a world record, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

China wants an increasingly large slice of the pie that is enjoyed by the developed countries and those that honour human rights issues. And it deserves its share of the pie to some extent, too, for China has taken enormous strides forwards in the last 20 years. But that does not mean they have reached journey's end.

The first step in a better direction is to annul the thousands of labour camp or gaol sentences imposed on innocent people. A second is to show that China does not snub its nose at countries engaging in the human rights dialogue, countries like Finland, for example. China's legislative machinery and its implementation has to be brought more into line with universally acknowledged principles.

The Olympic Games are "just a sporting event", but the award of the games to the host city is a matter of pure politics when China is among the applicants. Does China deserve the Olympics? Is Zhang Xueling in a labour camp? Why did her mother die?

Everything is connected to everything else.