By Paul Syvret
Courier Mail, August 05, 2008
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24125956-27197,00.html
GEORGE Orwell almost got it right. He just slipped up on the timing and the location.
1984, set in the fictional land of Oceania, was his seminal novel about a totalitarian state where all citizenry are monitored by a Thought Police and any dissent is brutally suppressed.
Just think of Beijing 2008 as the Oceania of 1984.
Winston Smith wouldn't have lasted a week. He would have been declared an unperson within days of Beijing being announced as host city for the Olympics, and promptly carted off to China's equivalent of Room 101 for re-education.
Residents are being ordered to sign pledges of "civilised behaviour", and popular internet blogs that dare to criticise the Games are shut down.
In fact, great swathes of the net have been blocked altogether – not just for citizens but for visiting journalists as well – by the Great Firewall of China.
Countless thousands of Beijing workers have been forced to take unpaid leave, and numerous homes and businesses have just been torn down to make way for Olympic venues.
Ye Guozhu, whose Beijing home and restaurant was bulldozed in 2004 to make way for an Olympic venue, was jailed for four years for having the temerity to organise a protest. He remains in detention.
Tens of thousands of surveillance cameras monitor the streets of Beijing and an estimated 110,000 security personnel (more than the total number of men and women in Australia's armed services) are on hand in the capital to ensure the Chinese version of "order" prevails.
Smile in the wrong direction, or break wind near an Olympic banner, and you're likely to find yourself taken in for questioning.
And that's before we even consider the rules that, among other things, ban spectators waving team flags or sporting T-shirts that might dare to question China's human rights record.
So what could be done to make the 2008 Games – which by reports to date have about as much Olympic spirit as the Villawood detention centre – more representative of life in China in 2008?
Perhaps we could stage an event to recognise the Falun Gong movement, which was banned in 1999 and whose members make up half of China's labour camp population.
At the time, China's Ministry of Civil Affairs, in a statement straight from the pages of 1984, said: "According to investigations, the Research Society of Falun Dafa had not been registered according to law and had been engaged in illegal activities, advocating superstition and spreading fallacies, hoodwinking people, inciting and creating disturbances, and jeopardising social stability."
I guess a spiritual movement that advocates truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance has "subversive" written all over it.
So maybe the International Olympic Committee should suggest a special Falun Gong event in Tiananmen Square, modelled on the schoolyard game of Red Rover, except instead of using a tennis ball the "Red Rover" is given a heavy truncheon to bludgeon any truthfulness, compassion and forbearance out of contestants.
Come to think of it, the Olympic shooting events also could be moved to Tiananmen Square, but instead of shotguns and clay pigeons, we could use .50 calibre machine guns and university students.
After the shooting, the dead and wounded could be left where they'd fallen, making for a variety of interesting obstacles for equestrian events such as show jumping.
And to celebrate Beijing's famously invigorating air quality, the Olympic marathon could also begin in the square and be run through the streets of the city. The rules would be simple – the last man still standing without the need for an oxygen mask or cardiac massage would be declared the winner. A similar approach could be adopted for the road racing events in the cycling program.
Here Chinese authorities might like to consider lifting the traffic bans they have in place for the duration of the Games, making such events as much a demolition derby in the perpetual half-light of Beijing smog as a race per se.
And let's face it, as spectator sports, the likes of archery and target shooting are about as exciting as watching paint dry.
China has thousands of Tibetan monks who apparently are surplus to requirements, so why not let them loose on the archery and rifle ranges and see how well our Olympic sharpshooters go against a moving target.
At least the Chinese really have got into the spirit when it comes to the Olympic motto of citius, altius, fortius – faster, higher, stronger.
According to a report in The Financial Times, the Tibetan capital's most senior Communist Party official cited the 84-year-old motto to urge people to crack down on supporters of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, at an Olympic torch relay ceremony in Lhasa last month.
"Encouraged by the Olympic spirit of faster, higher, stronger, Lhasa people of all nationalities will . . . resolutely smash the Dalai clique's scheme to destabilise Tibet, sabotage the Olympics and split the motherland," said Qin Yizhi, Lhasa party secretary.
Way to go Qin. That's gold, mate.