The opening of the Beijing Olympics is only a few days away and China has already tried to deter its staunchest critics by creating an atmosphere of terror, arresting and shooting dissidents as if Beijing were under martial law.
Media reports say the Chinese government is staging a “people’s war” on terror. Apart from the 100,000-strong anti-terrorist army, 1.4 million anti-terrorist volunteers, 200,000 troops and three armed services are safeguarding the games. The most advanced SU-27 jet fighters have been deployed around the National Stadium.
The scale of the deployment exceeds the deployment for the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. Many armed police with submachine guns are appearing in the streets, questioning and examining passersby. Some Beijing residents have said that a number of scientific research organizations have had to vacate their premises so they can be used as temporary dormitories for the armed police. Are these deployments also aimed at preventing a possible coup d’etat?
Traffic in and out of Beijing is also strictly controlled, isolating the city. All vehicles entering the city need to undergo safety checks. A vehicle packed with passengers is turned back if a single passenger does not have ID documents. Subway passengers also undergo such scrutiny.
On the opening day of the Games on Friday, there will be no flights over Beijing, or even balloons. For the convenience of the Olympic participants, the areas around Beijing Capital International Airport and Beijing Railway Station will be closed during opening week, while two layers of wire netting surround the Olympic Village as if it were a prison.
The media are also tightly controlled. On July 24, the Chinese-language tabloid Beijing News published an interview with a Hong Kong-born US photographer, who took a picture of casualties being rushed to a hospital on the back of a tricycle during the Tiananmen Massacre. Beijing immediately ordered the paper yanked from stalls and the report cut from its Web site, calling the article premeditation.
On July 25, some Hong Kong reporters and photographers were strong-armed by police while covering the uproar among people who wanted to buy tickets for the Games. Over the past two weeks, at least four groups of Hong Kong reporters have been treated brutally. The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games asked the reporters to follow police instructions.
Beijing has also banned the public from filing complaints during the Games, along with bans on prostitution and eating dog meat. It has even required that top-level managers of financial funds leave before the Games. On July 24, China Securities Regulatory Commission issued a notice to all fund operators, ordering them not to comment on the stock market in public to avoid market fluctuation. Why doesn’t Beijing simply close the market?
To promote etiquette among its residents, Beijing first told them that they were not allowed to discuss political or religious issues; now they are prohibited from talking about salaries, sex or health issues such as those related to pollution.
On the surface, Beijing is well protected. However, violent protests have occured from Guizhou and Yunnan provinces to Shanghai. Even Uighurs have reportedly threatened Beijing. Can Beijing really polish up its image before the Games start?
“One world, one dream” is the slogan for the games. But should Taiwan and the world lower themselves to China’s level? Due to the high costs of the Games and low incomes of the Chinese, the government has already held a meeting to call on the public to be prepared for danger amid the calm. What calm?
Paul Lin is a political commentator.
Translated by Eddy Chang
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS