Beijing Wide Open

In the small Beijing suburb of Hongxialu, there’s a new force in town. The government has recruited a special unit of 288 residents, mostly middle-aged or elderly, to work as “security volunteers” in the lead-up to the Olympics.

Wearing red armbands with Olympic badges, the volunteers loiter near the entrance gates of their neighbourhood. They scrutinize every visitor and report to the police if they see anyone unfamiliar or suspicious.

The volunteers of Hongxialu are just one cog in a vast machinery of surveillance in Beijing these days. Across the city, a network of 400,000 informants and volunteers has been mobilized to keep an eye out in their communities. The old Maoist system of neighbourhood committees, which had largely fallen into irrelevance in the past decade, is being revived again as a tool of social control.

When the last gold medal has been awarded and the athletes have left, this network of informers – along with an estimated 300,000 surveillance cameras and a strengthened security apparatus – will remain as perhaps the biggest legacy of the historic Beijing Olympics. » Read the rest of this entry «

From The Sunday Times
July 13, 2008

Beijing is putting on a show of moderation but internal party papers reveal a sinister crackdown

Michael Sheridan in Hong Kong

Internal Communist party documents have revealed that China is planning a programme of harsh political repression in Tibet despite a public show of moderation to win over world opinion before the Olympic Games next month.

A campaign of “re-education” has been outlined in confidential speeches to meetings of Communist party members by Zhang Qingli, the hardline party secretary of Tibet.

Verbatim texts of the speeches have been kept out of the Chinese media but were printed in the April and May editions of the Xigang Tongxun (Tibet Communications) — a classified publication restricted to party officials. Translations were handed to The Sunday Times in Hong Kong.

Zhang has admitted behind closed doors that the Chinese authorities in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, face “a tide of encirclement” and that anti-Chinese violence in March “destroyed social stability”. He has warned that “final victory” is far off. » Read the rest of this entry «