Representatives Ask Rice About ‘Consular Emergencies’ During Beijing Olympics
Last month, three members of Congress — Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, Ray Lahood of Illinois, and Darlene Hooley of Oregon — anticipating just how ugly things could will get if when U.S. citizens protest during this year’s Olympics in Beijing, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to ask what instructions she had given to our diplomats in China about “consular emergencies” during the games. The members also broached the sensitive subject of whether State should issue a travel advisory for Americans traveling to Beijing this summer.
The members also wondered about reports that the British Olympic Committee agreed to a Chinese “gag order.” They want to know what Rice plans to do to protect the free speech of our athletes.
(OFK note: A gag order seems exceptionally dumb. It’s superfluous where it can be enforced and nothing but an impotent source of bad publicity where it can’t. Is China asserting the extraterritorial jurisdiction of its censorship over our athletes here in the United States? Does it expect other countries’ subjects or officials to help enforce it? Do we really think we could give extraterritorial effect to the First Amendment in Beijing? ChiCom commissars and U.S. athletes need to understand some realities. Americans love publicity and we’re used to saying whatever we damn well please. We don’t always lose those habits when we clear customs and the laws change. The ChiComs, on the other hand, love to beat, imprison, massacre, or drive tanks over people for that sort of thing. American athletes really can say whatever they please while they’re on U.S. soil. That leaves the Chinese with two options: ingore it and let it blow over, or deny the offending athlete a visa and bring down even more bad publicity on themselves. Once they’re on Chinese soil, however, the athletes speak at their own peril, albeit far less peril than if a Chinese person were to do it. Everyone is on full notice.)
In any event, Rice never answered, so naturally, someone leaked the letter to me. Wanna read the whole thing? You know you do: letter-to-s-rice.pdf
I’m sure this quote will get someone’s attention:
We also have special concern for the treatment of U.S. citizens of Asian ethnicity in cases of detention in China. Beijing authorities have demonstrated in the past an inclination to engage in racial profiling towards U.S. citizens in custody. They tend, frankly, to treat U.S. citizens of their own ethnicity far more harshly.
Like I said, a real P.R. disaster, and it couldn’t happen to more deserving people.
“Follow the money”. Too many corporations depend on cheap Chinese [slave] labor to manufacture their goods. Too many politicians have their pay augmented by Chinese bribes, kickbacks, and etc.
Lenin told us that “useful idiots” would be the downfall of the West. He told us the last capitalist would be hanged by a rope he sold his executioners.
Maybe Lenin was a prophet? Just not about the USSR? Of course, he did miss that “mickey finn” his buddy Josef gave him…
Rice has no authority to protect the free speech of athletes on Chinese soil. They are sports ambassadors, but they do not enjoy diplomatic immunity. Nevertheless, the three members of Congress can rest easy. It is highly unlikely that the Chinese government will detain any Olympic athlete for engaging in some form of protest, nor will they deny visas to athletes who critcize China prior to the Games. So far the protests in the West have only made the Chinese feel persecuted, and netizens have been busy posting online defenses and counterattacks. If similarly chaotic protests do not erupt in Asia, then it will look to the Chinese and people in other developing countries like it’s the West that’s causing all this trouble, playing spoilsport. The Chinese government can easily make lemonade out of any lemons tossed out by Western athletes or spectators.
Thanks for making the letter available, Joshua. I wondered who Mark Russell was. He was easy to google. I am disgusted with the behavior of our consulate in Guangzhou and horrified to learn our government pays Chinese nationals to work inside our consulates there.
I somewhat disagree with Sonagi’s position. I’d say it is a 50/50 chance or higher.
We tend to forget these days that the Cold War just ended a couple of decades ago, and before that time, it would not have surprised us much at all if a Beijing took Olympic athletes into custody and deported them for protest actions or refused to let them enter the country.
And China’s leadership seems like the type that remembers that Cold War period well and might not have a mentality that has evolved much beyond that era. One item sticks out recently in this line —- I’m talking about news that the Chinese government put on a list of items athletes could not bring into the Olympic village the Christian Bible.
And as Sonagi pointed out, the Chinese people, due to their strong sense of nationalism, will not take kindly to athletes pissing on their nation. They also won’t accept, and will be further enraged by, negative world publicity – no matter what they’re government does. They would probably cheer their government taking athletes into custody and booting them from the nation if those athletes do something to gain bad press for China in the global community.
….and that sense of nationalism among the millions and millions and millions of Chinese citizens would trump fear the government would have of looking bad to citizens in Paris or Hollywood or Berlin.
Which made me think of something else —-
—– I think there is a good chance these Olympics will go a significant way to causing lasting medium to long term damage to relations with China and much of the world. — It won’t hurt trade because the world community couldn’t give a crap about human rights if it got in the way of doing business with China. And with business being of prime importance, it won’t harm Chinese relations with foreign governments.
No — the lasting impact might easily come in the form of solidifying the authoritarian regime’s hold on its people and helping it avoid future reforms it might have had to face as a natural progression of its economic rise (which comes with more distribution of wealth which comes (usually) with a greater sense of freedom and rights).
Chinese nationalism has grown and grown. We can see this by how their netizens attack sites that speak ill of real ills China has done — I get comments regularly at the You Tube videos I did on NK and Human Rights from them.
When the US accidently bombed the Chinese consulate in Kosovo, and when the Chinese fighter plane collided into the US spy plane, the natural and strong reaction of the Chinese people was to pour into the streets in rage.
If I start to imagine the thoughts of a communist/authoritarian regime like the one we’ve seen in China —-
—– I think they would conclude the benefits of stoking the sense of nationalism among its masses would clearly out weigh negative world publicity. By far.
I think there is a good chance they would think that, most likely, the worse the foreign press talks about China during and around the time of the Olympics, the closer such publicity is going to shove Chinese citizens into the arms of the authoritarian government and away from the outside world.
That is gold for a regime that is trying to do what no other nation (I can think of) has accomplished — implement successful capitalist reforms while maintaining a “communist” regime as central authority.
And as jtb pointed out, it isn’t like corporations or foreign governments are going to do anything to jeopardize their ability to beat other nations in the race to potentially milk what they view as a mega cash cow for decades to come – no matter what Beijing does to French or American or Australian or other foreign athletes who dare to “break the Olympic spirit of non-partisanship and speak out on political issues”….
One item sticks out recently in this line —- I’m talking about news that the Chinese government put on a list of items athletes could not bring into the Olympic village the Christian Bible.
The local Xinhua bookstore in my former city of residence sold Bible study tapes for English learners, so I was suspicious about whether this was true. It’s NOT. Athletes are free to bring in religious literature for personal use, just like any other foreign visitor or resident. China is not Saudi Arabia. There are churches, temples, and mosques, albeit state-controlled, and foreigners are allowed to organize their own worship services.
When the US accidently bombed the Chinese consulate in Kosovo, and when the Chinese fighter plane collided into the US spy plane, the natural and strong reaction of the Chinese people was to pour into the streets in rage.
The Chinese did not pour into the streets and organize spontaneous demonstrations. To the contrary, the rock throwers in front of the US embassy in Beijing were bussed there by the government. The 2005 anti-Japanese demonstrations were likewise goverment-organized, but government stuffed the genie back in the bottle when the demonstrations got out of hand. The Chinese government fears crowd control and would be leery of instigating or allowing another anti-foreign demonstration.
There will be plainclothes police everywhere in Beijing and other event-hosting cities during the Olympics, ready to bundle up into unmarked white vans anybody who unfurls a banner or starts shouting slogans. Athletes awaiting events will likely be confined to the Olympic Village. Visitors will be deported as usual.
I did a quick and limited check on the Bible story. This Washington Post article and a couple others I read report Beijing’s denial of the ban, but it did not look back much at the original claims.
At the end of the WP piece, it said the claim stemmed from a misunderstanding of what was said at some meeting, but it did not quote anything new from the original sources showing that those original sources stuck with their claim or had seen where they were mistaken. Nor did it state what was said that could cause the misunderstanding. Poor journalism there…
The original claim said that its source for the Bible ban story was a list of prohibited items in the Olympic village Beijing had recently released.
So, what did the list say? Somebody should have an original copy of it. Was it misunderstood? Or did Beijing quickly back peddle when the story was published?
On the examples of anti-US demonstrations in China, whether the Chinese government sought to control them or another – either promoting or shutting them down – doesn’t make much difference.
It only makes a difference if we are saying the protests would not have happened without the government causing them to happen.
I’ve heard reports of such things in Iran — of surreal protests witnessed by foreign news people where large crowds were shouting anti-American slogans and burning the US flag as a group only to have individual protest members frequently come over to say, “We like America.”
But, I doubt much that that was the case in the Kosovo and fighter plane incidents.
I remember listening to an academic panel discussion soon after the fighter plane incident happened. A Chinese-American scholar said he had been in China when the incident happened and he took part in a previously scheduled very large internet discussion with mostly Chinese college students all over that nation. The discussion was on China and the world community and international relations – but the just-happened fighter plane incident took center stage:
He said he had been surprised, to the point of being somewhat shocked, at the fury expressed at the plane incident. He said one thing that kept being repeated was that China had to teach the Americans a lesson again just like they did in the Korean War. That that was the only way America and the rest of the world were going to give China the respect of its power that it deserved. He said he had to remind them how massive amounts of Chinese citizens had lost their lives in the Korean War for the simple purpose of keeping North Korea alive.
I also remember hearing that the book The China That Can Say “No” was a big hit in China and was highly xenophobic particularly toward the US.
But my overall point was that the implications of negative press for Beijing as the Olympics come are fundamentally different between the world community and internal China:
Events surrounding the Olympics will probably end up souring world opinion concerning China in the short term, but China being portrayed negatively in the world press will most likely boost a negative Chinese nationalism for a much longer term. And that will be good for the leadership in Beijing.
And even in the world community outside of China, the economic hunger to utilize the Chinese labor market and consumer market make it clear any damage done to China by even the worst case protests at the Olympics will be short lived.
How long did it take Tianamen Square Massacre to be wiped from the memories of the world community and Chinese citizens?
I mean, Google and Yahoo and the like went to great lengths to help China work out means to block knowledge of that massacre and other things Beijing doesn’t want its people to hear about.
And here is a link to a You Tube video on a protest at Carrefour.
This is the kind of thing I’d expect to see played out throughout the Olympics.
The protests around the world against China’s abuses will do nothing to alter China’s course beyond the very short term, because China knows the world will continue to trip all over each other trying to do business with it.
But, the protests will help push the Chinese citizens closer to their government as they seek to shove away from the outside world that is criticizing “China”. It will stoke nationalism.
I am not saying I’m against protests at all. I wish the world community had more of a spine. But, it doesn’t.