China's conjuring acts were hardly a surprise

THE most surprising thing about the waves of outrage emanating from the Beijing Olympics about the manner in which the despotic Chinese Government is running the games is that anyone is actually surprised.

Surely no one could really have believed for a moment that Chinese officials would agree to change the nature of their totalitarian government's rigid decrees against press freedom and human rights at the behest of the slick fixers who operate the international Olympic gravy train? That officials from the historically corrupt International Olympic Committee could pretend to have reached an agreement with the current crop of mandarins which would have seen a relaxing of China's Draconian control of its internal media, that Sinophiliac national leaders such as our own Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, could claim that China was going to enter into meaningful discussions with supporters of Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and that his presence at the phoney Games' opening was in some way a recognition of these talks, or that the very act of awarding China the Olympic Games was ever seriously seen as an impetus which would presage a new era of Chinese openness, were always farcical confabulations. Yet there are apparently those who are surprised that Chinese political leaders prevented a buck-toothed child from appearing as the face of "new" China because her features were deemed to lack the blemish-free quality the backroom boys from the Politburo were trying to project. Good enough to sing, not good enough to be seen. If a Western nation had pulled this stunt, the forests of Finland would have been pulped to meet the needs of batteries of roaring presses. With China, it's a sort of a ho-hum. According to The Australian's Rowan Callick, the man who ordered the lip-synching switcheroo is believed to be Xi Jinping, the heir apparent to President Hu Jintao, who is in overall command of the Games machine. His wife, Peng Liyuan, is one of China's best-known professional singers. What a hit Mr Xi will be in future talks which demand a degree of trust and honesty. There was even a degree of surprise that other aspects of the opening ceremony were bodgied up, that the fireworks were digitally enhanced, along with some other special effects, to provide a better show for the television audience. As the rigid security ensured that very few spectators would actually see what was taking place in and around the stadium with their own eyes, it was presumably thought that the add-ons would go unremarked. Not so, and again, not much surprise. Conjuring has always had a special place in Chinese culture. Why, the Games organisers even managed to magically remove whole chunks of fairly recent history from their presentation of China through the ages, including the horrific years of the Cultural Revolution which were not so long ago much-admired by numerous Australian academics and not a few Labor MPs, along with their evil old architect Mao. Even our Sinophile PM glossed over this absence of history's grim record, tacitly acknowledging by doing so that manipulation of the past is part-and-parcel of the cultures of both China and the IOC. So, it's phoney and fraudulent and makes a mockery of truth and freedom, but who cares? Plazas emptied of all vehicles and pedestrians except for a few heavily armoured personnel carriers, vast sports stadiums empty except for a handful of senior Communist Party officials; yes, there's no mistaking that distinctive Olympic spirit. It was encapsulated in the televised exchange between a British reporter and a highly paid IOC flack at the Olympic media centre. All the reporter wanted to know was whether the IOC was embarrassed by China's repeated lies about human rights and press freedom issues. Simple question but he couldn't get a simple answer despite repeating it five times. The Chinese Government's idea of free speech is simple. Ask protesters to register with the authorities for permits to demonstrate in specific areas around the city. The Government has detained some of the petitioners who applied for permission to protest, and has exiled others from Beijing for the period of the Games. It wishes it could do the same with some more persistent members of the foreign press corps, one of whom was manhandled, detained and had his hand stomped on when he attempted to cover a pro-Tibet demonstration staged by foreigners last week. Empty promises and broken pledges, justified, apparently by our Prime Minister, who offers the view that human rights progress in China is a "two steps forward, one step back" process. After the unspoken horrors of the Cultural Revolution, the provision of specially sanctioned places for protest is a big step forward, even if actual protests remain forbidden. Clearly, those thousand flowers are still yet to bloom.