Olympics Used To Highlight Abuse in China

Posters that portray the five Olympic rings as handcuffs are set to roll through New York City streets today in a preview of what may become a political issue in the presidential campaign season: China's human rights abuses.

Almost exactly a year before the opening of the Olympics in Beijing, a Paris-based advocacy group, Reporters Without Borders, will mount posters on four-wheel bicycles to protest China's imprisonment of journalists.

A Democratic presidential candidate, Governor Richardson of New Mexico, has already called attention to the Beijing Olympics as a political issue. In a debate this June, he said that to stop the bloodshed in Darfur, America's response should include pressuring China. "And if the Chinese don't want to do this, we say to them, maybe we won't go to the Olympics," he said.

The Washington-based representative of Reporters Without Borders, Lucie Morillon, said bus stop-size posters will travel tomorrow by bicycle to Chinatown from Columbus Circle. The group launched a similar campaign last November that featured posters depicting the president of China as afraid of a computer mouse, she said.

"Beijing has not kept its promises to improve human rights," a Paris-based representative of Reporters Without Borders, Hajar Smouni, said. When China was awarded the 2008 Olympic Games six years ago, she said, it promised there would be improved freedom of expression, but it has "not taken even the smallest steps."

Reporters Without Borders is pushing for China to release imprisoned journalists, end Internet censorship, and allow foreign correspondents to move about the country freely, Ms. Smouni said. The press office of the Chinese consulate in New York could not be reached by press time.

The Associated Press reported yesterday that uniformed Chinese police in Beijing detained reporters at a protest organized by Reporters Without Borders. The protestors had unrolled Olympic rings-as-handcuffs posters near the Beijing Olympics office.

The director of China studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, David Lampton, said more such protests are likely as advocacy groups see an opportunity to promote their cause in the world press as it focuses increasingly on China during the next year. The Chinese government also will not want anything that suggests instability or an inability to control political developments in advance of its Party Congress in October, he added.

"Unless the Chinese authorities take urgent measures to stop human rights violations over the coming year, they risk tarnishing the image of China and the legacy of the Beijing Olympics," the secretary-general of Amnesty International, Irene Khan, said in a statement released yesterday.

Mr. Richardson's suggestion that America boycott the Beijing Olympics does not appear to have been taken up by other Democrats. When asked in the June 3 debate about a possibly boycott, Senator Dodd of Connecticut responded, "I think that goes too far." In a telephone interview, a former senator from Alaska, Mike Gravel, told The New York Sun that a boycott of the Olympics could compound problems with China.

Ms. Smouni said Reporters Without Borders is not asking for an Olympic boycott like the one America led during the 1980 Olympics in Moscow following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

"We want China to respect the Olympic spirit," Ms. Morillon said.