What's up with the flame?
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Paris,
Île-de-France,
France
Friday, June 6, 2008
Funny how the Olympic Torch, a symbol of unity and harmony (and steriod-free athletes), gets attacked - and those carrying it - by people demanding the better treatment of other human beings. And, funny, also, how China's sense of ownership of the Olympic Torch, is providing opportunity for anyone who doesn't like China to protest.
Clay Chandler in Fortune magazine had this to say:
Chasing the Dragon
With FORTUNE Asia Editor, Clay Chandler
The Olympic torch's world tour: is Beijing playing with fire?
This year's Olympic torch relay was meant by organizers as a kind of worldwide marketing tour, carefully scripted to showcase China's emergence as a modern global power. But a funny thing happened on the way to the coliseum. Somehow, the beacon of hope has morphed into a "flame of shame" - and its "journey of harmony" has been transformed by demonstrations in city after city into a gauntlet of humiliation.
Trouble started at the flame-lighting ceremony in Greece, where a human rights activist posing as a reporter interrupted a speech by the president of China's Olympic committee, unfurling a black banner depicting the Olympic rings as handcuffs.
On Sunday, torchbearers in London were harassed by thousands of demonstrators decrying human rights abuses in Tibet. Worse mayhem waited across The English Channel, where, on Monday, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Paris, blocking the flame's progress at nearly every turn. In the melee, the torch was extinguished no fewer than four times. The crowds forced organizers to abandon plans to parade the flame past the French capital's grand monuments. Hapless VIP torchbearers traversed the final leg of the route in a bus guarded by helicopters and police trucks. Elsewhere, pro-Tibet activists clashed with thousands of Chinese students carrying banners and flag. Activists unfurled a pro-Tibet banner from the Eiffel Tower.
Chinese officials backed out of an Olympic reception that was to be held at Paris' City Hall; politicians from the Green Party had draped a Tibetan flag across the front of the building. Mayor Bertrand Delanoe blamed China for the cancellation: "Chinese officials decided they would not [attend] because they were offended by Parisian citizens expressing their support for human rights. It is Beijing's responsibility."
In San Francisco, where the flame will arrive on Wednesday, police arrested activists for stretching a giant "Free Tibet" banner across the Golden Gate Bridge, and were bracing for large demonstrations. The flame is certain to draw opposition in Istanbul from Muslims dismayed by China's treatment of the Muslim Uighur minority in the Xinjiang region. Authorities in New Delhi, where the flame is due April 19, have shortened the relay route to 3 kilometers instead of 9 kilometers as originally planned.
Needless to say, this isn't the reaction Beijing expected. The Independent's John Lichfield equated demonstrations along the torch relay route to protests in the aftermath of the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square. "Beijing must be regretting its decision to stage the longest and most complex torch relay in the history of the Olympics.... Instead of a celebration of China's emergence as a world power, the journey of the flame has turned into a trail of shame: the most intensive, international protests against Beijing's human rights violations since the student massacres in Tienanmen [sic] Square in 1989."
The protests create a tricky dilemma for gate-keepers of China's domestic media. Government leaders know they must not appear indifferent to foreign slights. But at the same time, they must also dread the prospect that nationalist outrage over foreign snubs to the torch will get out of hand - a development sure to generate more embarrassing headlines in the foreign press.
In the state-run press, the solution so far has been to quote officials as "strongly condemning" the "disruption" of the torch relays in London and Paris without delving too deeply into the details of those disruptions - or attempting to explain what may have caused them. Similarly, Internet censors seem reluctant to let China-based web-users learn too much about the demonstrations online.
This weekend, as the flame arrived in London, The Financial Times reported that Beijing is looking to hire an international public relations firm to help it repair its image before the games.
Now there's an Olympian challenge that will really be worth watching.
His article provoked a response, for and against, which you can view here:
http://chasingthedragon.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/04/08/the-olympic-torchs-world-tour-is-beijing-playing-with-fire/
