WTA stars exultant about opportunity to play for gold

MONTREAL — The Olympics were a hot topic among the players at the Rogers Cup WTA tournament last week. Here’s what some of the top players had to say to reporters about participating in the Beijing Games:

Soon to be the world No. 1, Jelena Jankovic has her sights set on Olympic gold and the U.S. Open.

Question: Jelena Jankovic announced that it’s unfortunate [Maria] Sharapova will not play in the Olympics. Can you comment on this?

Answer from Ana Ivanovic, Serbia: She won’t play Olympics? I didn’t know that. It must be very disappointing because for many players I think they put Olympics even higher than a Grand Slam. So I guess that’s a very, very disappointing fact.

Q: Do you put the Olympics higher than the Grand Slam tournament?

A: It’s definitely [a] very important event, especially [because] you get chance to play once in four years. You play this year, and who knows in four years if you would be, you know, able to play it? So, it’s definitely very high on my list.

Question: How big are the Olympics for you?

Answer from Jelena Jankovic, Serbia: Olympics, it’s a very special event. We get [an] opportunity to play Olympics every four years. Just to be surrounded by the best athletes in the world — being in the village with them, experiencing the whole event — is special. So … I really look forward to giving my best there and hopefully being [in] a little bit better form than I was here. We will see. I don’t know. Anything can happen.

Q: What do you prefer, an Olympic medal or to win the U.S. Open?

A: Actually, to be honest, a win in the U.S. Open. I don’t know why. I want to win a Grand Slam. It’s just, you know, individual. But if I could choose, I would choose both. Very humble, huh?

Question: Are the Olympics just as important to you as a Grand Slam?

Answer from Dinara Safina, Russia: Doesn’t matter, Grand Slam or Olympics. … If I could pick one, it’s only it’s once in four years, yeah, maybe it’s more like kind of special. But I don’t know, I don’t mind to have one of them.

Question: What do you think of going to the Olympics?

Answer from Dominika Cibulkova, Slovakia: I’m really looking forward to [going] there. I’m so excited about my first Olympic Games. It will be just something different, Olympic Games. I will be playing not just for myself; I will be playing for Slovakia. I hope to play well. Now, I have enough confidence to believe in myself, and we will see there.

Paul Grant is a deputy editor at ESPN.com.

Source: http://sports.espn.go.com/

Beyond Beijing Olympics

China seems to be a nation that is inebriated with great expectations about its future, while rest of the world is just struggling to get along with bad debts, spiralling prices and random bursts of terrorism.
From die-hard communism to marketplace capitalism has been a long march indeed, though not what Mao Zedong might have conceived. But that is in fact a great tribute to China’s genius, its adaptability and resilience, creating the perception of China’s relentless and inevitable rise to a global superpower.
Today China is healthier, better-educated, richer and more optimistic about its progress than most other developing countries. A recent Pew Global Attitudes Project survey showed that 86 per cent of the Chinese said they were happy with their country’s direction provided by the Communist Party.
China fascinates the global corporate with its controlled narratives of boundless opportunities and more so with the power of its ruling party’s collective will that rules 1.3 billion hardworking, entrepreneurial and yet obedient masses. China has come to believe that since the world cannot do without its inexpensive goods and talents, there’s not much to worry about intellectual property, currency manipulation to boost exports, massive trade surpluses, and rising foreign exchange reserves that end up as US Treasury notes, so no harm done.
Now the whole world is waiting for the 2008 Games to open ~ hopefully ~ under Beijing’s clear blue skies “to refashion the Olympics from a sports and merchandising extravaganza to an engine of political and social change”, as The Wall Street Journal had optimistically put it once upon a time.
China won the right to host the Games in spite of its record about human rights of the people of Tibet, the followers of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong, and political dissidents and scholars, some in jail waiting for a fair trial. Doing business with China is more important than human rights, though Americans along with rest of the world go on paying lip service to the issue. The US House of Representatives passed a near unanimous resolution (419-1) last Wednesday criticising China’s human rights record. President George W Bush will be attending the Olympics but last Tuesday he met a group of Chinese dissidents and promised to raise the human rights issue. China of course protested, and that’s the end.
Trade and the Olympics had little humanising effect upon Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union; therefore, to expect wonders to happen in China because of the Olympics in 2008 or increasing international trade is expecting too much from China’s monolithic system. It is doubtful if rising prosperity would persuade China’s Communist Party to loosen its control over power and become less authoritarian.
Since China took the road to capitalism about three decades ago, its economy has been opening up and growing rapidly with its gross national product (GNP) rising to more than 9 per cent annually, which has made the Chinese, especially its elite and entrepreneurial classes, ultra nationalistic and patriotic. Tiananmen has been wiped out from the nation’s historical memory.
Many long-term economic benefits would accrue from the 2008 Games because the whole enterprise has necessitated massive investment, billions of dollars in infrastructure and information technology to modernise and showcase Beijing for the events. Hundreds of thousands of tourists are pouring into China and the organisers hope that apart from enjoying the Games they would admire the rise of new China. China seeks global acknowledgement and respect for its achievements.
China feels that it can compete with the best without the noise and chaos of an open society like the United States, where the people demand accountability from their political leaders. No wonder Beijing with the help of US telecommunication companies, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Cisco, has been trying to expand its control into the digital domain. Social scientists say that large centralised political systems break down due to internal pressures triggered by communications technology, unless they have built-in capabilities for adjustment.
So it is too early to say what might happen in China in the age of the Internet, satellites, cell phones and hosts of other wireless, digital, and interconnected sensing devices that are becoming available to the masses. China might succeed in controlling the digital generation and guide it into a nationalistic upsurge as it happened during the recent Tibet protests.
Some US corporations cannot stop thinking that by offering selective partnership to Chinese businesses they would be able to co-opt China’s brain-power. For example, after selling its ThinkPad to a Chinese company, Lenovo Group Ltd. in 2005, IBM alerted the public about the inevitability of China’s rise and the need to harness its strength for corporate America.
A full-page advertisement amusingly admonished: “The future is a dragon. Do you hear it coming?” The IBM boasted of access to a global pool of Nobel laureates, research labs and no less than 3,000 scientists, engineers and technologists. Instead of paying the salaries of scientists and technologists to solve complex problems, the ad asked, wouldn’t it be great simply “to rent their minds?”
Renting brain-power from China for doing specific jobs may sound more acceptable than outsourcing, but post-Olympics China’s intellectual and manufacturing power may no longer be available for renting.
The Japanese too have been hearing the dragon coming. In 2005, the Chinese government permitted loud and sometime violent protests against Japan in several big industrial cities, including Shanghai and Hong Kong, regarding Japanese insensitivities to their bruised feelings.
The Chinese claimed that their feelings had been hurt because some Japanese school textbooks showed no regrets about the atrocities the Japanese troops had committed against them during World War II. There were other reasons. Japan had begun to explore undersea oil and gas deposits in a disputed region of East China Sea; and of course Japan’s continuous strategic alliance with the US regarding the Taiwan issue has been an irritant.
When Japan asked for an apology and compensation for vandalism and damage to its diplomatic and commercial property, China said it had nothing to apologise about. Before the street protests, the Chinese government had allowed an online petition drive by millions of Chinese against Japan’s effort to seek permanent membership of the UN Security Council. The unprecedented online phenomenon showed how China could mobilise its masses.
Just as the Chinese authorities aroused the Chinese to come out and protest against Japan, with the same speed they ordered protesters to shut up. The Communist Party is capable of generating and controlling mass enthusiasm through nationalism, as it is doing for the Games now. It will be interesting to see how the Games affect China as the world turns.

Source: http://www.thestatesman.net/

China’s Olympic Crossroads: Author Ma Jian on Beijing, Spectacle and Reality

Ma Jian is an acclaimed Chinese writer who lives in London with his partner and translator, Flora Drew. He is the author, most recently, of “Beijing Coma,” a novel about the events surrounding the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Born in Qingdao, he moved to Hong Kong in 1983 after some of his works were banned, and later to England. Mr. Ma has previously contributed op-ed articles for The Times. In this interview he spoke from Beijing. (Interviewed previously in this series were Orville Schell and Ai Weiwei.)

Q: What does the Beijing Olympics represent for China? Why is it so important?

Ma Jian: The Beijing Olympics represent China’s grand entrance onto the world stage and confirmation of its new superpower status. The Games are crucially important, not for the Chinese people (who now seem weary of the whole charade), but for the Chinese government. Behind its arrogant swagger, the Communist Party is insecure and afraid. It bristles at any criticism from abroad and is terrified of internal dissent. The Olympics will give it the international recognition it craves, and will legitimize its dictatorial rule.

Q: Your new book, “Beijing Coma,” is about the Tiananmen Square crackdown. How might the Beijing Olympics affect the memory of that event?

Ma: The Chinese people have been forced to forget the Tiananmen massacre. There has been no public debate about the event, no official apology. The media aren’t allowed to mention it. Still today people are being persecuted and imprisoned for disseminating information about it.

The government hoped that the Olympics would stir up a nationalistic frenzy that would erase memories of the past. But by turning the Olympics into a mass movement, it has inadvertently reminded the Chinese people of 1989, which was the last time the country was mobilized on such a scale. Despite, of course, the fact that the ’89 Democracy Movement was a spontaneous, jubilant show of people power, whereas this year’s movement is an artificial, state-engineered propaganda pageant.

The state of high alert Beijing is now under is another reminder of 1989. It recalls the tense period of martial law before and after the massacre. Today, the army has once again surrounded the city. Taxi drivers remark that they haven’t seen so many troops deployed since 1989.

Q: You once said that, “China is completely lacking in self-awareness.” What do you mean by that?

Ma: I meant that the Chinese people are not aware of their own entrapment. They believe they live in a free society, but don’t realize how much they are being monitored and controlled, how much the information they receive is restricted and warped, until they step out of line, that is, and feel the heavy hand of the state fall on them. Then they discover that the rights granted to them by the constitution are meaningless, and that the freedoms are a sham.

To become self-aware, people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say, write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expression is the most basic, but fundamental, right. Without it, human beings are reduced to automatons. But I’m hopeful about the future. Travel and the power of the Internet will slowly open people’s minds.

Q: Based on your travels through the Tibetan regions of China, you’ve written a collection of stories about Tibet that offers a less than idealized view of a culture and people. Many critics were startled by your portrayal of a Tibet rife with sexual abuse and physical cruelty. How much of what you wrote about was a realistic and accurate view? What are your thoughts about the recent Tibetan protests?

Ma: I wrote “Stick Out Your Tongue” after wandering through China for three years in the late 1980s. The Tibet that I discovered at the end of my journey was very different from the rosy picture painted by the Chinese government. It didn’t feel like a “liberated” country; it felt like a nation under siege. But when writing the book, I wasn’t aiming to give a “realistic and accurate” view. That’s the role of documentary, not fiction. I wanted to write about the country as a state of mind. I’d traveled to Tibet as a Buddhist. It was a pilgrimage of sorts. But when I arrived, I suffered a crisis of faith. The emptiness of the landscape, the desecration of spiritual life, the poverty and isolation mirrored my own feelings of confusion and despair. The book is a work of the imagination, a meditation on death, religion and love. It shouldn’t be read as reportage.

I can understand the frustration and anger that drove the Tibetans to protest. They have been reduced to a minority in their own land. Tibet is a so-called “autonomous region” of China, but Tibetans have no real autonomy. They can’t choose their leaders; they are banned from worshipping the Dalai Lama; their resources and economy are monopolized by the Han Chinese. Their country has become a huge prison. These protests are like jail riots.

I believe that the Tibetans should have the right to control their own destinies, and decide for themselves whether they want to be part of China or not. But this view isn’t shared by most Chinese, or even the leaders of most Western democracies. As long as the Communist Party is in power, there is little hope for Tibet.

Q: Do you think the Sichuan earthquake had any effect on China’s state of mind leading up to the Olympics?

Ma: The earthquake reawakened the Chinese people’s sense of compassion. There was a mass outpouring of grief. The media took advantage of the chaos to prove that when restrictions are loosened, it is capable of reporting objectively. But after a couple of weeks, the government regained control, and the earthquake became just another of its propaganda shows, a tragedy with no victims. All criticism of the government was silenced, and the “stars” of the show were not the victims or the members of the public who had rushed to help them, but the Party leaders and People’s Liberation Army soldiers.

There is little talk of Sichuan now. As Olympic supporters shout “Go Sichuan! Go China!” the tragedy has been reduced to a slogan.

Q: If you were in Beijing during the Olympics, what stories would you pursue?

Ma: I’m in Beijing right now. I’ve come to observe the charade. As a novelist, I’m fascinated by the gap that exists between spectacle and reality. I’m not looking for any particular stories. I just want to walk through the streets, talk to people and let the absurdities of the event seep into me.

Q: Do you have any additional thoughts you’d like to share?

Ma: I was in Beijing three months ago, but this time it seems like a different city. The streets are half-empty. There are no beggars or pimps, no traffic jams. The taxis are frighteningly clean. The roads are lined with flags, slogans and the Olympic sponsors’ huge advertising hoardings. It feels like a sanitized, soulless exhibition center.

Source: http://olympics.blogs.nytimes.com/

Olympics Countdown

The Olympic Games is all set to go on stage in Beijing on August 8, 2008. As a curtain-raiser to the sporting extravaganza, your favourite magazine, Sportstar, beginning next week, will bring you three Countdown Issues followed by a Bumper. The Olympics specials, designed to capture the spirit of the Games, will delve into the past and also take a peek into the event set to unfold in the Chinese capital. They will carry a wealth of information including previews, profiles and eye-catching visuals.

Source: http://www.sportstaronnet.com/

One month to go: Beijing prepares to deliver Olympics

By Nick Mulvenney

BEIJING (Reuters) – With a month remaining until the opening ceremony of one of the most scrutinized Olympic Games in history, the time has come for Beijing to deliver on seven years of promises and billions of dollars spent.

On July 13, 2001, the state news agency Xinhua hailed the decision to award the Olympic Games to Beijing as being a “milestone in China’s rising international status and a historical event in the great renaissance of the Chinese nation.”

Six months ago, preparations were going to plan with gleaming new venues and infrastructure almost completely in place for the August 8-24 Games.

But violent unrest in Tibet in March followed by global anti-Chinese protests have marred Beijing’s final countdown to the Games. Moreover, the threat of terrorism and pollution have presented the Communist authorities with new challenges.

However, with the 31 venues completed and the army of migrant workers putting the finishing touches to a $40 billion upgrade of the city’s once-creaking infrastructure, organizers are upbeat.

“We are fully prepared for the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games,” organizing committee (BOCOG) vice president Jiang Xiaoyu said last week. “We are going to use the last 36 days to further perfect the arrangements.”

China’s rulers wanted to use the Games to promote internal stability and show off a confident, increasingly influential economic power to the rest of the world.

After the public relations disaster of the March 14 Tibet riots and the protest-disrupted international leg of the Olympic torch relay, some have questioned whether China’s leaders care anymore about external opinion.

“China wants the Olympics to be applauded by the international community and at the same time instill a sense of pride in the Chinese people,” said Jiang Qisheng of the China chapter of International PEN, an association founded to defend freedom of expression.

“But stability is more important. International applause is ranked only second. If forced to choose, China would rather have stability.”

The May 12 Sichuan earthquake and the genuine outpouring of emotion over the death of nearly 70,000 people altered some perceptions of China, turning the award of the Olympics “from obscene accolade to worthy reward” in the words of British commentator Simon Jenkins.

TERRORISM CONCERN

But visa restrictions for visitors, plans to rid Beijing of petitioners, the homeless and migrant workers as well as the tight control of the media on “sensitive” legs of the domestic torch relay point to obsessive stage-management.

China says it views terrorism as the biggest threat to the Games and a 100,000-strong anti-terrorism force is already on alert.

Rights groups say Beijing is using the threat of terrorism to suppress internal dissent, especially in the restive far-Western regions of Tibet and Xinjiang, which is home to more than 8 million Muslim Uighurs.

“We are worried that there will be an even more wide-scale crackdown on the Uighur people, especially over the next month,” said Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the exiled World Uyghur Congress.

“China is using the final opportunity the Olympics presents to portray Uighurs to the international community as terrorists. We have always opposed China holding the Olympics. We are the biggest victims of it, even more so than the Tibetans.”

Free Tibet is asking British athletes to express support for its cause by making a “T for Tibet” sign during the Games, it said in a statement on Monday.

American, Dutch and Australian athletes have already indicated their intention to express their concerns about human rights during the Games.

ALGAE STENCH

The stench of the algae in the city of Qingdao, which will host the Olympic sailing events, has been a vivid reminder that environmental concerns still dog the Games.

Of more pressing concern to most athletes is the air quality in the capital and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has said some endurance events might be rescheduled if the pollution presents a health risk.

The surrounding provinces of Hebei and Tianjin ordered factory closures this month and four others are also involved in the effort to keep the Beijing skies clear.

Beijing has spent more than 120 billion yuan on environmental improvements over the last decade and its own contingency plans will come into force mainly from July 20.

China’s athletes have continued to prepare for the Games away from the prying eyes of the media.

Life bans for two Olympic hopefuls caught doping this year — swimmer Ougang Kunpeng and wrestler Luo Meng — have left them in no doubt that the authorities do not want to lose face at their own party with any positive tests.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/

Tibet not an Olympic issue – China

CHINA has insisted that Tibet should not be linked to the Olympics, after French President Nicolas Sarkozy said his attendance at the opening ceremony hinged on Chinese talks with the Dalai Lama.
“We oppose connecting Tibetan-related issues with the Beijing Olympics and we oppose politicising the Beijing Olympics,” foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said.

“Tibetan affairs is an internal affair of China and the contact between the central government and the private representatives of the Dalai is also an internal affair of China,” Mr Liu said.

Mr Liu was asked to comment on statements made by Mr Sarkozy in Paris yesterday that his attendance at the opening ceremony would depend on progress in talks between China and envoys of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader.

Mr Sarkozy said he would announce next week whether he would attend the opening ceremony in the Chinese capital.

“If they continue to progress and if the Dalai Lama and the Chinese president recognise this progress, then all obstacles to my participation will have been lifted,” Mr Sarkozy said.

Chinese officials and the Dalai Lama’s envoys were due to begin two-days of fence minding talks in Beijing today. However Mr Liu would not say whether the talks had begun.

The decision by China to hold the talks was widely seen as a response to international condemnation of its crackdown on protests in Tibet in March that embarrassed Beijing ahead of the Olympics.

Source: http://www.news.com.au/

UN chief wishes Beijing Olympics “most successful”

UNITED NATIONS, June 29 (Xinhua) — UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has expressed his confidence that the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games will be the most successful ever in history.

“I am quite confident that the Chinese government and people will make this most successful ever Olympic Games in history,” Ban said.

The UN chief made the comment during a recent interview with UN-based Chinese journalists about his upcoming visit to China in early July.

During the visit, he will congratulate the Chinese government and people on their “very successful preparations” for the Beijing Olympic Games, Ban added.

“The Chinese people should be very proud of what you have achieved so far for the coming Olympics Games,” he told Chinese journalists at the UN Headquarters.

Ban is scheduled to visit China from July 1 to 3 at the invitation of the Chinese government.

The Beijing Olympics, the third ever held on the Asian continent following Tokyo and Seoul, should be used as a venue where the world people can demonstrate their athletic skills through fair competition, he said.

“But at the same time this should be the venue where we can promote the harmony and friendship and mutual understanding, transcending all ideologies and ethnicities and national geographical boundaries,” the secretary-general said.

Ban said he will also have an opportunity to visit the Olympic facilities.

“I am looking forward to my visit to China with great expectation and excitement,” he added.

Source: http://news.xinhuanet.com/

China announces Olympics stability drive after riot

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING (Reuters) – China has launched a nationwidecampaign to defuse protest ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games,state media reported on Monday, days after a riot in thecountry’s southwest highlighted volatile social strains.

With authorities eager to present China as a harmoniousnation during the August Games, the government has orderedlocal officials to defuse petition campaigns by discontentedcitizens and to prevent “mass incidents”, such as riots anddemonstrations, according to the news reports.

“The Beijing Olympics are approaching and properly carryingout petition and stability work, protecting social harmony andstability, and ensuring the Beijing Olympics go safely andsmoothly has become a tough battle that every department atevery level must win,” said one report of a nationwide videoconference on a stability drive that was held on Saturday.

“Now we are entering a state of war,” said the report on alocal government website in the eastern province of Zhejiang(http://www.dqnews.com.cn).

Yet at the very time officials were making plans forprotest-free Games, a county in the southwest province ofGuizhou was shaken by rioting over claimed police and officialabuses.

Thousands of locals mobbed government offices in Weng’ancounty, Guizhou. The local police headquarters was torched andpolice vehicles wrecked after claims spread that authoritieshad covered up a teenage girl’s death.

PETITION CAMPAIGNS

Saturday’s stability meeting was the latest of a flurry ofsecurity measures that China is taking to prevent any domesticunrest upsetting the Games and was targeted at petitioncampaigns by farmers and other disgruntled citizens.

Petitioners often pressure local officials by journeying toprovincial capitals or the national capital with complaintsabout lost land and corruption.

Over the past decade, the number of petitioners journeyingto provincial capitals and to Beijing has swollen. Nationwide,petitions and complaint visits grew from 4.8 million in 1995 to12.7 million in 2005.

“Our most fundamental demand that is that zero go toBeijing, zero go to the province capital and there are zeromass petitions and mass incidents,” a county official in thesouthwest province of Sichuan said, according to a localofficial website (http://www.scpc.gov.cn).

Guaranteeing security is the top priority of the BeijingOlympics, Chinese President Hu Jintao has said.

Another account of Saturday’s meeting appeared in the TibetDaily, where a vice chairman of the regional government, BaimaChilin, told officials to prevent more protests in the restivemountain area where anti-Chinese riots erupted in March.

Baima said the meeting had “made arrangements for creatinga harmonious and stable social environment for a successfulBeijing Olympic Games”.

In Weng’an county, locals contacted on Monday morning saidthe protest had melted away, but the county town remained tensewith heavy police patrols and broadcasts warning rioters toturn themselves in.

More than 300 people had been arrested following the riots,the Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, a HongKong-based group, said in a statement received by fax onMonday.

Cui Yadong, Guizhou public security chief, told state mediathat “14 lawbreakers” had been detained on Saturday night,Xinhua news agency said.

Police had said the teenage girl had killed herself byjumping in a river, but residents said the girl had been rapedand murdered by a relative of a senior government official.

The provincial government had re-opened the girl’s case,and set up a team of 10 criminal investigators and forensicexperts to probe the cause of death, Xinhua said.

“The police certainly won’t let the arson go unpunished.They will catch the criminals,” said a Weng’an businessmancontacted by telephone. He gave only his surname, Liu.

Source: http://www.ecodiario.es/