Here is a link to yesterday’s official Olympic press conference, attended by a rep from the International Olympic Committee and Wang Wei, executive vice president and secretary general of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, otherwise known as BOCOG. The whole thing, including a volunteer wrestling the microphone away from a South China Morning Post reporter who wanted to ask a follow up question (they’d had a bad experience with these: see here. Jump to the series of questions by the Chanel Four reporter. Great stuff.), is fascinating theater.
Wang faced persistent questioning about the supposed protest zones in three Beijing parks (see numerous stories on the issue on the web, ours here) and the reported arrests and harassment of those attempting to register to protest. His response was a long lecture about how Chinese traditionally look for compromise to settle disputes rather than confrontation. This does make one wonder what was happening during the the three decade long Civil War or the ten years calamity, sorry, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, when an estimated 1.5 million died as victims of warring political factions. They weren’t exactly tea parties, but then of course, ‘revolution isn’t a tea party,’ as someone once remarked: 革命不是请客)). Wang also refers to the Hundred Flowers Movement launched by that same someone, Mao Zedong, in the mid-1950s. Here’s what he said.
You mentioned just now Mao Zedong led a ‘100 flowers bloom’ that is in an attempt to let everybody to express their opinion. I think everybody has the right to speak. Nobody said that you don’t have the right to speak. This is another thing. This is not the same as demonstrating. Thank you.
This is pretty breathtaking. The “Let one hundred flowers bloom and one hundred schools of thought contend” (百花齐放，百家争鸣) was yet another of Mao’s endless political stratagems designed to flush out and destroy his enemies and the opponents of the Party. He encouraged criticism from intellectuals, most of whom resisted the impulse to criticize, quite sensibly fearing reprisal. Eventually, however, people allowed themselves to be persuaded and millions of letters of complaint poured in to Party Headquarters, vilifying the Party’s arrogant conduct, calling for democracy, human rights etc etc. A Democracy Wall even went up in Peking University, something that was to happen several times again over the years, always with a tragic outcome. At the height of the tsunami of dissent, Mao launched an ‘Anti-Rightist’ campaign. Half a million intellectuals were arrested, tortured, sent to prison camps for decades or just killed. Once they had been silenced, Mao was free to kick off the Great Leap Forward, a disastrous attempt at rapid industrialization that would leave some 20-30 million Chinese dead from starvation. Maybe in this case a bit less “harmony,” possibly even the odd demonstration or two, might have been useful. And, perhaps one of the reasons relatively few people registered to protest this time around could have something to do with what happened to protesters back in 1957? People tend to have long memories when it comes to this sort of thing.