BEIJING (Reuters) – The Beijing Olympics ended with a blaze of deafening fireworks on Sunday, bringing down the curtain on a Games that dazzled the world with sporting brilliance and showcased the might of modern day China.

It looks like China got everything it wanted out of the Olympic Games: a clean bill of health from the media, the fawning adoration of IOC bureaucrats, and a green light to starve, imprison, steal property from, and really torture its citizens at will without having to worry about any meaningful protest from any other nation. Plus it managed to pick up some additional loyalty from the Chinese who live in the cities, even those who have had their houses and lands stolen from them to build the lavish venues used in the past two weeks.

Did China show us its might? You bet it did, and we in the free world were too mesmerised by the pageantry to notice much of anything else.

I wonder, though, if anyone oohing and aahing over the fireworks in Beijing gave thought to the thousands of Chinese peasants who will die because their government took their water away so it could produce the fake beauty of the Olympic compound.

Maybe we’ll see that story show up in an NBC news report, do you think? I’m sure the network will get right on that as soon as it gets up off its knees and straightens up its clothing.

I keep hearing what a strong capitalist nation China is, but that’s not strictly true. China is a bandit nation that makes a good share of its money off of stealing things from the rest of the world and cutting the corners on the things it makes, no matter what that means. That’s not really capitalism. That’s organized crime. The mafia is not a capitalist enterprise any more than the black markets that operate in totalitarian countries. Just because some people make money does not make it a capitalist venture. Al Capone made a decent living off of his legitimate business ventures, but it was the criminal stuff he was doing on the side that brought him his real wealth. So it is with the upper crust in China.

As it turns out, these zones have been a great success…for the Chinese government. Not a single protest has occurred in any one of them. What’s actually happened is that the permit application process has lured would-be malcontents in so the public service bureau could snap them up and stongarm them. The likelihood of arrest, which could include real torture as opposed to being kept awake by Christina Aguilera music in a cell with too much air conditioning, has frightened off anyone who would dare protest the touchiest issues of Tibet and Falun Gong. Witness the year-long sentences given to Wu Dianyuan (age 79) and Wang Xiuying (age 77) who were sentenced, without trial, to “re-education through labor” just for applying for a protest permit. They remain under house arrest, but if they so much as make a peep, they’ll be spending a year in a hard-labor camp. Want to lay odds on whether they’ll make it out alive or not?

Meanwhile, the government censors have been doing a bang-up job squelching any story that might reflect poorly on the tyrants in Beijing. They’ve been greatly assisted by the fawning television coverage of the country by NBC.

Still, there are people trying to protest even while they are arrested and harassed by the Chinese government. Would that some professional journalists had their guts. The ChiComs can’t arrest every journalist, though I would darly love to see them try.

(via instapundit)

Said cheating includes fielding a gymnastics team full of toddlers. How do we know that? Well, that’s what their passports, issued by the ever so honest Chinese government says. How could it be otherwise?

And if you can’t beat the best gymnast, why not fudge a couple scores and arrange a tie, that you win through an arcane tie-breaking method?

A big raft of gold medals is just the thing the ChiComs need to take the minds of the people off of their economic misery, the dead children crushed under substandard schoolhouses built by corrupt government officials, the thousands in prison to daring to challenge the government, and the hundreds of thousands throw out of their homes and lands so the government could build the shiny new venues for the Olympics. It’s very obliging of the IOC to give the ChiComs the cover they need to pull that off without a hitch.

It’s almost like paying a prostitute for a hummer and getting a bonus boink in the bargain. I hope the ICO at least brought its best kneepads.

Ye’s only crime was that of questioning the authority of the Government of China.

In 2003, Ye was just another property owner in Beijing’s Xuanwu District who learned that the government and developers had seized their property, with little or no compensation, in order to build brand new buildings for the Olympic Games on prime property in the city. He lost his business and the house in which three generations of his family lived along with him. After trying in vain to press his grievance through proper governmental channels, he decided to stage a protest against the seizure. Mindful of government regulations, he applied for a permit to stage the “September 18 10,000 People March” protest against the forced evictions which have affected thousands in the city.

That turned out to be a huge mistake.

Three days after applying for the permit, he was arrested. In December of 2004 he was convicted for “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble” an sentenced to four years in prison. While in prison, he has been tortured. According to Amnesty International,

He is reported to have been tortured while in detention. Suspended from the ceiling by the arms and beaten repeatedly by police before his trial, he was also beaten with electro-shock batons in Chaobai prison, Beijing, towards the end of 2006.

He was then sent twice to Qingyuan prison for periods of “discipline”, most recently in February 2007 for 10 months, apparently because he tried to appeal his conviction.

In addition, his family has been prevented from supplying him with medicine for his medical conditions, including high blood pressure and prison authorities are only giving him basic medical care.

The reason given his family for his extended detention is that he is being held “for suspicion of gathering a crowd to disturb public social order”, something he could not have done while in prison, considering that for a good part of the time he has been held incommunicado. It is, quite simply, a trumped-up charge designed to keep him from embarrassing the Chinese government during its coming-out party.

Today, Ye Guozhu is being held somewhere in China’s prison system enduring the brutal ministrations of his guards while the rest of the world ooh and aah at the glitz of this week’s Games. Thousands of people will admire the brand new buildings that sit where Ye’s house and business used to be and they’ll never know. Perhaps one day, more people will know his name and his story.

Previous 2008 Olympic Profiles:
Mao Hengfeng
Yang Maodong (AKA: Guo Feixiong)
The People of Beijing, June 3-4, 1989

Unless you’re the Chinese government. In 1999, two months after a crowd of over ten thousand Falun Gong adherents silently protested a numer of beatings and arrests in the province of Tianjin, China ruled that Falun Gong was an illegal religion and that its adherents should stop practicing it immediately. The language used to describe it was starkly at odds with the practice of the religion.

In its decision on this matter issued today, the Ministry of Civil Affairs said that according to investigations, the Research Society of Falun Dafa had not been registered according to law and had been engaged in illegal activities, advocating superstition and spreading fallacies, hoodwinking people, inciting and creating disturbances, and jeopardizing social stability.

China then set about persecuting Falun Gong members with all the vigor of the Spanish Inquisition or Cotton Mather. According to the UN, some 66 percent of all instances of torture reported from China were committed against members of Falun Gong. Two researchers, one of whom was a former Canadian Secretary of State, also published a report concluding that since 1999 the Chinese government had been executing Falun Gong members and harvesting their organs to feed them into the lucrative organ transplant market.

One of the most outspoken critics of China’s treatment of Falun Gong has been a lawyer named Gao Zhisheng. Shortly after Gao sent a letter to several high Chinese Communist Party officials urging them to end the persecution of Falun Gong, his law office was shut down by the authorities. The official reason given was because he failed to deliver a change of address notification to the government and he allegedly submitted documents to a lawyer who was not a member of his firm. Mr. Gao’s trouble has only begun at that point.

In January, just a few months later, Gao reported that he had nearly been run down in the street, a victim of an assassination attempt. He has twice been abducted by the Chinese secret police and imprisoned. His latest imprisonment was in September 22, 2007 after he sent a letter to the United States Congress outlining the brutal treatment he and his family have endured and details of the ongoing persecution of Falun Gong members. He wrote that Congress should not support China’s Olympic Games so long as these persecutions continued. He managed a telephone call a month later to a prominent Chinese human rights lawyer, but has apparently not been heard from since.

On August 5, 2008, SOH Radio reported that an informant had told them that Gao has been beaten and tortured severely in an effort to make him write a series of letters repudiating his earlier work, condemning Falun Gong, and praising the Chinese Communist party. According that informant, he did not relent. He remains in custody, somewhere.

Previous 2008 Olympic Profiles:
Mao Hengfeng
Yang Maodong (AKA: Guo Feixiong)
The People of Beijing, June 3-4, 1989
Ye Guozhu

Seriously, my brain locked up with caption possibilities when I saw that, especially because it looks for all the world like he’s giving Misty May-Treanor’s delectable derriere the big thumbs up.

But here’s the real story.

Today, as the busy crowd over at our Olympics blog notes, after an hour’s brisk bit of mountain-biking himself, Bush paid another visit to the American athletes, watching the women warm up for softball, regretting the disappearance of that sport from the next Olympics (“It’s good for the world to have girls playing softball and these women are going to show young girls how to win”) and trying his hand, so to speak, at volleyball.

Bush knuckled off a couple of lobs, but defending gold medalists Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh gave the chief executive some pointers. Then after a good play, in the tradition of female volleyballers, May-Treanor turned, bent over slightly and offered her bikinied rear-end for the 43rd president to slap.

“Mr. President,” she said, “want to?”

And in that second, George W. Bush stood on the cusp of a fantasy of hundreds of millions of red-blooded men.

But, as Andrew Malcolm put it, “Want to has nothing to do with it in public life.”. Bush merely settled for brushing the back of his hand across the small of her tattooed and tanned back.

And then he went back to his suite and cried a little.