BUT THE SCORPION PROMISED....:

Tibet gives the lie to the great change : All promises about freedom of reporting and improving human rights in the run-up to the Olympics appear to have been abandoned (Lindsey Hilsum, 03 April 2008, New Statesman)

Everyone says this is a period of profound historic change in China. I've said so myself, pointing to huge economic growth and the country's new diplomatic reach.

But the speed with which the leadership has reverted to Cultural Revolution language and to blaming old enemies for the trouble in Tibet makes me wonder if anything very much has changed at all. Zhang Yihe, whose writing is ban ned in China, wrote a book entitled The Past Is Not Like Smoke - you cannot blow it away. Her father, Zhang Bojun, was condemned as a "rightist" in the Fifties, and she is censored partly because of official suspicion of what used to be called "bad family background". Not surprisingly, she feels the past half-century has failed to produce a real shift. "This is an insignificant transitional time in China," she writes.

The Olympics was supposed to mark China's full emergence from that transition into the modern world, but without political change it is hard to see how that can happen. Commercialism and nationalism may have replaced communism as the prevailing ideology, but when faced with a crisis, the authorities behave pretty much as they always did.

If things had changed the PRC would stand for election.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 3, 2008 7:34 AM