Beijing must be pressed to live up to its pledges

Beijing must be pressed to live up to its pledges
Thursday, July 31, 2008
President George W. Bush is finally beginning to complain - gingerly - about China's disgraceful wave of pre-Olympics repression. With the start of the 2008 Olympic Games rapidly approaching, we hope that he keeps speaking out and enlists others to join him, including world and corporate leaders and the International Olympic Committee - if that troubled organization is not already beyond redemption.
After playing Beijing's game and declining to condemn China's latest crackdown on critics and journalists, Bush deserves credit for holding talks on Tuesday with five prominent Chinese dissidents.
Although the meeting was private, the White House announced it and said that Bush spoke of his "concerns" about human rights in China.
Bush also attended a separate meeting between his national security adviser and the Chinese foreign minister and advised how the Olympics present an "opportunity to demonstrate compassion on human rights and freedom."
The problem is that Bush's approach is still too deferential, given China's reprehensible and defiant behavior. On Wednesday, authorities confirmed that they would censor the Internet during the Games, violating previous assurances. Foreign journalists have already found that they could not reach sites like Amnesty International and Radio Free Asia.
Making matters worse, the IOC, which has enabled China at every step, apparently acquiesced in Web sites being blocked. Those responsible for such a disgraceful deal should be forced to resign.
The committee must demand that China live up to its pre-Games pledges.
To win the coveted right to hold the Olympics, China promised to expand press freedoms for foreign journalists and dangled the prospect that, more broadly, human rights might also be improved. Instead, authorities have harassed and locked up critics, intimidated journalists, selectively denied visas, silenced grieving parents who lost children in the May 12 earthquake and relocated thousands of Chinese whose homes or businesses were seen as marring Beijing's image.
Bush cannot go to the Olympics in silence next week. As the House of Representatives said in a resolution, approved 419-1, he must insist that China act immediately to cease rights abuses, allow promised press freedoms and permit peaceful political activities during the Games.