By David Barboza

Source: New York Times

It is becoming increasingly clear which nation global corporations will be rooting for at this summer’s Olympics: China.

Or at least that’s what it looks like from advertisements here. McDonald’s is running a “Cheer for China” television ad. Nike ads feature China’s star hurdler, Liu Xiang, and other Chinese athletes besting foreign competitors. Earlier this year, Pepsi even painted its familiar blue cans red for a limited edition “Go Red for China” promotion.

The campaigns for Western companies are part of an advertising blitz the likes of which this ostensibly communist nation has never seen. Ads are papered over bus shelters, projected on giant outdoor television screens and plastered on billboards. Commercials even flicker at commuters as they zoom through subway tunnels.

China, already the world’s second-largest advertising market, after the United States, is a dream for consumer product companies. “For most international brands here, China is the growth market for the next 10 years,” said Jonathan Chajet, strategic director at Interbrand, which consults on brands.

A record 63 companies have become sponsors or partners of the Beijing Olympics. Olympic-related advertising in China could reach $4 billion to $6 billion this year, according to CSM, a Beijing marketing research firm.

“You’ve never seen the Olympics in a market that has such domestic, commercial scale,” says Michael Wood, the chief executive for greater China at Leo Burnett, the global advertising agency. “When the Olympics were in Los Angeles and Atlanta, the U.S. market was already fully developed.”

The promise of selling a billion bottles of Coke to China’s 1.3 billion people is no longer a pipe dream; last year, 24 billion bottles of Coca-Cola were sold in China. KFC, a unit of Yum Brands, has more than 2,000 stores here. McDonald’s and Starbucks are ubiquitous. And Nokia, the cellphone maker, sold about 70 million phones to Chinese consumers in 2007, racking up sales of $10 billion.

Now those global brands are trying to extend their reach beyond China’s wealthiest cities. But China’s growing economic clout and increasing nationalism among its youth — as well as the newfound strength of its homegrown brands — pose challenges for foreign companies trying to woo its growing middle class.

“For most international brands, this is a double-edged sword,” said Mr. Chajet of Interbrand. “They’re premium, high-tech and status brands. But there’s rising nationalism, and the Olympics is a rallying cry for the Chinese, who are looking for a reason not to buy foreign.”

To win over Chinese consumers, Adidas, which already has more than 4,000 stores in China, has new television and print ads showing legions of everyday Chinese guiding the country’s top athletes to gold medal performances. The campaign won a top award at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in June.

Erica Kerner, director of Adidas’s Beijing Olympic Games program, said, “This is about rallying the nation.”

Gatorade, which is owned by Pepsico, has a television ad featuring Chinese athletes counting down to the year 2008. It concludes with a group of children, around age 7, at what looks like an Olympic training center, hitting table tennis balls in unison and counting down to 2012 and 2016.

A Volkswagen campaign encourages people to “honk for China”; McDonald’s ads say “I’m Lovin’ It When China Wins”; and Nike, though not an Olympic sponsor, is the official outfitter of more than 20 of China’s teams.

But these advertising ventures are not going unchallenged. The Chinese government is pushing its companies to amplify their ad messages to compete with foreign brands. Many are promoting their home-court advantage.

For example, a print advertising campaign by Anta, one of China’s biggest sportswear companies, shows a crowd of flag-waving youths gesturing like wild revolutionaries in a state of Olympic euphoria. Many of Anta’s television ads include the song lyrics “I love you, China.”

Ads by the dairy producer Yili feature young people and the tag line, “I Make China Strong!”

More than a dozen Chinese companies have paid millions each to become Olympic sponsors, including the computer maker Lenovo (the sole Chinese company among the Games’ “global sponsors”). And some companies are hinting that, like the country’s top athletes, they can go head-to-head with the best in the West.

Marketing experts say one downside to the advertising frenzy is the clutter.

In the sea of ads featuring Chinese athletes pitching products as varied as Cadillacs and traditional Chinese medicine — with endless images of the Olympic stadium — is a simple question: Whose ad was that anyway? In fact, Mr. Liu, the hurdler, is in ads for at least 16 companies, including Nike and Coke.

“The sameness of the ads is the frightening thing,” said Terry Rhoads, managing director at Zou Marketing, a sports consultancy in Shanghai. “You have to wonder about the ad agencies.”

The avalanche of Olympic television advertising is compounded by so-called ambush marketing, in which nonsponsors — often rivals of official sponsors — try to grab some Olympic glory without paying the high sponsorship fees. The proliferation of such ads is not going unchecked; China is scrutinizing the ads of nonsponsors, trying to give prime billboard space to the official sponsors.

Pepsico, for instance, is not an Olympic sponsor, but its Gatorade brand sponsors some Chinese athletes. Nike is also not a sponsor of the Games, but it has created some of the most striking television ads, encouraging Chinese athletes to “Just Do It.”

Further blurring the line between official and unofficial, some competing companies have been allowed as sponsors: three beer makers — Budweiser, Tsingtao and Yanjing — will be Olympic sponsors, authorized not by the International Olympic Committee but by the Beijing Olympic committee.

With so many companies eager to market to China’s increasingly wealthy consumers, advertising agencies and China’s sports industry — which controls Olympic athletes and shares in their sponsorship dollars — have already captured lots of gold.

“There’s never been an Olympics with such a big home market,” says Dick van Motman, the chief executive of the Chinese division of DDB Worldwide, the advertising agency. For global brands to succeed, he said, that means “reinforcing your image; aligning yourself with the China dream; and aligning yourself with China entering the world stage. That’s the real game.”

By Jim Yardley

Source: New York Times

 The Chinese government will permit public protests inside three designated city parks during next month’s Olympic Games, but demonstrators must first obtain permits from the local police and also abide by Chinese laws that usually make it nearly impossible to legally picket over politically charged issues.

The arrangement, announced by authorities on Wednesday, is a break from normal practice in China’s authoritarian political system and seems loosely modeled on the protest zones created at previous Olympic Games and at many recent international political gatherings that attract large numbers of protesters.

But it remained unclear whether international advocacy groups on issues like Tibet, Darfur and broader human rights would be able to secure the bureaucratic approvals needed to use the protest zones and whether they would be arrested if they held demonstrations elsewhere in Beijing.

With only 15 days until the Olympic opening ceremonies, China’s ruling Communist Party is tightening security across the country and has shown little appetite for domestic political dissent. Several dissidents have been jailed, monitored or placed under house arrest in recent months.

Liu Shaowu, director of security for Beijing’s Olympic organizing committee, said that Ritan Park, World Park and Purple Bamboo Park would be designated for use by protesters during the Games and that the approval process would be regulated by Beijing’s public security bureau.

“The police will safeguard the right to demonstrate as long as protesters have obtained prior approval and are in accordance with the law,” Mr. Liu said during a news conference.

The issue of how much space, if any, China would allow for legal demonstrations became especially charged after the international Olympic torch relay this year. Violent anti-China protests marred the relay in London and Paris, then at later stops angry confrontations occurred between China supporters and advocates for Tibet. Chinese leaders want the Games to showcase the country’s achievements, and they are wary of protests being broadcast to a worldwide audience.

Under Chinese law, citizens must apply to the local public security bureau five days in advance of a scheduled protest. Applicants must appear in person and offer detailed information about their topic, any possible slogans and the expected number of demonstrators. The law prohibits protests that are deemed harmful to national unity and social stability or that agitate for ethnic separatism. These prohibitions can be interpreted so broadly that most legal protests are not approved.

“We never get it no matter how many times we try,” said Jiang Tianyong, a lawyer and legal-rights advocate who has been rejected numerous times. “This is only a show for foreigners. Otherwise, I’d love to see these three places be kept after the Olympics so we can let our voices be heard, too.”

Xu Zhiyong, another legal-rights advocate, agreed that obtaining approval for legal protests was usually very difficult, but he also applauded the Olympic protest zones as an improvement that should be acknowledged.

“As a first step toward opening up space for dissent, it is appropriate,” Mr. Xu said. “There should be many people who are willing to use this space, petitioners and people who have experienced injustice.”

Illegal protests are common in China, especially in rural areas or smaller cities where peasants and laid-off workers hold demonstrations about issues like local corruption or illegal land seizures. In recent weeks, Chinese media have reported on demonstrations around the country, including one in late June in Guizhou Province that involved an estimated 30,000 people in response to the way officials handled the investigation into the death of a local teenage girl .

Usually, these demonstrations are localized and almost never represent attempts to directly challenge the leadership in Beijing. The police usually disperse the crowds and local officials sometimes relent on some demands, even as protest leaders are often detained or sentenced to prison.

Somewhat similar protest zones were used at the 2004 Athens Olympics, and cities hosting other international events have sought to isolate demonstrators in designated areas.

Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher for the Asia division of Human Rights Watch, criticized the broader trend in creating protest zones during international events. He described Beijing’s protest zones as inadequate and said Chinese citizens would be very reluctant to use them, given the political priority that the party has placed on the Olympics. He said the police might use video cameras and collect the names of demonstrators.

“Chinese people know better than to go demonstrate in a protest zone during the Olympics, except maybe a few people with nothing to lose,” Mr. Bequelin said. “They know the risk of retribution is very high.”

He added: “It is not a step toward allowing Chinese citizens to demonstrate freely. They are using this as a fig leaf to cover the fact that they are organizing the Games in a very repressive environment.”

Mr. Liu, the Olympic security director, did not spell out the consequences facing protesters who attempt to demonstrate without permission or outside the designated areas. But he said that the Olympic charter prohibited protests at venues and that protesters should be steered toward the designated zones, in part to ensure that the Games themselves are not disrupted.

“The places for their demonstrations must be made clear in the application, and during the Games times, we must secure a good flow of traffic, a good environment and good social order,” he said.

By Nicolai Ouroussoff
Source: New York Times

If Westerners feel dazed and confused upon exiting the plane at the new international airport terminal here, it’s understandable. It’s not just the grandeur of the space. It’s the inescapable feeling that you’re passing through a portal to another world, one whose fierce embrace of change has left Western nations in the dust.

The sensation is comparable to the epiphany that Adolf Loos, the Viennese architect, experienced when he stepped off a steamship in New York Harbor more than a century ago. He had crossed a threshold into the future; Europe, he realized, was now culturally obsolete.

Designed by Norman Foster, Beijing’s glittering air terminal is joined by a remarkable list of other new monuments here: Paul Andreu’s egg-shaped National Theater; Herzog & de Meuron’s National Stadium, known as the bird’s nest; PTW’s National Aquatics Center, with its pillowy translucent exterior; and Rem Koolhaas’s headquarters for the CCTV television authority, whose slanting, interconnected forms are among the most imaginative architectural feats in recent memory.

Critics have incessantly described these high-profile projects as bullish expressions of the nation’s budding global primacy. Yet these buildings are not simply blunt expressions of power. Like the great monuments of 16th-century Rome or 19th-century Paris, China’s new architecture exudes an aura that has as much to do with intellectual ferment as economic clout.

Each building, in its own way, embodies an intense struggle over the meaning of public space in the new China. And although at times terrifying in their aggressive scale, they also reflect the country’s effort to give shape to an emerging national identity.

Mr. Foster’s airport terminal, the world’s largest, is the purest expression of China’s embrace of the Modernist creed. Its swooping form, which suggests two boomerangs placed side by side, has been compared to a dragon. Yet its real precedent is Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, a monument to air travel conceived by Albert Speer in the 1930s as a gateway to a new Europe. Both are part of a vision of a mobile society, one that extends back through Grand Central Terminal to the great train halls of Paris.

Like Tempelhof, the Beijing air terminal boasts a sweeping concourse that evokes the glamour of air travel while enclosing a surprisingly intimate interior. But Mr. Foster pushes the ideal of mobility to a new extreme. Guided by twinkling lights embedded in the terminal’s ceiling, arriving visitors glide up ramped floors and across broad pedestrian bridges before spilling out onto the elevated concourse. From there they can disperse along a fluid network of roads, trains, subways, canals and parks whose tentacles extend out through the region.

This sprawling web has completely reshaped Beijing since the city was awarded the Olympic Games seven years ago. It is impossible not to think of the enormous public works projects built in the United States at midcentury, when faith in technology’s promise seemed boundless. Who would have guessed then that this faith would crumble for Americans, paving the way for a post-Katrina New Orleans just as the dream was being reborn in 21st-century China at 10 times the scale?

Soaring Art, Deadening Frame

Yet your sense of marvel at China’s transformation is easily deflated on the drive from the airport. A banal landscape of ugly new towers flanks both sides. Many of those towers are sealed off in gated compounds, a reflection of the widening disparity between affluent and poor. Although most of them were built in the run-up to the Olympics, the poor quality of construction makes them look decrepit and decades old.

It’s the flip side of China’s Modernist embrace: tabula rasa planning of the sort that also tainted the Modernist movement in Europe and the United States in the postwar years. China’s architectural experiment thus brims with both promise and misery. Everything, it seems, is possible here, from utopian triumphs of the imagination to soul-sapping expressions of a disregard for individual lives.

These tensions and contradictions are encoded in Mr. Andreu’s National Theater, just west of Tiananmen Square. Topped by an elliptical titanium-and-glass dome and surrounded by a shallow reflecting pool, the theater complex stands along the Avenue of Eternal Peace, the great east-west corridor that borders Tiananmen Gate.
Lining the avenue are many of the Socialist landmarks built for the 10th anniversary of China’s 1949 revolution, from the Great Hall of the People to the Beijing Railway Station and the Revolutionary Museum. The theater is one of the few major cultural monuments to rise in this historic core since Mao’s mausoleum was built opposite the Forbidden Palace three decades ago.

Over coffee in Beijing recently, Mr. Andreu described it as a place “open to ordinary citizens.”

“It is a place that is very calm,” he said. “It is a building that you cannot touch. I didn’t want to remove the mystery. You arrive through trees to the edge of the water. But you can also penetrate it. I wanted people to understand that this is for them.”

Yet the building’s symmetrical layout and monolithic scale invite other interpretations. The isolation imposed by the surrounding reflecting pool is reinforced by the entry sequence: visitors must descend a grand staircase into the earth before passing under the pool and re-emerging in the cavernous dome. It’s as if the theater were connected to the city by a gigantic umbilical cord.

The entry passage suggests more haunting comparisons. Yan Meng, a Chinese architect who grew up in Beijing in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, told me that in the 1970s and ’80s Tiananmen Square was in many ways the city’s social heart. “There were fewer cars, it was more accessible,” he said as we drove past the square one afternoon. “You would see people playing cards and flying kites.”

After the Tiananmen Square protests and the government’s violent crackdown in 1989, the city added pedestrian barriers around the square. Today it can be reached only through underpasses patrolled by security forces, an experience that is more bleak than intimidating. Once you emerge, the square feels like a tourist zone; the Chinese are there mostly to buy and sell cheap souvenirs.

Mr. Yan suggests that the National Theater’s circuitous entry echoes the clampdown on public life after the 1989 massacre. “It no longer belongs to anyone,” he said of the square. “It is about control.”

Pushing What’s Possible

But some of the most imposing architectural symbols of China’s rising stature reflect a more enlightened reading of how the future might unfold. At their most self-aware, they probe the edges of the possible.

The Olympic Stadium and the National Aquatics Center lie 10 miles north of the city center along its ancient ceremonial axis, putting them on par with the Forbidden City and Mao’s mausoleum in national importance. Of the two, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron’s stadium is the more photographed and familiar symbol of the Games. Its huge elliptical form is enveloped in a dense latticework of steel columns.

The columns, which twist and bend as they rise, are conceived as a gigantic work of public sculpture. Their outward thrust suggests they are straining to contain the activity inside. That intensity is strangely magnified when the building is empty, as if trembling in anticipation of a mass event.

Yet a conflict over the stadium’s future underscores tensions over how the new China will be defined. The stadium is in the center of a sprawling park surrounded by regimented rows of housing towers. After the Games, Mr. Herzog and Mr. de Meuron hope to transform the building into a vast public forum and a visual anchor for the community.

The government prefers to build a fence around it, which would eliminate the parklike openness that is one of its most attractive features. A local developer has proposed creating a subterranean shopping mall at one end of the structure, further undermining the design’s public spirit.

“The building is made to be open,” Mr. Herzog said. “It is a work of public sculpture.” Still, as the architect, all he can do is press for flexibility. “Even if they put up a fence, they can take it down again one day in the future,” he said hopefully.

Mr. Koolhaas faces similar strains in his headquarters for CCTV, the state television authority, several miles to the south in Beijing’s new business district. Long negotiations have unfolded over how much public access will be allowed: to the architect’s distress, CCTV’s directors have threatened to close off two public roads that cut through the site. An enormous plaza will also be restricted to the company’s employees.

A year away from completion, the CCTV building has already attracted huge global attention and some controversy. Some have condemned Mr. Koolhaas for accepting the commission, likening it to participating in the 1931-33 competition for a Palace of the Soviets in Stalinist Russia. Essentially, they argue, he has designed a monument to a vast propaganda machine.

But the project is a formidable challenge to all of our expectations of what a monumental building should be. Like Mr. Herzog and Mr. de Meuron, Mr. Koolhaas is part of a generation of architects, now in their late 50s and early 60s, whose early careers were shaped in opposition to the oppressive formal purity of mainstream Modernism. They fashioned asymmetrical forms to break down the movement’s monolithic scale and make room for outcasts and misfits. The problem they face now is how to adjust that language for clients that include authoritarian governments and multinational corporations.

In his design for the CCTV headquarters, Mr. Koolhaas begins by obliterating any trace of the human scale from the exteriors. There are no conventional windows, no clear indication of where the floors begin and end. The forms completely distort your perspective of the building; it seems to flatten out from some vantage points and bear down on you from others.

As a result it is almost impossible to get a fix on the building’s scale. Seen through the surrounding skyline of generic glass-and-steel towers, it sometimes seems to shrink to the size of a child’s toy. From other angles it seems to be under a Herculean strain, as if fighting to support the enormous weight of the cantilevered floors above.

This is not just a game. Mr. Koolhaas has set out to express the elasticity of the new global culture, and in the process explore ways architecture can bridge the gap between the intimate scale of the individual life and the whirling tide of mass society. The image of authority he conveys is pointedly ambiguous. Imposing at one moment, shy and retiring the next, the building’s unstable forms say as much about collective anxieties as they do about centralized power.

He has carved out ample space for places of social exchange. The interior of the building is conceived as an endless loop of public activities, with cafes, viewing decks and galleries extending up through one leg of the structure and back down through the other, where it connects to an underground subway.

The architect sees the dividing line between public and private spheres as an active battleground, one that is constantly shifting and readjusting as society’s norms change and evolve. For now, however, it is not the architect who will determine the degree of openness at CCTV but the company’s government-appointed board of directors.

It remains to be seen where this will lead. For centuries, architects have aspired to create buildings that enlighten or transform civilization, only to see them remain isolated splendors, with little impact on society at large. That may prove to be the case in China, too.

But there is no question that its role as a great laboratory for architectural ideas will endure for years to come. One wonders if the West will ever catch up.

By Nick Mulvenney
Source: Reuters

China has spent the last two years downplaying its chances of leapfrogging the Americans at the top of the Olympic medals table in Beijing, but the race for global sporting supremacy still looks like being a close one.

China produced its best gold medal tally since its 1984 return to the Summer Games to finish second (32) behind the United States (36) at the last Olympics in Athens in 2004.

The boost from playing hosts in 2008 plus the investment in elite sports, particularly for the Beijing Games, led to an expectation that China could supplant the Americans, who have ruled the roost since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

However, Chinese sporting officials, perhaps in an attempt to reduce the pressure on their athletes and anxious not to leave a hostage to fortune for the post-Games reckoning, have tried to dampen expectations.

“Basically we are not yet a strong nation in sport, we must be practical and realistic. We’ve got only Liu Xiang for athletics and I don’t see much hope in swimming,” deputy sports minister Cui Dalin said in March.

The pessimism professed by Cui and his colleagues is an admission that the “119 project,” which aimed to boost China’s chances of winning a share of the gold medals awarded in athletics, swimming, canoeing, kayaking and sailing, has failed.

Certainly beyond world champion 110 meters hurdler Liu and a clutch of women marathon runners, China’s track and field hopes are bleak and the secret battalion of Chinese world-beating swimmers one American coach prophesied has not emerged.

China failed to win a title at last year’s swimming world championships in Melbourne and the retirement of Athens women’s 100-metre breaststroke champion Luo Xuejuan has deprived them of their only genuine gold medal contender.

In athletics, Athens 10,000 meters champion Xing Huina will be absent because of a leg injury, while 2003 world bronze medalist Sun Yingjie’s return from a doping ban came too late for her to regain form for a shot at the 10,000 in Beijing.

Even Liu’s title defence is by no means a foregone conclusion after Cuban Dayron Robles bettered his world record last month.

BIGGEST TEAM

China will, though, have its biggest ever Olympic team for Beijing with about 613 athletes, plenty of whom have a good chance of standing on the top step of the podium next month.

Table tennis (four gold medals available), diving (8), gymnastics (14), shooting (15), weightlifting (15), badminton (5), rowing (14) and taekwondo (8) should provide several Chinese champions.

The United States Olympic Committee (USOC) analyses world championship results in Olympic sports and the data from the last two years suggest China did not peak in Athens.

“The top eight results for 2006 and 2007 show how strong the Chinese medal chances are as they won the 2006 gold medal count and had a solid performance again in 2007,” Steve Roush, the USOC’s sports performance chief, said by e-mail.

The USOC analysis of 2007 results gives the hosts 37 gold medals to the 47 of the U.S., while the total medals showing (87 to 100 for the U.S.) point to Chinese strength in depth.

Accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has predicted the total medal counts for each country based on past performance, economics and political planning for the last three Games.

Its 2008 report gives China a rise of 25 golds, silvers and bronzes for its home Olympics, putting it top of table with 88 compared to 87 for the U.S., which is predicted to drop by 16 medals compared Athens.

“The combination of the home country effect and the state support for sport… is expected to lead to a particularly significant boost to Chinese medal performance, allowing them to challenge the U.S. for top position in the medal table,” read the report.

Cui’s message, though, seems to have got through to the Chinese people, certainly if a random sample of Beijingers on the streets surrounding the vast sports ministry compounds in the south of the city last week is anything to go by.

“I don’t think China will top the medals table,” said a school caretaker in his 50s surnamed Zhang. “In table tennis, China will do well but besides that it will be difficult.”

A designer, Li Xiaobo, predicted about 40 gold medals for the hosts and reflected the thoughts of many in China, who believe performing on home soil will prove to be a double-edged sword.

“We could have the most gold medals but in total medals, the U.S. will be stronger,” the designer said.

Source: BBC

China has ordered dog meat to be taken off the menu at its 112 official Olympic restaurants in order to avoid offending foreign visitors.

Restaurant workers are advised to “patiently” suggest other options to diners who order dog.

Any restaurant found violating the ban would be black-listed, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

Dog - known as “fragrant meat” - is eaten by some Chinese for purported medicinal properties.

The ban, issued by the Beijing Catering Trade Association, forbids all designated Olympic restaurants from offering dog and urges other food outlets to remove the meat from menus.

“If a customer orders dog meat, restaurant staff should patiently suggest another entree,” said Xiong Yumei, deputy director of the Beijing Tourism Bureau told Xinhua.

Act of Respect

The measure has been implemented to “respect the habits of many countries and nationalities,” the Beijing News quoted the municipal food department as saying.

The BBC’s James Reynolds says the ban is one of several steps taken by China to avoid foreign visitors being amused or offended by local customs.

Authorities have also told people to queue up politely, to smile and not to spit on the streets.

During the 1988 Seoul Olympics, South Korea also banned doggie dishes from menus. Officials invoked a law banning the sale of “foods deemed unsightly”.

Dog meat is eaten in some other Asian countries, including Vietnam, the Philippines and Laos.

By Tom Raum
Source: AP

China, India and other energy-guzzling developing nations on Wednesday rejected key elements of a global warming strategy embraced by President George W. Bush and leaders of wealthy nations. And the UN’s top climate official dismissed the G-8 goals as insignificant.

Sharp criticism emerged at the close of a summit in Toyako of the Group of Eight industrial powers that was dominated by how to address the warming Earth. The G-8 leaders invited their counterparts from fast-growing, pollution-emitting nations to sideline talks on the topic, but the session merely showcased a widening rift over the best approach.

It was the final G-8 summit of Bush’s presidency. He said “significant progress” had been made on global warming when the leaders agreed to slash greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050 and also agreed to insist that developing nations be part of any new international agreement.

“In order to address climate change, all major economies must be at the table, and that’s what took place,” Bush said before boarding Air Force One to return to Washington.

The major economies are the world’s 16 largest-emitting nations, accounting for 80 percent of the world’s air pollution. The expanded meeting that included all of them was the first time their leaders sat down together for climate discussions.

It ended with only a vague reference to a long-term goal for reducing global emissions and a pledge for rich and poor countries to work together. Only three of the emerging powers-Indonesia, Australia and South Korea-agreed to back the 50 percent reduction target by 2050.

The five main developing nations-China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, who together represent 42 percent of the world’s population-issued a statement explaining their split with the G-8 over its emissions-reduction goals. They said they rejected the notion that all should share in the 50 percent target because it is wealthier countries that have created most of the environmental damage up to now.

“It is essential that developed countries take the lead in achieving ambitious and absolute greenhouse gas emissions reductions,” said the statement.

Chinese President Hu Jintao went a step further. While acknowledging that developing nations must act, he said “developed countries should make explicit commitments to continue to take the lead in emissions reduction.

“China’s central task now is to develop the economy and make life better for the people,” he said. “China’s per capita emission is relatively low.”

Yvo de Boer, who leads UN negotiations to forge a new climate change treaty, challenged Bush’s optimistic assessment of the meetings.

“I don’t find the outcome very significant,” de Boer said in the Netherlands. He said the target for reducing carbon emissions by 2050 mentions no base line, is not legally binding and is open to vastly different interpretations.

By Ian Ransom
Source: Reuters

China said on Thursday that it had foiled five “terrorism groups” plotting attacks targeting the Beijing Olympics, as the government cracks down on perceived threats to the Games which open in less than a month.

In the first six months of the year, police detained 82 people in the restive far western Xinjiang region who had plotted to sabotage the Olympics, the state-run Xinhua news agency said, citing Chen Zhuangwei, police chief of regional capital Urumqi.

“Police in the regional capital also detained 66 gang members of the ‘three evil forces’ of terrorism, separatism and extremism, and destroyed 41 training bases of ‘holy war’ from January to June,” Xinhua quoted Chen as saying.

The agency did not make clear whether the 66 gang members were included within the 82 detained region-wide.

The government says it has foiled a string of terrorist plots this year hatched from Xinjiang, a mainly Muslim region where Beijing accuses militant Uighurs of working with al Qaeda to bring about an independent state called East Turkestan.

Xinhua on Wednesday said that Chinese police had shot and killed five people they said were seeking “holy war” against the country’s dominant Han Chinese.

In April, public security officials said authorities had foiled plots to kidnap athletes and carry out suicide attacks during August’s Games. China earlier said had foiled a plan by Uighur separatists to bring down a Beijing-bound plane.

Many Uighurs resent the migration of Han Chinese to the region and government controls on their religion and culture.

But Uighur advocacy groups deny separatists are plotting attacks in Xinjiang and accuse China of embarking on a pre-Olympic security crackdown targeting activists seeking greater freedom for the region.

“What China claims simply is not true,” said Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the exiled World Uyghur Congress. “Wanting to boycott the Games is not the same as wanting to damage them.”

Some Uighurs and Tibetans claim they are being targetted indiscriminately ahead of the Olympics. On Tuesday, China deported a British Tibetan woman it said was a key member of a pro-Tibet independence group. She denies the allegations.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Thursday insisted the security threat in Xinjiang, a resource-rich region bordering Central Asia, was real and bolstered by the support of international groups.

“Facts and evidence have fully demonstrated that there exist terrorist organisations in the Xinjiang region that are against China and aimed at splitting China,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told a regular news conference.

Beijing’s Olympic security chief on Monday said homegrown “terror groups”, including Uighur militants, Tibetan groups and Falun Gong followers, posed the greatest security risk to the Games starting on Aug. 8.

Source: Reuters

Broadcasters will be able to transmit live by satellite from around Beijing and Tiananmen Square during next month’s Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said on Wednesday.

Broadcasters, some of which pay billions of dollars for Olympic rights, had complained that China had not been forthcoming with licenses to allow live transmissions during the August 8-24 Games and had tied up other processes with red tape.

Rights-holding broadcasters, which include NBC and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), met with Beijing organizing committee (BOCOG) officials on Wednesday to try and resolve the issues.

BOCOG said both rights-holders and non-rights-holders would be given licenses and frequencies to transmit live from around Beijing and the other five Olympic co-host cities, according to the IOC.

“We welcome the confirmations given today by BOCOG to broadcasters that they will be able to report and broadcast via satellite from around the city,” said International Olympic Committee (IOC)’s communications director Giselle Davis.

Sites that are classified as cultural relics, such as the Great Wall and Forbidden City, will still require permission while live transmissions from Tiananmen Square will be restricted to rights holders and only be allowed at certain times of day.

Non-rights holders will, however, be able to pre-record programs and interviews from Tiananmen, the site of the bloody crackdown on the 1989 democracy movement.

“Particularly pleasing is the fact that all broadcasts — both rights holders and non-rights holders — will be able to record interviews, reports and packages unrestricted from Tiananmen Square,” Davis added.

Live transmissions from positions on Tiananmen Square will be allowed from 6 to 10 a.m. and 9 to 11 p.m.

“Whilst we understand there may be frustrations on the part of some broadcasters that they cannot transmit live around the clock from Tiananmen Square, we recognize that this iconic location is much in demand … and that consequently, some time constraints for live access were needed to be given by the Chinese hosts,” Davis added.

China has promised to give media the same freedom to report as they enjoyed at previous Games since winning the right to host the Olympics in 2001.

Reporting restrictions were loosened under regulations issued at the start of last year but are due to expire after the Olympics and September’s Paralympics.

Human Right Watch said in a report released on Monday that China had breached its pledge on media freedom and reporters working in China still report obstruction and harassment.

Source: AP

French President Nicolas Sarkozy will attend the Beijing Olympics’ opening ceremony next month, his office said Wednesday, ending a boycott threat and seeking to soothe Chinese irritation over French support of Tibet.

Sarkozy was the first world leader to raise the possibility of boycotting the festivities to protest China’s violent crackdown on Tibet after riots and protests there in March. A snub would have been a slap in the face to China’s communist leadership.

After keeping the threat alive for months, Sarkozy on Wednesday reassured Chinese President Hu Jintao that he would attend the Aug. 8 ceremony, his office said. The two men spoke on the sidelines of the Group of Eight summit of industrialized powers in Japan.

Sarkozy has pressed for dialogue between envoys of China and the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, saying that he could attend the event if the discussions made more progress. International pressure has built on both China and the Dalai Lama for an easing of tensions, and their talks are important to China’s hopes of hosting a flawless Olympics.

But there was no mention of Tibet, human rights or the Dalai Lama in the brief statement from Sarkozy’s office.

”The chief of state stressed the Olympic values of peace, friendship and brotherhood, and wished great success to the Beijing Olympic Games,” Sarkozy’s office said.

The statement added that France wants to ”deepen its strategic partnership with China,” a major client for European plane manufacturer Airbus, as well as French companies from nuclear giant Areva to transport and engineering company Alstom.

The Dalai Lama is expected to visit France in August. Sarkozy has said in the past that it is ”possible” he might meet with the Tibetan leader, though China disapproves of such contacts.

But Sarkozy’s office refused to discuss the sensitive issue Wednesday, saying it had to be ”discreet.” An Elysee Palace official traveling with Sarkozy said Chinese and French officials had mutually agreed not to communicate on that question.

The announcement came as news outlets reported that China’s ambassador to Paris warned of ‘’serious consequences” if Sarkozy met the Dalai Lama. Le Figaro newspaper, which printed the ambassador’s comments, reported that business contracts were at stake, including the sale of more than 100 Airbus planes.

Like Sarkozy, President Bush will attend the Olympics opener: He said this week at the summit in Japan that it would be an ”affront to the Chinese people” if he stayed away. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said he would skip the opening ceremony but attend the closing ceremony.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel does not plan to attend, but Sarkozy’s office said she supported his decision, saying it was important to have an European Union representative there. Sarkozy’s office said he consulted his EU partners, and he will represent both France and the European bloc at the Games. France currently holds the rotating EU presidency.

Sarkozy and other world leaders have been under intense pressure from human rights groups to skip the event, a 3 1/2-hour extravaganza of fireworks, dancing by ethnic groups and performances portraying 5,000 years of Chinese history.

Media advocacy group Reporters without Borders said recently that Sarkozy, who has pledged to defend human rights since his election last year, would heap ‘’scorn on his commitments to the French people” if he attended.

Reporters without Borders was among the organizers of massive protests when the Olympic flame passed through Paris in April. Many Chinese were shocked that a pro-Tibet protester in Paris tried to grab the Olympic torch from a Chinese athlete in a wheelchair. Anger reverberated in China, with protests organized at outlets of the French retailer Carrefour.

By Clifford Coonan
Source: The Independent 

China’s greatest Communist icon, Chairman Mao Zedong, will be dropped from new 10 yuan (75p) banknotes to mark the Olympics, which start a month from today.
The Great Helmsman will be replaced on the six million new notes by the National Stadium, or Bird’s Nest, which is more in keeping with the image of progress and prosperity that China is trying to show as the Games approach.

Above the stadium is the “Chinese Seal, Dancing Beijing” emblem for the 2008 Olympics, set against the backdrop of the Temple of Heaven, one of China’s best-known landmarks. The reverse side of the Olympic note features the ancient Greek marble statue of a discus-thrower, Discobolus, portraits of athletes and the numerals “2008″.

Despite the ravages of the Cultural Revolution and the disastrous social agricultural reform known as the Great Leap Forward, Mao is still an icon in China, considered by the Communist Party to be “70 per cent good, 30 per cent bad”. His portrait still gazes out over Tiananmen Square in central Beijing.

During Mao’s rule from the 1949 revolution that swept the Communists to power until his death in 1976, banknotes featured more traditional socialist realist fare - determined workers, muscled farmers, and clear evidence of China’s successful modernisation such as factories or rustic classical scenes.

He first appeared on the banknote in 1990, alongside three other iconic leaders, and his face still adorns all modern banknotes in China. There are periodic calls to have his face removed from notes, including occasional motions tabled at China’s annual parliament, the National People’s Congress. Some delegates would like Mao to make room for other leaders such as the economic reformer Deng Xiaoping and Sun Yat-sen, considered the “father” of modern China.

In 2000, Mao gave way to a dragon for millennium 100 yuan (£7.50) banknotes, but again only temporarily. Seven notes bearing his image on one side and backdrops such as Tibet’s Potala palace and the Three Gorges area on the other, were issued in 1999 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic.

The new notes are slightly larger than the ordinary 10-yuan notes, which are a more sombre grey and black. In a country where fake banknotes regularly surface and where every 100-yuan bill is checked for authenticity, watermarks and other technologies will be used to prevent counterfeiting of the notes.

A watermark appears on the picture of the National Stadium in the shape of the Arabic numeral 10 and the Games of XXIX Olympiad in the Chinese characters, the central bank said.