Should we boycott the Beijing Olympics ....

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http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/activists-propose-olympic-boycott/2007/07/11/1183833599499.html

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Activists propose Olympic boycott
Email Print Normal font Large font Dan Silkstone
July 12, 2007

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AdvertisementAUSTRALIAN human rights advocates are poised to campaign for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics, citing China's record of repression.

A coalition of community leaders and rights advocates has set a deadline of August — one year from the beginning of the Games. If Beijing does not stop reported persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, they will press the Australian Government and sporting authorities to stay away from the Games.

Coalition members include former Australian Democrats leader, Senator Andrew Bartlett, former human rights commissioner Dr Sev Ozdowski, the Christian group, the National Civic Council and Dr Noel Preston, founder of the Uniting Church's UnitingCare Centre for Social Justice. The group calls itself the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong in China.

Calls have previously been issued internationally to boycott the Games, most famously by French presidential candidate Segolene Royal, as well as by the press-freedom group Reporters Without Borders.

"I think it's something people should at least start talking about," Senator Bartlett told The Age. "It's a huge thing to do and I don't necessarily, at this stage, advocate it, but there needs to be a debate.

"China's human rights record is appalling and I don't see a lot of evidence that it has improved significantly since the Olympics were awarded."

Australian Greens leader Senator Bob Brown, not a coalition member, said he did not support a boycott but called on the Government to pressure China about human rights. He said it was a "breathtaking double standard" that cricketers were prevented from touring Zimbabwe while more than 500 athletes will travel to Beijing.

Neither the Government nor the Opposition supports a boycott and it would be unlikely to occur. But the calls could bring negative publicity to the Games and confront athletes with a moral quandary.

A spokesman for the Falun Dafa Association, John Deller, said it was important to keep China's human rights record under scrutiny in the lead-up to the Games. "I think the athletes have to be informed," he said. "That is the key. If they know what's happening to Falun Gong prisoners and others in labour camps, the torture that goes on there. Then they can make an informed decision."

Senator Bartlett compared the moral question facing athletes with the one faced before the 1936 Berlin Olympics. While he stressed that he did not regard the Chinese Government as equivalent to the Nazi regime, he said in both cases athletes' participation could deliver a propaganda victory for their host. "This is a regime with major human rights problems and people should at least make themselves aware of that and make their own decisions," he said.

Australian Olympic Committee secretary-general Craig Phillips said that boycotts were not successful, punished athletes unfairly and could result in subsequent reverse boycotts. "The Olympics do bring greater scrutiny of the host nation," he said. "But it's not a matter for us, it's a matter for governments and other organisations to press if they wish to."

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China Quick to Execute Drug Official

JOSEPH KAHN

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Zheng Xiaoyu, who had admitted to taking bribes over medicines, was put to death Tuesday.
Eye Press, via Associated Press
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BEIJING, July 10 — China executed its former top food and drug regulator on Tuesday for taking bribes to approve untested medicine, as the Beijing leadership scrambled to show that it was serious about improving the safety of Chinese products.

The Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court carried out the death sentence against Zheng Xiaoyu, 62, the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration, shortly after the country’s Supreme Court rejected his final appeal.

Mr. Zheng, who had appealed his May 29 sentence on the grounds that it was too severe and that he had confessed to the bribery charges against him, became the first ministerial-level official put to death since 2000 and the fourth since China opened its doors to the outside world nearly 30 years ago.

The official Xinhua news agency announced the execution, but did not say how Mr. Zheng was killed. In most cases, the court police execute prisoners by shooting them in the back of the head, though recently the police have also used lethal injections.

China carries out more court-ordered executions than the rest of the world combined, according to human rights groups. But the sentence against Mr. Zheng was unusually harsh and its execution uncommonly swift.

The country’s Supreme Court has recently made a highly publicized effort to show that it carefully reviews all death sentences and that it has restricted the power of local courts to impose them.

But Mr. Zheng’s case appears to have served a political purpose, allowing senior leaders to show that they have begun confronting the country’s poor product-safety record. Shoddy or dangerous goods, including drugs, pet food and car tires, have damaged its reputation abroad, especially in the United States.

China is the world’s largest exporter of consumer products, and tainted goods represent a small fraction of the country’s more than $1 trillion in annual exports. But officials clearly worry that protectionist forces in the United States could use the spate of quality problems to restrict trade.

On the same day that Mr. Zheng was executed, representatives of the country’s leading food and drug regulatory bodies held a joint news conference to emphasize their determination to crack down on fake and counterfeit food and medicine.

After weeks of denying serious problems or blaming foreign forces for exaggerating the issue, officials have recently begun to strike a less defensive tone. One senior official acknowledged that the food and drug safety network still allowed too many unsafe goods to slip through, and said that at the moment the trend was “not promising.”

“As a developing country, China’s current food and drug safety situation is not very satisfactory because supervision of food and drug safety started late,” said that official, Yan Jiangying, deputy policy director of the State Food and Drug Administration, the agency Mr. Zheng headed. “Its foundation is weak, so the supervision of food and drug safety is not easy.”

Asked about the death sentence, Ms. Yan said: “Corruption in the food and drug authority has brought shame to the nation. What we will have to learn from the experience is to improve our work and emphasize public safety.”

Regulators said their ability to monitor food and drug purity would greatly increase by 2010, when they expect to have enhanced their ability to respond to accidents and to have established a national product recall system.

The authorities said that inspectors would start shifting posts more often to prevent corruption, and that they would check a wide range of goods more frequently to ferret out fakes.

But they acknowledged that they faced challenges in eliminating unsafe products. China has 200 million farms, many of them less than an acre in size. It has nearly 450,000 food processing companies, nearly 80 percent with 10 employees or fewer, said Lin Wei, a senior official at the National Administration of Quality, Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.

“This is our national condition,” Mr. Lin said. “It is our hope that by 2010 we can reduce the number of small food workshops by 50 percent and effectively curb law breaking and counterfeiting.”

Officials acknowledge that responsibility for food and drug safety involves as many as 17 government agencies, ranging from the Health Ministry, which sets hygienic standards, to the Public Security Bureau, which has the power to investigate criminal cases.

This fragmented authority has led to a proliferation of licensing fees and fines. But it has also allowed local officials to protect factories in their domain and has created overlapping jurisdictions in which no single agency exercises ultimate responsibility, Chinese regulatory experts say.

On Tuesday, officials said the five agencies with the most direct, front-line responsibility for food and drug safety had stepped up their coordination.

Officials also appeared worried that the safety scare could reduce attendance or otherwise limit the economic development and global prestige it hoped to gain from being the site of next summer’s Olympic Games. On Tuesday, authorities outlined measures they had taken to guarantee clean food and water supplies for athletes and spectators at the Games.

Fears abroad over Chinese-made products were aroused last year by the deaths of dozens of people in Panama who took cough syrup that contained diethylene glycol, a poisonous chemical, that was imported from China. The Chinese manufacturer had labeled the chemical as glycerin, a common and harmless ingredient in drugs.

Chinese-made pet food tainted with the chemical melamine caused the deaths of cats and dogs in the United States this year. American regulators have since turned away drug-tainted seafood products, juice containing unsafe additives and toy trains colored with lead paint.

The United States and several other countries have banned Chinese-made toothpaste that contains diethylene glycol. No reports of health problems stemming from the product have emerged, however, and China allows the use of diethylene glycol in toothpaste in small quantities.

Mr. Zheng became China’s top drug regulator in 1994, when he was named to head what was then called the State Pharmaceutical Administration. In 2003, the agency became the State Food and Drug Administration, and acquired responsibility for overseeing the nation’s food supply as well.

He was removed in June 2005, for reasons that were not specified at the time. His ouster came after a period of bureaucratic infighting over the powers of the food and drug regulator, whose expanded responsibilities encroached on the purview and revenue sources of rival departments.

Late last year he was charged with accepting $850,000 in bribes to grant approval for hundreds of medicines. State media said his agency had approved 137 drugs that had not submitted proper applications, and that six of those turned out to be entirely fake.

Continuing the crackdown, a Beijing court on Friday meted out a capital sentence to Mr. Zheng’s deputy, Cao Wenzhuang. Mr. Cao was given a two-year stay of execution, however, which often results in commutation to life in prison.

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