China Vs West-China Wins

And so the Olympic Games came and got kicked as quick to London on top of a typical double decker red bus by David Beckham as the press.

China’s inadequate commitment in the troubled areas of Darfur and Tibet was the pre-Olympic match that had China and the West wrestle.

New York Times, Time Magazine, BBC, and thousands of others didn’t profile as much for us, a prospective Olympic double gold medallist hero Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps, the now greatest Swimmer of all time. Some even say, Michael is the greatest ever Olympiad. That’s for the Jamaicans to judge otherwise i risk being partial.

Not even did our very own African media contingent know that Kirsty Coventry, the Zimbabwean would for some days save Robert Mugabe from a left to right hitting by his hungry watchdogs , flying home three silvers and a gold for a country whose inflation rate can no longer be written in figures but rather sentences.

The opening ceremony at the “birds nest” would for the two-week event blindfold almost every single journalist. They all went on a gracious treatment on how the opening was spectacular, how fireworks lit the entire Beijing, how Li Ning, a former Olympic gymnast for China flew around the birds nest, how the world has never seen anything like this before, how not a single mess was witnessed and so on.

Apart from dotted barely unconfirmed reports of abuse of human rights, everything went as planned for China .Even the most courageous of media houses for once forgot about China’s human rights records and concentrated on the games.

As long as Michael Phelps wore a gold medal a day at the water cube, all cameras were stuck at the pool because that’s what the world at that time wanted to know especially Americans, China’s hardest critics.

George Bush for your information smiled as much when Kobe Bryant and LeBron James stepped on court for a China Vs USA. While the US team didn’t grace the court as frequent as Bush would have wished, Michael Phelps gave the now unpopular republican a smile in his presidential suit by plucking medal after medal.

Somehow, he too forgot about China’s rights record. At least for the days China hosted him
China granted the world free access to a country most, prior to the games would rather know it through the media. People were scared of the worlds’ largest country.

The BBC, my most preferred source of information came short of my expectation.
The constant pre-Olympics criticism was heavy enough to convince me of two-week media battering of China.

I was keen and followed every step both on TV and radio.

BBC radio, rather than deploying the very best of investigative reporters, swarmed China with what i can term ‘tourists’-minus sports journalists.

One particular day, a BBC reporter set out for a region thousands of miles away from Beijing. All i heard was him interacting with Chinese on board and those he talked to sounded so amazed of travelling with a white person. It takes a while for these people to set their eyes on foreigners.

Some exploited the reporter by using the 24hour journey to perfect their English.

At the end of the journey, we listeners were not told as to how China has been going wrong in the furthest prior to inaccessible areas. It was more like a travel story to me than anything closer to drawing a picture of hardcore human rights abuse in China.

Credit to them though, they tried.

But to be fair, China was and is smart. Terrorist attack in the far west Chinese territory of Xinjiang Province, 2,500 miles from Beijing was cleaned even before a single footage would be recorded.

That time, 16 policemen were killed and because of the mere giant nature of China, that, i suppose to western media was not news and was buried as soon as it occurred. It was the second attack on China in less than a week.

As the world anticipated a wave of protests in China during the Olympics, not even the hardcore Tibetan supporters who preceding the games distracted the Olympic touch on its tour around the world, stepped a foot during the two weeks.

By today, trust me; most of them are still recovering from the outstanding show China show-cased the world. Do they even remember where their anti-Chinese placards are?

China designated three parks in the outlying parts of Beijing to be used for public protests during the Olympic Games though not a single one took place. Reports coming out said, close to people were denied to protest though they applied to do so.

The media had a shot and did not fully exploit it. Nobody can expect the freedom China gave to prevail now that the Olympics are over.

It’s back to the drawing board.

Most journalists used to enter the country as tourists to unearth human rights abuse and i am sorry many more will go back to China as tourists.