买佛龛

陈晓卿 @ 2008-8-22 1:50:50

http://www.bullog.cn/blogs/hizi/archives/169078.aspx

　　近来老妈成了体育迷，天天坐在电视机前面看比赛，前提是有中国队的比赛。不管什么都看，哪怕规则都不清楚，只要有希望得金牌就行。她愿意等，等到升国旗的时候。

　　我理解不了这种心理。当年，部办秘书纪大姐整整一上午一眼不拉地看谢军的比赛直播，我特敬佩也特吃惊，在旁边问：“您还会下国际象棋呢？”“我哪懂这个？可咱们小谢军，就快拿世界冠军了！”纪姐头都不回，双手捂着胸口说，“多让人激动啊！”我倒。金牌真这么重要么？
　
　　偶尔，老妈会问我一些问题，比如，她到昨天还在担心，美国队会不会在金牌榜上超过我们。我反复解释鬼子没希望了，她才稍微放下心来。但我说金牌不重要，她又不乐意了，认为我假清高。我被迫用了很长时间来解释，这本来应该是一个大Party，大家来乐和乐和就得了，可现在已经成了堂会了……这下我妈真的生气了，她认为我太反动，“金牌多不是意味着我们国家体育强么？难道你就希望我们还是东亚病夫才好？”

　　我实在没办法，只好引用刘建宏同学的例子。四年前的雅典，中国队金牌狂飚，回来后，建宏到母校讲座，在座有听众也说到这个问题，理所当然认为“国运盛体运盛”，金牌多就意味着咱们已经成为体育大国了。刘同学一时语塞，只好反问台下，请每周坚持体育锻炼的同学举手，结果二百多人的礼堂，举手的只有不到三十人；刘同学趁热打铁，继续请坚持每天锻炼的同学举手，结果令人汗颜，只有五个人……刘建宏把双手一摊，耸了耸肩膀，算把这事儿掰扯清楚了，台下掌声雷动。

　　当然，我妈显然比那些年轻人难以说服。她坚持认为这次堂会相当伟光正，并且举了大量例证－－北京的空气质量，道路交通，治安状况……更重要的是，得了这么多金牌，真的让人从心底感到国家大有希望。她认为我这么大岁数还不懂事，觉悟太低，甚至连陈乐都不如。

　　我只好闭嘴，继续看比赛。昨天女排发挥一般，被巴西队遏制了，让老妈心情非常不好。我赶紧解释说，比赛总有输有赢，运动员有状态高低的问题，时好时坏。比如，如果今天第一局如果拿下了，就会像股市暴涨，后面也就顺了；没拿下，就有可能像股市暴跌……说完我就后悔了，因为近期股市低迷，我们本来让老爸解闷玩儿的炒股活动，结果把老人家套在那儿了，这事情一直让老妈搓火。

　　果然，我妈关了电视，开始埋怨我们怂恿我爸糟蹋钱。我恨自己多嘴，可也只好听着。抱怨了一会儿，我妈突然问我：“你说，股价都跌成这样了，国家怎么不管呢？”我对炒股一窍不通，只好想像着解释－－炒股是市场行为，可能国家干预的程度有限吧。我妈摇头，表示不信：“别人说的可跟你不一样，政府其实是能救市的。”

　　“那为什么不救呢？”我问。“还不是因为要办运动会？”老妈一下变得怒不可遏，“开始吸引我们往里面投钱，都投了，投多了，然后它就缩水。你说这次北京，花了多少钱啊！真是劳民伤财，哪一分钱不是我们老百姓的？！”

　　相关阅读：侯宝林郭启儒相声选段

北京八旬老太申请抗议反遭劳教惩罚；秦刚论兴奋剂

BBC：北京八旬老太申请抗议反遭劳教惩罚

2008年08月20日 格林尼治标准时间17:41北京时间 01:41发表

北京当局为奥运专门设立了示威区，但是，两位年近80的北京老太太却因为长期上访、申请抗议遭到惩罚。

这两位老太太吴殿元和王秀英先后五次向当局申请到新设的"集会游行示威场所" 游行示威。

但是，她们的申请没有到当局批准或拒绝的答复，后来，两人同时遭到被判劳教一年的处罚。

79岁的吴殿元和77岁的王秀英原来的住房于2001年被强制拆除。之后，两人就一直不断上访。

扣留盘问

吴殿元的儿子李学惠接受BBC中文部采访时叙述了事情的经过。他表示，两位老太太从8月5日至8月18日期间，先后5次向北京市公安局治安管理总队申请到新设的"集会游行示威场所" 进行游行示威。

但是这些申请无一得到当局批准或拒绝的答复。两人于8月5日申请游行当天还被公安局扣留盘问10个小时。

李学惠说，8月17日中午，吴殿元和王秀英同时收到北京市政府劳动教养管理委员会7月30日签署的的"劳动教养决定书"。

他说，两位老太太8月18日再度前往北京市公安局治安管理总队时，执勤的公安人员告诉她们，因为两人已经在8月17日收到劳动教养决定书，所以她们现在没有权利申请游行示威。

李学惠表示，他们准备通过司法渠道提出行政诉讼，状告北京市政府劳动教养管理委员会。

中国人权执行主任谭竞嫦表示："积极上访的吴殿元和王秀英在申请游行示威后遭到当局处罚，显示了政府所宣称的在奥运会期间专设'集会游行示威场所'供民众申请游行，不过是在作秀"。

她指出，尽管民众提出许多申请，但当局除了报复的行动外，未有批准任何申请的报道。

近十几年来，伴随着中国经济的畸形增长，因征地、拆迁、国企改制、军人转业导致的上访人次剧增。

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Too Old and Frail to Re-educate? Not in China

By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: August 20, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/sports/olympics/21protest.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&oref=slogin




Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
Wang Xiuying, left, and Wu Dianyuan have been ordered to undergo “re-education” for seeking a protest permit in Beijing.

BEIJING — In the annals of people who have struggled against Communist Party rule, Wu Dianyuan and Wang Xiuying are unlikely to merit even a footnote.

The two women, both in their late 70s, have never spoken out against China’s authoritarian government. Both walk with the help of a cane, and Ms. Wang is blind in one eye. Their grievance, receiving insufficient compensation when their homes were seized for redevelopment, is perhaps the most common complaint among Chinese displaced during the country’s long streak of fast economic growth.

But the Beijing police still sentenced the two women to an extrajudicial term of “re-education through labor” this week for applying to hold a legal protest in a designated area in Beijing, where officials promised that Chinese could hold demonstrations during the Olympic Games.

They became the most recent examples of people punished for submitting applications to protest. A few would-be demonstrators have simply disappeared, at least for the duration of the Games, squelching already diminished hopes that the influx of foreigners and the prestige of holding the Games would push China’s leaders to relax their tight grip on political expression.

“Can you imagine two old ladies in their 70s being re-educated through labor?” asked Li Xuehui, Ms. Wu’s son, who said the police told the two women that their sentence might remain in suspension if they stayed at home and stopped asking for permission to protest.

“I feel very sad and angry because we’re only asking for the basic right of living and it’s been six years, but nobody will do anything to help,” Mr. Li said.

It is unclear why the police have detained people who sought permission to protest. Some political analysts say the police may be refusing to enforce the government’s order, announced last month, to allow protest zones. Chinese lawyers and human rights advocates also suggested a more cynical motivation — that the authorities were using the possibility of legal demonstrations as a ploy to lure restive citizens into declaring their intention to protest, allowing the police to take action against them.

When the International Olympic Committee awarded the Games to Beijing in 2001, ignoring critics who said China should not be rewarded for repression, its president, Jacques Rogge, offered assurances that the Games would invariably spur China toward greater openness.

But prospects dimmed even before the opening ceremony, when overseas journalists arrived to discover that China’s promise to provide uncensored Internet access was riddled with caveats. The ensuing uproar did persuade the government to unblock some politically sensitive Web sites, but many others, including those that discuss Tibet and the banned spiritual group Falun Gong, remain inaccessible at the Olympic press center.

The announcement that the police had set up protest zones was first greeted as a positive if modest step that could allow Chinese a new channel to voice grievances otherwise ignored by party officials and the state media.

“In order to ensure smooth traffic flow, a nice environment and good social order, we will invite these participants to hold their demonstrations in designated places,” Liu Shaowu, the security director for Beijing’s Olympic organizing committee, said at a news conference. He described the creation of three so-called protest zones and suggested that a simple application process would provide Chinese citizens an avenue for free expression, a right that has long been enshrined in China’s Constitution but in reality is rarely granted.

But with four days left before the closing ceremony, the authorities acknowledge that they have yet to allow a single protest. They claim that most of the people who filed applications had their grievances addressed, obviating the need for a public expression of discontent.

Chinese activists say they are not surprised that the promise proved illusory. Li Fangping, a lawyer who has been arrested and beaten for his dogged representation of rights advocates, said there was no way the government would allow protesters to expose some of China’s most vexing problems, among them systemic corruption, environmental degradation and the forced relocation of hundreds of thousands of residents for projects related to the Olympics.

“For Chinese petitioners, if their protest applications were approved, it would lead to a chain reaction of others seeking to voice their problems as well,” Mr. Li said.

During the past two decades, China has embraced a market economy and shed some of the more onerous restrictions that dictated where people could live, whom they could marry and whether they could leave the country. But with political dissent and religious freedom, the government has been unrelenting.

In theory, the Communist Party allows citizens to lobby the central government on matters of local corruption, the illegal seizure of land and extralegal detentions. In reality, those who arrive at Beijing’s petition office are often met at the door by plainclothes officers who stop them from filing their complaints and then bundle them back to their hometowns. Intimidation, beatings and administrative detentions are often enough to prevent them from trying again.

Daniel A. Bell, who teaches political theory at Tsinghua University in Beijing, suggested that Western political leaders and rights advocates were naïve to think that the Olympics would lead to looser restrictions. Although Chinese have come to enjoy greater freedoms in the past two decades, progress has been largely stalled in the years leading up to the Olympics as officials worked to ensure that nothing would interfere with them.

In recent months, the pressure has only intensified: scores of rights lawyers and political dissenters have been detained, and even the armies of migrant workers who built the Olympic stadiums have been encouraged to leave town, lest their disheveled appearances detract from the image of a clean, modern nation.

“When you have guests coming over for dinner, you clean up the house and tell the children not to argue,” Mr. Bell said.

While the demands of Ms. Wu, 79, and Ms. Wang, 77, the protest applicants, might be seen as harmless, they threatened to expose the systemic problems that bedevil the lives of millions of Chinese. Like many disenchanted citizens, the two women, former neighbors, were seeking to draw attention to a government-backed real estate deal that promised to give them apartments in the new development that replaced their homes not far from Tiananmen Square. Six years later, they are living in ramshackle apartments on the outskirts of the city, and their demands for compensation have gone unanswered.

On Monday, when they returned to the police station to follow up on their protest applications, the women were told they had been sentenced to one year at a labor camp for “disturbing public order.” For the moment, the women have been allowed to return to their homes, but they have been warned that they could be sent to a detention center at any moment, relatives said.

Officials say that they received 77 protest applications but that nearly all of them were dropped after the complaints were “properly addressed by relevant authorities or departments through consultations.”

At a news conference on Wednesday, Wang Wei, the vice president of Beijing’s Olympic organizing committee, was asked about the lack of protests. He said it showed the system was working. “I’m glad to hear that over 70 protest issues have been solved through consultation, dialogue,” he said. “This is a part of Chinese culture.”

But human rights advocates say that instead of pointing the way toward a more open society, the Olympics have put China’s political controls on display.

“Given this moment when the international spotlight is shining on China, when so much of the international media are in Beijing, it’s unfathomable why the authorities are intensifying social control,” said Sharon Hom, the executive director of Human Rights in China. “The truth is they’re sending a clear and disturbing message, one they’re not even trying to hide, which is we’re not even interested in hearing dissenting voices.”

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流氓国家的外交部真是流氓济济。越流氓越有前途，沙老师是榜样。

秦刚论兴奋剂

http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/chn/xwfw/fyrth/t467269.htm



2008年8月20日下午，外交部发言人秦刚举行例行记者会，就胡**主席访韩、南奥塞梯局势、北京奥运会等回答了记者提问。

　　问：今天有六名外国人举行支持“*独”的抗议活动而被中国警方逮捕，他们现在在哪里？是否会被驱逐出境？另据称有两名中国妇女因为申请示威被判劳教，你对此有何评论？根据新华社的消息，目前北京市主管部门还没有批准一起示威申请，你认为这能体现中国的民主吗?

　　答：你是不是看到新华社的消息之后感到很失望，缺少一点“兴奋剂”？

　　北京市公安局已经就相关问题作出了解释，我没有更多的补充。在中国和在任何其他国家一样，申请游行示威要依照有关的法律程序进行。

　　外国人在北京举行示威活动，他们也要遵守中国的法律。如果出现了违反中国法律的情况，中方有关部门有权依法进行处理。我想强调指出的是，在中国从事支持“*独”和分裂中国的活动不受欢迎，必然遭到中国人民的强烈和一致的谴责。

　　关于你的第二个问题，有关具体情况请你向有关部门去了解，我在前面的阐述中已经回答了我们在处理此类问题上的原则。