Jen Lin-Liu is the author of "Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China."
In an op-ed piece in the IHT she writes about how the spotlight in Beijing has been turned in various critical ways away from the public gaze:
"While eating dinner at a packed Spanish restaurant one recent evening, I found myself sitting next to two scorekeepers for the International Olympics Committee who had just arrived here. They remarked that they found Beijing to be a very modern place. They were able to surf the Internet freely from their hotel rooms. Apart from the crazy drivers, the city didn't seem that different from the ones in their countries, New Zealand and Canada.
That's the Beijing many visitors coming for the Olympics will see. But unrestricted Internet use is a rarity, even for foreign reporters covering the Games, who last week discovered that the Chinese government is limiting their access to the Internet. Even as China projects a new air of openness and tolerance as it rolls out the welcome mat for Olympics visitors, the government is cracking down on citizens.
Last month, Chinese officials ordered copies of The Beijing News removed from newsstands and censored the newspaper's Web site after it published a photograph of victims wounded during the 1989 democracy movement in Tiananmen Square. The authorities have barred distribution of the English version of Time Out Beijing, a magazine for which I write, for the past two months. A good friend who is an American professor had valuable political texts in Chinese seized when he arrived at Beijing's airport. And a shipment of my recently published food memoir was detained and sent back to the U.S. by Chinese customs officials, who explained that my books were not "approved materials."
Continue reading here.
In an op-ed piece in the IHT she writes about how the spotlight in Beijing has been turned in various critical ways away from the public gaze:
"While eating dinner at a packed Spanish restaurant one recent evening, I found myself sitting next to two scorekeepers for the International Olympics Committee who had just arrived here. They remarked that they found Beijing to be a very modern place. They were able to surf the Internet freely from their hotel rooms. Apart from the crazy drivers, the city didn't seem that different from the ones in their countries, New Zealand and Canada.
That's the Beijing many visitors coming for the Olympics will see. But unrestricted Internet use is a rarity, even for foreign reporters covering the Games, who last week discovered that the Chinese government is limiting their access to the Internet. Even as China projects a new air of openness and tolerance as it rolls out the welcome mat for Olympics visitors, the government is cracking down on citizens.
Last month, Chinese officials ordered copies of The Beijing News removed from newsstands and censored the newspaper's Web site after it published a photograph of victims wounded during the 1989 democracy movement in Tiananmen Square. The authorities have barred distribution of the English version of Time Out Beijing, a magazine for which I write, for the past two months. A good friend who is an American professor had valuable political texts in Chinese seized when he arrived at Beijing's airport. And a shipment of my recently published food memoir was detained and sent back to the U.S. by Chinese customs officials, who explained that my books were not "approved materials."
Continue reading here.
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