Peace in the protest parks
Updated on 20 August 2008
Alex Thomson questions the absence of activists in Beijing's designated protest parks.
So it's all quiet in the parks then. Particularly the three Beijing parks specifically set aside for protesters to come along and protest. They are almost spectacularly quiet.
I've toured them just to check. What spurred me on to do this was the information we had been seeking here for so long which was denied to us for almost a week. How many people had applied for the necessary protest permits to go along to the park and be noisy about whatever beef you have? And, further, how many such permits had been issued?
The answer was a masterpiece of ruritanian absurdity. You can't buy this kind of thing. It's only available from the bureaucracies of genuine police states.
Turns out that around 150 people had applied to protest, including three foreigners, involving 77 specific applications. Of these, all but three had been mysteriously and amicable settled by the "appropriate authorities".
You can say in complete truthfulness that you have only actually rejected one application. But it is equally true that not a single applicant actually got the necessary permit to protest.
Nobody has the slightest clue what this means and equally, nobody will tell you even if they do know.
So that leaves three. Of these, two applications were not in order and involved things like bringing children along to protests which is forbidden in China on the perfectly sensible grounds that they don't know what they are doing.
It leaves one. And that one was rejected on the good old grounds that it was a threat to the stability and well-being of the People's Republic.
Thus, you arrive at the brilliant One Part State solution. You can say in complete truthfulness that you have only actually rejected one application. But it is equally true that not a single applicant actually got the necessary permit to protest.
So in the parks you can do Tai Chi, gymnastics, dancing, feed the baby, feed the duck, take an elephant ride, get married, fall asleep - but you cannot protest in the Olympic Protest Parks.
