Protests against China

2 weeks of working in our UK (in Camden) and Global offices (in Woking, not a touch on Camden!) over, I headed back to Beijing via a few days in Hong Kong. Note to self: do not mis-read flight time and get flight time time wrong by 1 hour 10 minutes in the future!! Now I am in Shanghai (can't sit still!) and BBC World is raving all about the Tibetan exiles in India starting a march to the India-China border to protest about the treatment of Tibetans in the Chinese province of Tibet.

When I was in the UK, the papers were all about Steve Spielberg withdrawing from his role as an adviser to the Opening Ceremony; British Athletes had joined a group of Athletes from around the World who wanted to use the Olympics as leverage on China and the British Olympic Committee got in hot water for asking its athletes to sign that they would not protest in China. Evidently all eyes are on China, and it is not just those in China who care.

People in Plan UK and Netherlands were asking me what Plan China will be doing about the Sudan issue and the answer is very obvious: nothing. Plan has no leverage over China in its dealings with Sudan and seeks to engage constructively rather than criticize. Of course, if Plan did say anything, our work in China would be restricted (as might our work in Sudan), which would not be of benefit to the hundreds of thousands of children and their families who we are helping every year. This is only my personal opinion (and I have many!), but we'll be leaving the protests to those who have nothing to lose inside China, such as the Tibetans in exile (the Tibetans in China might suffer because of their exiled colleagues, and then i wonder what the exiled Tibetans will do?) or other human rights groups who do not work in China, such as Amnesty.

Of course what most people fail to realise is that, though the Olympics does offer an unusual chance to pressurize the government, any difference that those groups will make will only be superficial and will be withdrawn straight afterwards. Of course, the government (any government)'s number 1 concern is its own future and that depends on its own citizens. In China, those citizens only really know what the government wants them to know since it controls its domestic media so well. So as long as the government can keep the 'physical activities' that might happen in Beijing covered up well (undoubtedly it will move against any protesters in seconds) then anything else is irrelevant, to some extent.

What is interesting is that there could be a lot of domestic groups organising protests over more serious matters than Tibet or Sudan; such as farmers and, though that will not get in the media either, it could have more interesting, longer-term implications. Also of interest, to me at least since I work with companies here, is the pressure on the Olympics sponsors that pressure groups are mounting, as we all know how much International media can damage big Multinational companies!