Taxi for Sandell…

From Mark…

There are two Olympic Games going on here. There’s the smiley, “Ni Hao”, “Welcome to Beijing”, Bird’s Nest games and then there’s the other , slightly sinister, rumour-laden, you- are- being- watched, sanitised Games.

I had a taste of the latter yesterday and it wasn’t pleasant. Rebecca and I were working on a piece about the “right” to protest, and we wanted to go down to the so-called “petition village” in the south of the City Before the Games, it was a place where people could – with permission – take their complaint from their own town or village and protest peacefully about their grievance in the capital city. We’d heard it had been shut down for the Games and the area “cleaned up”.
With an interpreter, who for the purpose of this blog we’ll call “Lucy”, we got into a taxi to head south – both Rebecca and I clearly wearing our accreditation identifying us as journalists. Lucy sat in the front and explained where we wanted to go.

The driver , as he set off (in the middle of a thunderstorm, just to set the scene), started shouting at Lucy, and told her that he was under orders from his boss not to take anyone there. He kept on driving, but clearly wasn’t the happiest worker in Beijing. He then – still with the accelerator well down – phoned his boss. Lucy was by now pale and she told us she was frightened. “Why are you helping these foreigners ? “ he shouted at her “Why are you telling them what I am saying?”. In between shouts he told her that nobody in China has anything to protest about which is why the “village” is not worth going to.

Lucy said she felt uncomfortable now and wanted to get out of the cab. She thought that us as clearly accredited journalists , would be ok, but her advice was not to linger when we got there. She got out, at a place where she could get a cab back into the centre of Beijing, and we carried on. Then the driver took a call, which didn’t take long. Lucy thinks this was from the police (though by now of course she wasn’t there) but the driver seemed a lot happier after taking the call. We can only guess who was on the other end of the line but he put his foot down afterwards as if he was on a mission. We were obviously going to get a welcoming party and we were concerned that our association with “Lucy” would give her problems when we left so we decided to get out as well.

We asked him to stop and motioned to the side of the road. He wouldn’t stop. He took another call and still wouldn’t stop. Finally at some lights we were able to get out. It was an unnerving experience. Later, we went to one of the designated “protest parks”, again wearing our accreditation (which is also the advice from our bureau here). We were greeted nicely at the entrance (Games 1), but as soon as we set off, one of our greeters pulled out his mobile phone to call someone, while looking straight at us (Games 2). One of our colleagues, in the same park, was assailed by a middle aged man who told her that nobody needs to protest in China – everyone is happy. We asked where the protest zone was : the man with the mobile told us it was the whole park if any protesters wanted it – but no-one does because everyone is happy, see ?

We met up with some other media people last night and they were full of similar stories. Not the kind you can really do much with – we weren’t arrested, I can only speculate who those last two calls were from, we can’t prove tales of bugging and phone taps, e-mail monitoring etc, but it’s an overall uncomfortable experience and I can understand why sometimes the paranoia can get to you.

They key thing for us is that we will – eventually – go home, but for Lucy and all the other people who’ve helped the media, spoken freely to the press, or raised a dissenting voice, I wonder what the future holds. A respected senior figure at the BBC who happens to be Chinese, says he thinks people will be ok because the authorities have too many people to visit. I hope he’s right.