China Feels the Heat

The former Silk Road oasis of Hetian perches on the edge of China's Taklimakan Desert, a gravelly wasteland of scrub and rock. The city is far even for Chinese—it would be five time zones away from Beijing, if the regime allowed more than one official time in China—but news travels. Last week word emerged of a March 23 protest among Hetian's Muslim Uighur population, long resentful of Han Chinese domination. Yet when reached by phone, four local officials curtly denied reports of a protest, arrests or a curfew. "You should not spread rumors! It's been peaceful here!" said one. Others rudely declared, "No demonstrations!" or hung up. This was all the more puzzling given that the city-government Web site for Hetian (the Uighurs call it Khotan) and another official Web site stated that an incident had taken place on market day, when as many as 100,000 people converge on the city's fabled bazaar. A "tiny number" of people representing the forces of "separatism, terrorism and extremism" unfurled a "splittist" banner in the bazaar, one site said. It went on to declare that police had responded, the incident was handled "according to law" and nobody was hurt.

Is that really such a difficult message to get straight? In recent weeks China has been acting less like a budding superpower than a tin-pot dictatorship—petulant, preachy, defiant. Global audiences have seen images of truncheon-wielding riot police, sent to Lhasa and other Tibetan areas to quell anti-Beijing protests that began on March 10. Chinese officials talk of dark plots, re-education programs, Western media "bias." Each new clampdown—and the shrill agitprop that accompanies it—seems guaranteed to antagonize not only China's restive Tibetan and Uighur minorities but also the nations scheduled to compete at the Olympic Games in Beijing this August. But those aren't the audiences Beijing cares most about pleasing. "A government official I met actually referred to a 'crisis' of [international] public opinion," says John Kamm, a well-connected former businessman who now lobbies for the release of Chinese prisoners of conscience. Even so, he adds, "I don't see any sign the government is going to make concessions."

This has long been Beijing's trade-off: to keep a majority of Chinese loyal, at times by pandering to their most xenophobic prejudices, at the risk of offending the rest of the world. If China craves international legitimacy, the regime fears the nationalist ire of the people even more. The question is whether the old pattern can survive this fraught Olympic year. For at least a year, Darfur activists have been calling this summer's Games "the genocide Olympics," hoping to shame Beijing into helping to stop the killing in western Sudan. Now the Games have set off a string of protests around the world. Demonstrators marred the lighting of the Olympic torch in Greece, and Uighur activists tried to disrupt its route in Turkey last week. Plans to run the flame up Mount Everest in May and through Lhasa in June are sure to provoke outbursts.

Few foreign dignitaries have committed to boycotting the opening ceremonies, and a consumer backlash against Olympic sponsors has not materialized yet. But with hundreds of millions of dollars invested in the Games, companies have reason to worry. "They're facing serious risks to their reputations," says one public-relations consultant working in Beijing, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation against his firm and its high-profile clients. Several big sponsors, including Coca-Cola, GE and UPS, are trying to ward off criticism by pointing to aid pledges they've made to help refugees in Darfur—more than $5 million in Coke's case.

This summer's Games were meant as a graduation ceremony for China's ascension to superpower status. Beijing is in danger of flunking. "China now finds itself under pressure to manage these internal issues, such as ethnic unrest, in a way that doesn't scandalize people [abroad]. That's a new expectation," says the PR consultant. He acknowledges that such issues would be growing in importance even without the Games but says, "What the Olympics does is turbocharge the attention."

When Beijing was awarded the Games back in 2001, the hope was that their staging would push China to open up. In an April 2 letter to the Free Tibet Campaign, a copy of which was obtained by NEWSWEEK, Coca-Cola CEO E. Neville Isdell used the same argument to defend his company's sponsorship of the torch relay: "We believe ... using the event to put political pressure on China would erode the ability of the Olympic Games to make a contribution to lasting change in China and its relationship with the rest of the world."