Countdown to Beijing

by Sheldon Rampton — August 9, 2005 - 1:40pm
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Three years from now, Beijing will host the Olympic games, giving the "Chinese superpower-in-the-making" an opportunity to "present a progressive, urbane and open face to a world increasingly nervous about its growing might," writes Catherine Armitage. However, the Beijing Olympics organizing committee (BOCOG) isn't taking phone calls from reporters, for fear that they might get a call from the outlawed spiritual group Falun Gong. "The problem with telephone interviews is that we can't identify the person on the line, which media he represents and whether he is a journalist or not," explained BOCOG spokesman Jiang Xiaoyu. "For example the Falun Gong cult is illegal in China but they have their own journalists." BOCOG is planning to hire a leading international PR firm to help manage media coverage of the Olympics. "Hill and Knowlton, Weber Shandwick and Burson-Marsteller are rumoured to be those in contention," Armitage writes.

Main Source: 
The Australian, August 8, 2005

Comments

Badly missing the point

Submitted by critical thinker on August 10, 2005 - 5:06pm.
The People's Republic of China has a lot of work to do in the area of human rights and political freedoms, and it makes sense to hold their policies up to the same scrutiny as their presentation of the Olympics will attract. But treating Falun Gong as the litmus test of a free society is an error that journalists in the west continue to make year after year. Downloading and studying the books of the Falun Dafa movement (Falun Gong is the practise of their beliefs) makes it clear that F.G. is nothing more than a mish-mash of traditional Chinese practises for spiritual and physical health combined with a cult of personality centered around the founder Li Hongzhi. Readers of the books are repeatedly informed of Li's paranormal powers, and the material strongly emphasizes that the supposed benefits of Falun Dafa are not available to a diligent practitioner working in isolation, they can only be conferred by Li Hongzhi or one of his authorized associates, in person. This is akin to a pop psychologist renaming self-esteem as 'magic love' and saying that only they can transfer it into your mind by means of a secret process. Don't take my word for it: read the Faulun Dafa movement's own material and decide for yourself whether it is spirituality or snake oil. Falun Dafa is essentially a marketing concepts designed to sell books and seminars to a credulous public. By gathering together a mass of traditional (and free) Chinese knowledge about the cultivation of mental and physical health, and re-branding it as a paranormal breakthrough, the originators and managers of the Falun Dafa movement have simply found a way to encourage the Chinese public to pay for something they could have learned for free at the library. The same organization which promotes Falun Dafa also publishes a 'newspaper' called 'The Epoch Times', which spends less time reporting news than pointing out the deficiencies of the Chinese Communist Party. While this is a perfectly legitimate publishing activity, one must wonder whether the goal is to bring about change in China or simply collect advertising revenue from the large community of Chinese expatriates. I practise a martial art myself and found the Falun Dafa material particularly offensive because it subverts centuries-worth of public domain knowledge for the private profit of a few individuals, playing upon the credulity of the Chinese population. Reprinting fulminations about the BOCOG's use of a public relations firm without addressing the fact that Falun Gong is itself a creation of clever PR is shoddy journalism. It's ironic that CMD & PR Watch is giving a backhanded endorsement to a movement that is itself a marketing tool masquerading as a grassroots movement. I am not affiliated with the government of China, the Olympics, or any PR firms of any kind.