13 Jun 2012 | China, Mexico, News and features
This article was first published in 2012 in volume 41, issue 2 of Index on Censorship. We have republished it here to mark the death in May 2025 of influential sports writer and Index contributor Brian Glanville at the age of 93. He was the father of former Index editor Jo Glanville.
The Olympic Games, like the poor, alas, are always with us. Drug ridden. Insanely expensive. Defying what the communists would call their own internal contradictions. Britain is saddled with them now, and God knows what they will cost in the end. But first, there will be China.
An awakening economic giant, caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of communist repression and rogue capitalism, perhaps the symbol and symptom of the Chinese Olympics is the poor wretches who fall to their deaths off the stadia they are building. Underpaid and underprotected. In Beijing, moreover, the pollution is such that numerous athletes will live outside the city. And Ethiopia’s world-record marathon champion refuses to compete in China, fearing the pollution. We know that the Chinese government imposes ruthless censorship on the media and the Internet. Though fortunately, a grovelling attempt by the British Olympic authorities to prevent any kind of comment by their competing athletes has bitten the dust.
Abortive censorship was the name of the game, or the Games, in Mexico City in 1968. They were the third Olympics I had reported, for the Sunday Times, and I had decided they would be my last. I’d already written my novel The Olympian, which appeared in London and New York the following year. Essentially an allegory, using the figure of an English miler as a kind of Faust, driven to greater and greater illusory efforts. And I knew all too well the narcissistic self-involvement of the athlete, with his or her ‘event’. Destined to be all too wretchedly exposed.
The bullets started flying
I arrived in Mexico City from Buenos Aires, where I’d been covering the torrid match between Estudiantes and Manchester United for the world club title. The Olympics would begin the following week, but I had already been told to report on the so-called student riots. Only the previous day, the notorious blue-helmeted riot police, the Granaderos, had battered down the door of a barricaded polytechnic.
So, that first evening in Mexico, I was told to attend the student mitin, as it was called, in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, at the end of the Paseo de la Reforma. Three cultures, comprising Aztec ruins, a Spanish colonial church and a vast, yellow-tiled apartment block, from one of whose terraces the student leaders would address the crowd.
It poured with rain, the students spoke; nothing happened. Speaking Spanish as I did, I found myself lurking round corners, talking to student activists. To be misled; they were convinced that nothing violent was going to happen.
So it was that when the bullets started flying in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas the following Wednesday night, it wasn’t I but the amiable, modest Guardian athletics correspondent, John Rodda, who found himself lying prone on the student leaders’ balcony, a secret policeman’s gun jammed into his head, while bullets pinged off the wall behind him.
Earlier that day, we had travelled up together on one of the press buses from the Villa Olimpica, the Olympic Village, far from the centre and a kind of Shangri La for athletes. John told me he was going to the mitin. I told him that I wasn’t, since I was certain that nothing exceptional would happen.
More than 300 students died
Early the following morning, I was phoned in my hotel by my Sunday Times colleague, John Lovesey, who told me that the previous night ‘all hell had broken loose’. He had been roused from his bed to attend a press conference, to be told that there had been a riot in the square and a few deaths. Where the Mexican officials had seriously miscalculated was in their evident illusion that they were dealing only with a pack of dumb sports journalists. They may well have had a point when it came to the leathery old Americans, permanent adolescents, arrayed in their peaked caps and festooned with badges. When, a few days later, still shell shocked by the events, I ran into large, lumbering Arthur Daley, sports columnist then of the New York Times, and told him what had happened, his reply was, ‘But that was just one section of the city.’
It would transpire that more than 300 students had been killed, their bodies taken to Campo Militar Numero Uno, to be burned. John and I visited the Plaza that Thursday morning. There was a huge scar left by a bazooka shell running down the yellow-tiled face of the apartments. Tanks stood in the square. Broken glass was everywhere.
The government, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which had been oppressively in power for 40 years, had seriously miscalculated. For sports journalists, notably those from England, Italy and Germany, turned into outraged investigators; to the fury of the PRI. And so we discovered Por Que and the brothers Mario and Roger Menendez Rodriguez. Por Que was a cheaply produced but defiant weekly magazine. John and I went to its offices, then on the Colonia Romana. There we found big, hefty, genial Mario and his handsome and more aesthetic brother, the younger Roger. They were scions of a well-known newspaper-owning family in Yucatan. Por Que that week was filled with alarming photographs of the atrocities committed in the Plaza by police and military. Indeed it was the soldiers who had surreptitiously ringed the square, and when a helicopter buzzed overhead and dropped flares, and the white-gloved secret police in the crowd had fired into the air, they had moved in, bayoneting and shooting.
Photographers knew they had no chance of having their pictures in their own newspapers. In a wily sort of censorship, the government of Diaz Ordaz controlled all newsprint, which would simply not be forthcoming for any newspapers which offended. So it was that the photographers took their pictures to Por Que.
Mario, its editor, told us that an attempt had recently been made to kill him. A coach had driven straight at him, but he had jumped in time onto the bonnet of a nearby Renault, so that the man standing innocently next to him had been murdered. John and I duly wrote our report for the paper, which was headed, with echoes of the ice-pick assassination of Leon Trotsky, ‘Murder in Mexico’.
Meanwhile, at the Villa Olimpica, all was unawareness and indifference, as the athletes concentrated on their events. Sitting on the steep green bank above the training track, I tried to tell what had happened to the pretty, blonde Lillian Board, the English 800-metres contestant. ‘I know it sounds terrible,’ she rejoined, ‘but I’m more interested in that girl down there. You see, I’m running against her.’ A rare exception was the Northern Ireland pentathlon athlete, Mary Peters, who had heard that parents of the killed had been presented with their ashes.
John and I continued to work very hard on the appalling story, wondering the while whether we were under surveillance; even threat. We filed another comprehensive piece for the following Sunday, but to our frustration, it didn’t appear. Those were the high, halcyon days of ‘legendary’ Harry Evans as editor.
Back to Mexico
A year later, I was back in Mexico City with the England football team, due to return in 1970 to contest the World Cup finals. It was to find Mario in solitary confinement, Roger and Por Que exiled across the Reforma to the grim Calle Xochimilko. Where Mario had kept his gun in his desk, Roger’s lay on the top. He told me that lorry loads of the magazine had been hijacked.
Fast forward again to 1986. I am in Mexico City again, for another World Cup. Walking down a back street in the city centre, I see in a bookstall rack what seems a familiar publication. A magazine which closely resembles Por Que. The title is Por Este – ‘for this’ rather than ‘why’. I bought it, opened it and there inside on the masthead are the names of Mario and Roger. With excitement, I telephone their office. Mario answers the phone. I tell him it’s I. ‘Oh yes,’ he says casually, as though we’d seen each other the day before, rather than 18 years ago. I arrange to come over.
This I do with my friend and colleague Paul Gardner, an Englishman working for an American television company. There is a splendid reunion. Amazing stories to be told. How Mario was sprung from prison when a guerrilla leader had captured the Rector Elect of the University of Guerrero, and had exchanged him for political prisoners, Mario among them. How Mario had then taken off to spend years in Cuba, working on a PhD. How Roger, in the meantime, had been arrested and tortured, the printing presses of the magazine smashed up, Roger imprisoned. How a new, more democratic, president, Portillo, keen to improve relations with Cuba, had allowed Mario to return, Roger to get out of jail, the magazine paid compensation to restore its printing presses and to publish again: provided it changed its name to Por Este.
Since then, the long, corrupt monopoly of the PRI has come to an end. When the stifling autocracy of the communist regime in China comes to an end, who can guess? The colossal sums they have spent on their Olympics may or may not buy the propaganda success they so much want them to be. Since they no longer seem to be drugging their once all-conquering swimmers, gold medals in the pool will at least be, for them, at a premium. As for the Olympic Games themselves, they remain what they have so long been – a bloated, costly anachronism.
At least there is no longer the bitterly contentious figure of the Spanish reactionary Juan Antonio Samaranch presiding over the Olympic body. Nor yet that of the ineffable Avery Brundage, a Nazi sympathiser at the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936, still Olympic president in 1968 – the man who, when told that the celebrated Italian journalist Oriana Fallacci had been dragged by her hair down the steps from the students’ balcony on La Noche Triste, replied: ‘What was she doing there?’
12 Jun 2012 | China
Feng Zhenghu. Image by Lara Farrar.
This piece originally appeared on the Huffington Post and is cross-posted with the author’s permission
Just down the street from Fudan University, one of the top colleges in China, and across from a massive shopping complex that has a Wal Mart, a couple of Starbucks and KFCs, H&M, Sephora and Zara, among other Western brands, lives Feng Zhenghu who for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week is barred from leaving his home.
In 2009, Feng garnered international media attention when he lived in Tokyo’s Narita Airport for several months after the Chinese government repeatedly stopped him from entering the country. He eventually was allowed to return to his apartment in Shanghai in 2010 and since then has faced random detentions in his home, which is also regularly searched for contraband by police.
“I don’t know if there is any surveillance in my house, and I don’t care,” said Feng who is reachable via mobile in his apartment, which is just a couple of buildings away from mine in a complex that has a fish pond, palm trees and a playground. “My phone is recorded, my computer has been taken. They can come to my house anytime without notice as they please. I have no privacy at all, and it is all public to them.”
Feng has become an enemy of the state for the work that he does to educate petitioners about their rights under Chinese law.
China has hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of petitioners, or people who file grievances with the government against local officials for abuses ranging from corruption to forced land acquisition. They are usually poor, which means they cannot hire lawyers to help them solve their cases, which are also rarely ever heard in local courts. This means that most petitioners make dozens of trips to Shanghai over the course of many years to try to find someone powerful in the central government to help them find justice. Most never find any help at all.
The dissident has made it his mission to push local courts to not dismiss cases from petitioners as well as help petitioners write court documents or other papers outlining their particular complaints. And for this, he has lost his freedom.
In the beginning, when I moved into my apartment back in 2010, the security apparatus was barely noticeable. There were always some random men who looked like the type of men who might be found late at night in a stale diner in a casino in Atlantic City. Thuggish. Gold chains. Greasy hair. One had a broken arm.
They would sit at the gate and smoke. After a while, they started talking to me. Offering me cigarettes. I would stand around and chat about America. It was a good way to practice Chinese. I thought they were part of the complex’s management team. Once I asked what they did, and they replied that just had some sort of random business to do in the neighborhood. I thought nothing of it. Nor, it seemed, did anyone else who lived around me.
I discovered who the men were and why they were there only a few months ago when a Chinese friend of mine who worked for a foreign news agency came to interview Feng. The police arrived to stop him and the foreign reporter from entering Feng’s building so they came to my apartment for tea. Since then, I have been in touch with Feng via phone to ask him some questions surrounding some stories I have been working on about black jails in China and to ask him about what it is like to be in prison in his home.
“If I escape, those guards, the local public security bureau chief, the district governor, all of them will lose their jobs,” he said. “I have been with them for two years, and I understand them. It is also hard for them, so I don’t want to try to run away. Summer is coming, and I worry for them. The sun and mosquitoes are coming, and they have to stay outside. It is a pretty hard life for them as it is for me.”
Since the blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng dramatically escaped from house arrest in a rural village in northern Shandong Province at the end of April, the layers of security surrounding my apartment complex have multiplied. The guards are still at the gate. But now there are more who hang around all day near the entryway to Feng’s building. There are new security cameras by the entrance. This week, new ultra bright lights were installed on the grounds.
And now in front of Feng’s building is a police car round-the-clock. I walk by it everyday. On my way to go buy coffee or cigarettes or a newspaper, I peer inside the tinted windows where I see bored officers watching something on their mobile phones. The car is always on. Sometimes there are people sitting in the backseat. Sometimes there are not. Sometimes everyone inside is asleep. Sometimes they sit outside a small tea shop and watch me pass. One night, one even said hello.
Back in April, before the police car arrived out front, my news assistant and I called Feng early one morning. We said we would come to see him from the street. He walked to his window and briefly peered outside. We snapped a photo. He dropped us a package with a note that said he is allowed to walk outside in the afternoon for half an hour for fresh air, and that maybe we could see him then.
Via phone, Feng told us that, unable to take the constant surveillance, his wife has moved to Germany.
“My life has become worse after her departure,” Feng said. “I cannot even go out to buy food. I rely on visitors to bring me food, and I cook a lot at once, and just eat the leftovers for meals.”
Georgie is a neighbor who visits Feng when he is let out of his apartment in the afternoons. Over the years, Georgie has developed a rapport with the guards, which now number at nearly 20 or so. He says they are migrant workers from provinces around Shanghai and make a couple thousand yuan per month to monitor the dissident. When Feng is let out, he talks to the guards about current events or cooking.
They talk about “how to stay healthy or what kind of television they are watching or how to cook fish. That was yesterday’s topic,” said Georgie who requested his full name not be disclosed out of fear that he would no longer be able to visit Feng anymore.
“Some of them, they have a good relationship [with Feng],” he said. “The guards just consider this as any other job.”
The degree to which my neighbors are aware that their neighbor is a dissident who is in prison in his home is unclear. There are daily rhythms of life here. Cars come and go. Children play soccer outside. Elderly men walk their dogs. Women sit around the fish pond and chat in the evenings. Every time I enter the gate, I look left towards Feng’s apartment and wonder what he is doing, whether he will ever get out and whether, for me, if it would have been better to never know that he was there at all.
“They are very worried right now that in Shandong a blind person could escape such heavy security,” Feng said. “They afraid that I might run away too, and then they will lose their jobs. So their days are not easy right now.”
Lara Farrar is a China-based correspondent, working for CNN International, the Wall Street Journal, Women’s Wear Daily, and the International Herald Tribune among other publications
4 May 2012 | Asia and Pacific, News and features
Even before the internet, dissidents in exile were able to create networks that provided a lifeline to those back home, writes Index editor Jo Glanville
This piece originally appeared on Comment is Free
The desperate plight of Chen Guangcheng is a graphic illustration of how China treats its dissidents. Harassed and intimidated, Chen has spent the past seven years between prison and house arrest since he exposed the government’s forced abortion policy in 2005 (he was awarded the Index freedom of expression award for whistleblowing in 2007). House arrest is a common tactic in China for containing and controlling whistleblowers and activists. In Chen’s case, since his release from prison in 2010, it has meant a life of social isolation and fear. Other current well-known victims include Tibetan poet Tsering Woeser and Ai Weiwei, who famously attempted to turn China’s tactics on their head by installing his own in-house surveillance.
The week’s dramatic events echo the story of celebrated dissident Fang Lizhi, who died last month; Fang also took refuge in the US embassy following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and stayed for more than a year until China allowed him to leave. Fang was one of the most important influences on the Tiananmen generation of young activists and the authorities considered him “the biggest black hand behind the 4 June riots”. In exile in the US for the rest of his life, as well as pursuing his academic career as an astrophysicist, he remained active in speaking out for human rights in China along with other exiles of 1989, including Wang Dan.
The experience of exile for dissidents, despite the continuing possibility for influence, can bring another kind of isolation. “Homelessness, loneliness and despair have almost driven me to self-destruction,” wrote the poet Liu Hongbin on the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square. It is only through memory, he has written movingly, that he has made the journey home. Writer Ma Jian, who has written the definitive novel of the Tiananmen generation, Beijing Coma, while in exile, was still able to visit China regularly until last year – a measure of how far the situation has deteriorated. Chen’s desire for “a rest”, as he told Congress, is likely to be more than a short stay.
However, there are networks that can only be built from exile and that have always been a lifeline for dissidents back home, long before Twitter, SMS and Facebook revolutionised the possibilities of making revolution. Under editor George Theiner, a Czech dissident in exile in London, Index on Censorship magazine published the leading lights of Czechoslovakia’s pro-democracy movement in the 80s, most notably Václav Havel, as well as publishing and distributing Polish and Czech samizdat – a vital outlet for opposition activists. When Index’s founding editor Michael Scammell started publishing the most famous dissident of them all, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great man panicked: when he heard that his work was appearing so widely in English, he thought it was the KGB who was circulating his writing as part of a political provocation. But it was the first worldwide publication of much of his work in translation and an immensely important part of circulating the plight of dissidents in the Soviet Union.
Forty years on, Belarusian activists in exile have played a vital role in galvanising opposition to Alexander Lukashenko’s regime. Since the elections in 2010, following the mass arrests and imprisonment of the opposition, some of the leading lights of the pro-democracy movement have settled in London and Warsaw where they have helped to shape a successful European campaign alongside human rights groups. Natalia Kaladia, artistic director of the acclaimed Belarus Free Theatre, had to flee Belarus following her arrest and the intimidation of her family. In a campaign with Index, her new organisation Free Belarus Now, which she runs with Irina Bogdanova, sister of former political prisoner Andrei Sannikov, has helped to persuade Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas to stop doing business with Lukashenko’s regime.
While none would choose exile, Chen is reported as telling the US ambassador that “he wanted to be part of the struggle to improve human rights within China”, thanks to the internet it is now perhaps more possible than it ever was in the days of the carbon copies of samizdat to continue to exert an influence back home.
Jo Glanville is editor of Index on Censorship magazine
