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From the australien newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald
The Sydney Morning Herald 12:31PM Wednesday April 2, 2008

April 2, 2008 - 11:33AM

Beijing: the shame game Olympics
Activists hit web with widgets, podcasts and games,
fuelling cacophony of complaints against China.
by Stephen Hutcheon



A broad coalition of professional activists, anarchists and freelance stirrers is rolling out a series of shaming campaigns intended to fuel the cacophony of complaint against China's hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games.

In addition to the usual physical displays of opposition, the groups are ramping up a powerful online presence that includes the use of the big three social networking sites - MySpace, Facebook and YouTube - plus an array of widgets, podcasts, blogs and other web-based weapons of persuasion and subversion.

The agitators include long-time China critics such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Free Tibet Campaign plus a host of smaller activist groups covering the entire gamut of anti-Beijing causes including Darfur, Burma, workers' rights, animal rights, pro-democracy and the death penalty.

Their common aim is to drown out China's attempts to use the Olympics as a celebration of its coming of age as a modern economic powerhouse and refocus international attention on the many skeletons that rattle around in the regime's closets.

With the Olympic torch setting out on a four-month, 19-nation tour of the globe, before returning to the Chinese capital for the start of the opening ceremony on August 8, expect to see the symbols of the Games - in particular - come under sustained attack.

Today's launch by Amnesty International' s Australian branch of its Olympics campaign, for instance, features a monkey character called Nuwu.

China campaign director, Sophie Peer, says this is the first time that the Australian branch of the international human rights organisation has used a cartoon character in one of its campaigns.
Nuwu - meaning angry young boy in Mandarin - is a play on "Fuwa", the collective name given to the five Teletubby-esque mascots of the Beijing Olympics.

The Fuwa five "seek to unite the world in peace and friendship through the Olympic spirit," the official Beijing Games website says.

Amnesty's mascot wears a red bandanna - just like the ones worn by many of the Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989 - and "wants to set the record straight by speaking about the human rights abuses suffered by people in China", Amnesty's new Uncensored website says.

The monkey - the brainchild of an Australian creative team - is also used as the logo on Amnesty Australia's new Facebook presence, one of thousands of "Causes" that members of the social networking site can join.

For activists, the five official critters have become sitting ducks and fair game.

They have already been appropriated by PlayFair 2008, a campaign launched by a group of labour organisations promoting workers' rights in the global sporting goods industry.

PlayFair's website features posters of Beibei, the blue fish-themed official mascot that is supposed to symbolise the "blessing of prosperity", working in a sweatshop sewing garments.
Ben Cohen, the co-founder of the famous Ben & Jerry's ice-cream company in the US, says that he also has the cutesy mascots in his crosshairs.

Cohen is helping the Mia Farrow-backed Dream for Darfur organisation, which seeks to end the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan by putting pressure on China, the Sudanese regime's principal international backer.
"I'm interested in running some sort of campaign that introduces these little guys [the mascots] to the world as 'Looks cute - supports genocide'," Cohen told The New York Times last month.
Farrow's organisation is also behind the push to rebrand the Games as the "Genocide Olympics", a phrase she first used in a commentary published in The Wall Street Journal last year.

But the award for the most brutal act of Photoshop subversion goes to activists who transformed the official Games emblem from a statement of "trust and an expression of self confidence" into a blood-stained symbol of repression.


Photo : French graphic designer Serge-Henrii Bouvet's poster from Sergenry

The official emblem of the Games is called "Chinese Seal, Dancing Beijing". It's a red and white stylisation of the Chinese character "jing", which is both the second character in "Beijing" and the word for capital.

The official Games website states that the emblem - which looks a bit like a running stick figure - is supposed to be "filled with Beijing's hospitality and hopes, and carries the city's commitment to the world".

But over at The SubRealism Manifesto website, a group of freelance anarchists has published a wicked video parody in which "Chinese Seal, Dancing Beijing" becomes the bloodied, crime scene chalk outline of a dissident who has been chased and mowed down by a tank.

Once viewed, the Beijing Games stick man will never look the same again.

The video is the work of the French cartoonist Guillaume Podrovnik and an American who uses the pseudonym Keiko Ketsugo.
Podrovnik, who describes the site as a "radical, anti-consumerist project", worked for many years as a political cartoonist on the anti-Beijing Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily.

Ketsugo says the video, which was created using the animation tools in the Second Life virtual world, drew its inspiration from a four-panel cartoon found on the web in which the blood-rimmed silhouette is formed after a man is executed by a firing squad.

A similarly edgy animation is being promoted by Students for a Free Tibet on its parody of the official Torch Relay site.

The animation, a hack of the official Torch Relay logo, can be downloaded and used as a "badge" on blogs and websites, ensuring that it will spread virally across the internet.

The official logo is static and depicts two characters running, holding aloft a flame in the stylised shape of a phoenix, the mythical creature that in Chinese culture symbolises high virtue and grace and is supposed to appear only during periods of peace and prosperity.

However, in the Students for a Free Tibet version, one of the characters pulls on a policeman's cap, the torch becomes a truncheon and the other character is beaten senseless until it collapses and blood spills down over the Olympic rings.

The online flash video mocks China's torch relay logo and slogan "Light the Passion, Share the Dream" in an attempt to expose China's cynical Olympics propaganda, the SFT website says.

The IOC's most sacred symbol, the five interlocking rings, have also been targeted.
In one image used by the French organisation Committee for Supporters of Tibet, the Olympic rings are shown as tank tracks.
In a poster, originally published by Amnesty's branch in Slovakia and later withdrawn, the rings are depicted as barbed wire loops. The image shows a man pointing a gun at the head of prisoner.

Gaming the Games
Photos: How activists have hijacked the symbols of the Olympic Games and used them to shame China.

The poster uses the slogan "China is getting ready", the same one being used by the Beijing Olympic Organising Committee in the lead-up to the Games.

Photo : Photo : French graphic designer Serge-Herni Bouvet's mock poster from Sergenry

A similar theme is being used by press freedom group, Reporters San Frontiers, which is promoting its Olympic campaign with a graphic using interlocking handcuffs instead of rings.


Photo : Reporters without borders
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