A US politician has accused the Chinese government of ordering US-owned hotels in China to install internet filters that can spy on international visitors coming to watch the summer Olympic games.
Republican Senator Sam Brownback made the claim as he and other politicians denounced China’s record of human rights abuses and called on President George Bush not to attend the opening ceremonies in Beijing.
“This is wrong, it’s against international conventions, it’s certainly against the Olympic spirit. The Chinese government should remove that request and that order,” he said.
Mr Brownback said he has seen the language of the memos received by at least two US hotels. He declined to name the hotels.
He said he obtained the information from two “reliable but confidential sources” in the hope that public pressure would convince the Chinese government to back off the demand.
Brownback called China “the foremost enabler of human rights abuses around the world” and said the Chinese government is turning the summer games into “an Olympics of oppression”.
Beijing has said that its citizens’ human rights are protected under the Chinese constitution, and that it welcomed renewed dialogue on the issue. But Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao also has suggested the US politicians were biased in their views.
China hopes a successful August Olympics will signal its emergence as a world power. The approach to the games has focused intense international and US congressional attention on what human rights groups say is Beijing’s oppression of religious freedom, minorities, the media and those who criticize the government.
At a news conference, Brownbeck and the other politicians also condemned the Chinese government for supporting repressive governments in Sudan and Burma, suppressing dissent in Tibet and forcibly returning North Korean refugees who flee across the border, where they face imprisonment and torture.
More than a dozen former North Korean refugees who escaped to China and suffered beatings, imprisonment and other persecution at the hands of Chinese officials attended the news conference to discuss their plight.
