Chinese regime blocks socialist but welcomes Bush and Sarkozy
Socialist Hong Kong legislator Leung Kwok-hung, better known as “Long Hair”, was barred Friday from traveling to southwest China’s earthquake zone.
By CWI reporters Hong Kong

Leung, who is an elected member of Hong Kong’s pseudo parliament, the Legislative Council, was among a 20-member delegation scheduled to visit Sichuan to survey the damage from the 12 May earthquake and meet local officials. Despite his earlier inclusion on an official list of delegates, Leung was told his travel permit application had been rejected at the last minute, on suspicions he was planning protests in China.

“It’s so ironic. People said the Olympic Games will make China more open up, I think it’s going backward,” Leung told The Associated Press.

Hong Kong’s chief executive (non-elected Prime Minister) Donald Tsang said the decision was made by the Chinese government and he declined to comment further. “The entry is the business of the Chinese authorities,” he said.

China reincorporated Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region in 1997, but Hong Kong citizens still require visas to enter China and vice versa. Many Hong Kong democracy activists are blacklisted by China’s one-party dictatorship and prevented from visiting “the motherland”, but these rules were relaxed to some extent in relation to May’s earthquake. Three other Hong Kong legislators who are also on Beijing’s blacklist were granted entry permits for the same Sichuan visit meant to include Long Hair. Sichuan was the hardest hit province in the earthquake that killed more than 70,000 people and left over five million homeless. Gansu and Shaanxi provinces also suffered extensive damage and loss of life.

“Show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are”

Ironically, on the same day that Long Hair was prevented from entering the mainland, it was announced in the French news media that President Nicholas Sarkozy will, after all, attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics on 8 August. Sarkozy, who earlier this year flirted with the idea of a personal ‘boycott’, has been desperate to repair relations with the Chinese regime in order to limit any damage to French capitalism’s interests inside the country. In April and May, a short-lived campaign was conducted against French goods and businesses by Chinese nationalists. This boycott call was initially encouraged by the Chinese regime as a useful distraction from bigger issues closer to home. The regime accused “France” (not Sarkozy personally) of “insulting the Chinese people”.

Sarkozy’s change of heart follows the announcement on Thursday that President George W. Bush will also attend the opening ceremony. The Chinese regime is presenting the attendance of both Bush and Sarkozy as a major triumph over the Olympic-boycott movement. A host of activist groups internationally have called for a boycott of the Beijing Olympic Games over issues such as repression in Tibet and the lack of basic democratic rights in China as a whole.

Thus, while Bush and Sarkozy and other notoriously right-wing and anti-working class politicians are welcome to visit China as guests of its nominally “communist” ruling party, democratic socialists, even Chinese ones such as Leung Kwok-hung, are declared “undesirable”. As the saying goes: “Show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are”!