Olympic Games 2008

China kicked off its one-year countdown celebrations to the 2008 Olympic Games on Wednesday. This prompted commentary from German papers on the human rights situation in China. Just on Tuesday, Chinese police detained six foreign nationals for demonstrating for a free Tibet on the Great Wall.

Munich's Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote that the Olympics were a significant bench mark in China's rapid advancement. But the government in Beijing had underestimated the political burden associated with the Games.

"Beijing 2008 is a sporting, as well as a political event," the paper wrote. "It was the Chinese government itself which gave the Games their political character through an excess of national ambition during the application phase and the promise to heed human rights more strongly."

China wanted to act and be respected as a world power -- but without the associated political and moral responsibility. "Someone who travels to Zimbabwe with a checkbook and supports the dictator there, someone who accepts the genocide in Sudan for the sake of much-loved oil, someone who operates internment camps at home, censures and randomly arrests cannot expect undivided affection and can also not refer to the Olympic peace," the daily commented.

The 2008 Olympic Games could be a turning point for China's image abroad, as their success wouldn't only be decided in the stadiums and cash boxes, wrote Handelsblatt. "Whether the People's Republic manages to develop a modern image is dependent on how it deals with its critics," the Düsseldorf business daily said. But the results were still bleak, it added. AIDS activists were being harassed, foreign press restricted and dissidents banned to labor camps.

"The government in Beijing is fatally wrong if it believes that it can relay the image of a clean China by muzzling disagreeable journalists, forced resettlers and dissidents," it commented. "As long as China rejects universal human rights standards, this dream will remain unfulfilled."

The daily Frankfurter Rundschau agreed that the world will call China to account for its actions. "The Olympics are more than just perfect organization and grandiose buildings," it said. "If China wants to win the world's respect, the communist party leaders have to wage more freedom. This is the only way the Olympic Games will be a success."

According to business daily Financial Times Deutschland, the games should be seen as an opportunity for the West to influence China. "The ultimate goal of this major event for China is organizing the perfect show and delivering the image of a modern, open-minded country," the Hamburg-based paper wrote.

Foreign countries should take advantage of this historical opportunity to influence China, but shouldn't overexcite this leverage, it said. "A rapprochement between the Far East and the West is always more valuable than a China, which is offended and seals itself off after the games."

Yet western democracies shouldn't allow themselves to be degraded to extras in the game of Chinese self-promotion, the Badische Neueste Nachrichten warned. At the same time, the West shouldn't destroy the unifying idea of sport by being "merciless spoilsports."

"It may be a tightrope walk," the Karlsruhe daily wrote. "But when in doubt, backbone and clear words can help more than coy strategies to demand human rights and make public violations of the elementary rules of living together."