Let the Bejing Olympics of Global Re-branding and Marketing begin!

.: Li Changchun (C), member of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee Political Bureau, attends a evening party for the up-coming 2008 Beijing Olympic Games in Beijing, capital of China, on July 29, 2008. (Xinhua Photo/Li Tao)

The Beijing Olympics has displaced 1.5 million people since 2000, according to the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE). A new COHRE report, One World, Whose Dream? Housing Rights Violations and the Beijing Olympic Games, has found that the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) decision to award the Games to Beijing has been a catalyst in increasing forced evictions and displacements in Beijing.

Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)

China's government, which invests up to a third of its $1.68 trillion in currency reserves in [US] Treasuries, is "not smart'' to invest in U.S. debt and should seek higher returns, a former legislator said [June 13 2008]. "I don't think it's a smart move to invest in U.S. bonds,'' said Cheng Siwei, former vice chairman of the National People's Congress, China's legislature, at a Beijing conference.

A Moscow press conference of ecologists, human rights activists and Sochi residents has suggested that the International Olympic Committee(IOC) has grounds to cancel the winter Olympic Games, set to take place in the Black Sea resort of Sochi in 2014. The press-conference, titled “The 2014 Sochi Olympics. Opportunism, incompetence, disregard for the law – the major threat to the collapse of the National Project,” met in Moscow on April 10th.