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

Please note some of the links in this article are to pages with Chinese text and some computers may not display them correctly

The following “Sci-Fi” short story has been (re)posted in many Chinese online forums and blogs, originally from SCI-FI Great Wall blog, translated by China Digital Times’s Linjun Fan.

German public service broadcaster Südwestrundfunk recently obtained this 48-page IOC media kit for Beijing 2008 (or 'One-Year-to-Go Countdown Resource'). Marked CONFIDENTIAL – FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY, it offers an intriguing insight into the way the IOC views itself and its relations with the media, governments and NGOs and protest groups.

.: 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)

In the run up to the Beijing Olympics, Matt McGrath sets out to expose corruption, drug use and cover-ups at the highest levels in sport. BBC World Service Investigation

.: © Vasily Shaposhnikov

Residents of Imeret lowland, which has been chosen to as a construction site for the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, clashed with bailiffs and police yesterday, July 22, 2008. Armed with sticks and bottles of incendiary mixture, 200 locals defended their houses.

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.)

Residents in Hackney Wick have protested at the dust and noise being produced from the Olympic Park. The statement reproduced below was sent on Sunday 6th July to Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, David Higgins, Chief Executive of the ODA and Sebastian Coe, along with other relevant officials and representatives, by Sona Abantu-Choudhury on behalf of the Leabank Square Residents Association about the disturbance being caused by work on the Olympic site.