It’s not only foreign human rights groups that are seizing upon the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing to promote their causes:
Yesterday Friday December 28, China Central TV’s sports channel—CCTV 5—had a ceremony to celebrate its renaming as The Olympics Channel. The ceremony was disrupted by a marital dispute. As John Kennedy on Global Voices reports:
Friday was meant to be a big day for China’s main sports channel CCTV-5, with a lavish ceremony attended by top station executives held to celebrate its official change of name to The Olympics Channel. It got a bit bigger when a visibly upset Hu Ziwei, the wife of top CCTV-5 announcer and sports news department head Zhang Bin—about to introduce Olympic ping pong player Wang Nan—suddenly appeared on stage and grabbed the microphone, accusing Zhang of having had an affair, as well as of smearing the name of both China and next year’s summer Olympics. Hu herself is a host of an Olympics-themed program at Beijing TV.
You can view the whole sordid episode on Youtube and Tudou, as captured on someone’s cellphone. As Beijing-based PR insider and blogger Imagethief puts it:
It just goes to show what a lovely target those gleaming rings make. It also demonstrates nicely that, no matter how China tries to control Olympic related news and imagery, anyone with a cell-phone will be a journalist come August.
One more point: What a tank of sharks is the TV industry in Beijing.