PR needed to save Beijing suffers from own bad image

China, an emerging superpower with a booming economy to match its military might, appears to need a lesson in good, old-fashioned PR as it struggles with its international image prior to hosting the Olympic Games in August.

The country’s latest public relations fiasco involves one of the country’s newest movie stars, Tang Wei. The actress starred in last year’s critically acclaimed “Lust, Caution” from director Ang Lee. This week, China unofficially blacklisted Miss Wei for her role in the movie as a student activist who displayed unpatriotic behavior during the Japanese occupation, according to numerous press reports.

“I am very disappointed that Tang Wei is being hurt by this decision,” Mr. Lee said Tuesday. “We will do everything to support her in this difficult time.”

Mr. Lee is not the first big-name Hollywood director whom Beijing has recently alienated.

Last month, Steven Spielberg withdrew as an adviser to the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics to protest China’s refusal to exert pressure on Sudan to change its role in the five-year-old crisis in Darfur, which has resulted in the deaths of more than 200,000 people and forced more than 2 million from their homes.

China yesterday vigorously denounced the “groundless accusations” and “ulterior political motives” of international critics who have sought “to link the Darfur issue and other irrelevant issues with the Olympic Games in Beijing.”

“They have even used sensational words to instigate [a] boycott of [the] Beijing Olympics,” the Chinese Embassy in Washington said yesterday. “Their action is against the universally recognized principle of sports being nonpolitical, against the Olympic spirit, and against the wish of the people throughout the world.”

But the catalog of Chinese public relations setbacks is lengthy and expanding. On Monday, London’s Times Online reported that Ethiopian marathon runner Haile Gebrselassie was threatening not to go for the gold this summer for fear that Beijing’s polluted skies could damage his lungs.

On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that the U.S. State Department’s annual survey of human rights practices around the world finds that in “authoritarian” China, “forced relocations went up last year with people pushed out of their homes to make way for Olympic projects in Beijing.” However, China was, in a controversial move, dropped from the State Department’s list of the very worst offenders.

As if apparent blacklisting, overlooking genocide, polluting and forcing relocations weren’t enough, a recent report in London’s Daily Mail said the Chinese government is rounding up and, some contend, killing hundreds of cats in the nation’s capital in an effort to beautify the city in the run-up to the Olympics.

The eyes of the world will be on China this summer.

Will the country be ready for its global close-up?

Ethan Gutmann, author of “Losing the New China” and an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said blacklists similar to the one imposed on Miss Wei happen all the time in China.

“It’s a pretty effective way to get entertainers in line,” Mr. Gutmann said, adding that the ingenue’s blacklisting is unusual in that most actors are targeted for expressing a form of Taiwanese nationalism.

Ultimately, any blow back from moves like this “will have almost zero effect” on the Olympic Games, he predicted.

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