So maybe now we know whom the new security cameras in Ritan Park are really for...Yesterday, Beijing announced plans to set aside three city parks as protest zones during the Olympics: the World Park in Fengtai district, Purple Bamboo Park in Haidian, and the expat neighborhood park of Ritan, a biosphere of foreign journos, diplomats, and business people (along with Russian traders and retired cadres). "During the Olympics, in order to ensure a smooth traffic, nice environment and good social order, we would like to ask protesters to go to the designated parks," Liu Shaowu, security chief of the Beijing Olympic Games Organizing Committee, told a news conference.

    But Shao failed to make clear who, how, or if anyone would be allowed protest within those parks, let alone anywhere else in town. Olympic rules forbid political and religious displays at the sporting venues. Chinese law prohibits any protests deemed a threat to national unity or social stability. It requires would-be protesters to apply in person before police five days in advance and provide details on the demonstrators and the nature of the demo in order to get the go-ahead – which is almost never granted. In many cases, the applicants have wound up preemptively detained.

     When asked to detail the protest plan, Shao did not say what if any specials allowances would made inside the zones. He did imply that standard application procedures would still hold. “As long as the demonstration has passed approvals, Chinese police will protect the legal rights of the demonstrators to gather in accordance with the law,” he said.
 

    He added that reporters would be getting details from other channels. But so far, nothing.
   

    When news of three parks "specially provided for demonstrators to express themselves" first hit the portal Sina.com on Wednesday, courtesy of a brief report by the China News Service, Chinese readers cheered: "This should be expanded nationally," enthused one comment attached to the piece. "When there's pressure, there's progress," mused another. But on BOCOG's web site, the official transcript of the news conference omitted Shao's mention of the three parks and the question that prompted it. The Beijing News, a progressive, centrally-sponsored daily, did not name the parks either in its story the next day. The paper's headline called the parks "legal assembly sites".
 

    For months, rumors percolated that Beijing would designate a park or two as protest sites. Officials eventually acted in part on the recommendations of scholars who lobbied for them, the AP reports. The so-called “protest pens” were used in Athens in 2004, and Beijing has experimented with them at least once before, at the U.N. Women’s Conference in 1995. But that took place in the suburb of Huairou, out in the sticks. “Several delegates used them,” notes Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei.org, “but they looked rather sad parading around a small, fenced-off patch of ground miles away from anywhere.”
 

    This time the designated parks are considerably more convenient for the protesters and their target audience (us). None is near the Olympic Green where the major venues are concentrated. But Fengtai has been the stamping ground of nomadic communities of displaced hutong dwellers from the old city, as well as petitioners from around the country. Purple Bamboo Park rests amid the capital's main belt of universities. And the Ritan area is practically a foreign concession.
 

    Authorities around Ritan have been on high-security alert in recent months (full disclosure: my wife and I run a cafe there.) Ritan is also designed to serve as an emergency base for the People’s Armed Police in case of a mass disturbance, as it was as recently as 2005, when Chinese protesters swarmed the Japanese embassy one block away. The Closed Circuit Television system was installed during the course of this spring, so now globed lenses peek through the trees over pathways.

     
    Just last week, local police, park officials and State Security officers convened the most recent briefing on security arrangements in and around Ritan. At the meeting, they warned relevant establishments to be on guard against an array of unauthorized people and activities, because said persons and activities were variously regarded as threats to law and order, a “safe Olympics”, an image of “civility”, or the “national interests". The list of those fingered, as read back to us later, includes:

-          large crowds and live performances

-          excessively wild or "cuddly" partying

-      illegal drug use

-      “international prostitutes”

-          fires, electrical accidents, and employees with criminal records

-          the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong

-          foreign journalists