From the New York Times:

The Chinese government will permit public protests inside three designated city parks during next month’s Olympic Games, but demonstrators must first obtain permits from the local police and also abide by Chinese laws that usually make it nearly impossible to legally picket over politically charged issues.

It seems that the central government is trying to save some face with visitors after the fiascos with the torch relay in London, Paris and San Francisco. They may well have some success: putting up protesters in visible places like parks may give China the image of liberalizing with the foreigners that visit the city and will probably get the Games some brownie points for coverage, as I imagine one of the protest groups that’ll likely be given permission is Reporter’s Without Borders, which is pesky, but relatively toothless, as far as the government is concerned.

The question is: will something like this last after the Olympics? Possibly. Keep in mind that this announcement doesn’t grant any new legal rights–in a sense it even restricts current rights that citizens should have to get government permission to protest, by designating only very limited space for those protests. But this might be considered the PRC testing the water: depending on how big and rowdy the protests become, or how much attention (negative or positive) they draw from locals and foreigners, they may continue having designated protest areas in the future. That would be a very small, but significant, step in liberalizing the media and allowing dissent.

We shouldn’t, however, expect too much, if anything at all. The similarity of “a space to protest” to a “democracy wall” certainly won’t be missed by the government, which still holds mum about the crackdown on the protests in Tiananmen Square. As the Times article points out, Beijing will likely seize the opportunity to photograph and get information about protesters, to potentially harmful effect. But, with all the visitors from other parts of China coming to attend the Olympics and taking note of the things that pass for okay in their capital, it may spark a thirst for public protest that won’t be easily repealed and that may be hard for the government to ignore.