The big pre-Olympics news today is a last-minute visa cancellation for 2006 Olympic gold-medalist Joey Cheek. Cheek is the co-founder of Team Darfur, which is self-described on it’s website as a “campaign leading up to the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing… to put international pressure not only on Sudan, but also on those countries that support the policy of inaction in the face of this dire humanitarian crisis.” This isn’t the sort of campaign that makes friends in the Chinese government.

Though the Chinese embassy is refusing to give a reason for revoking Cheek’s visa, it’s obvious to all that his fervent political activism (and eager self-promotion through it–check out his bio on the Team Darfur site, and on his own page) has China worried about the very likely prospect of him using the Olympics as a protest platform. Even though China has officially allowed limited protests, it seems that their policy is to try to prevent foreigners from exercising that right by keeping them all out of the country.

Of course, Western activists are up in arms over the matter, making for good front-page journalism and further finger pointing at China. However, the China embassy’s official response–that “the visa issue is a country’s sovereign affairs”–is, well, entirely reasonable. Cheek is not competing in the 2008 games, after all, and, has no inherent right to a Chinese visa. Especially after 9-11, the discretionary rejection of visa applicants has been affirmed as an undeniable issue of sovereignty–America itself turns away people every day for reasons such as being too poor (considered an intent to immigrate), an anarchists, or formerly affiliated with the Communist Party of the United States. Of course, vigorous internal oversight of a country’s use of its discretion powers is always necessary, but the basic discretionary right is more or less set in stone.

So, even though China’s fear of protest is a great shame, then, it’s pretty hard to come up with an argument that they’ve done something wrong–or even unusual–here. What is despicable, however, is the way they did it at the last minute–obviously planned out as part of an effort to unbalance the Darfur protesters, who’ll now lose a leader they had been expecting to help organize whatever they might be planning for the games, and to drown out their whining on the matter, which will be mostly forgotten after the opening ceremonies in two days.

Just because China has the power to keep Cheek from protesting, after all, doesn’t mean that the government shouldn’t play fair.

Too much Cheek got him boxed out of the Olympics

<—UPDATE—>

7 August 2008

This morning it was reported that Arto Halonen, the filmmaker that produced Karmapa–a documentary sympathetic to Tibet–has also been denied a visa. Halonen was going to Beijing as a member of Finland’s delegation of cultural dignitaries. As he is learning now, the Chinese government has a long memory.

Unlike Cheek, though, as an official part of a foreign delegation, Halonen has something closer to an arguable “right” to enter China. Why isn’t his visa rejection getting more publicity?

Too radical for a Chinese visa, not pretty enough to be on the news.