An update on the Olympic protest parks, as covered in an earlier post. Here are excerpts from the Guardian UK:

…as the end of the Games approaches, not a single permit has been issued and park managers have not even made plans for handling demonstrators, because they do not expect any.

Apparently, of 77 protest applications lodged, none were approved, with one would-be protestor being arrested, and others being told that they would not be able to clear the paperwork hurdles in time for the end of the Olympics.

So, while nobody had predicted that the protests would be widespread–or anything but tightly monitored and controlled–even the cautious optimism of Dongcha’s earlier post on the subject was misplaced. This, unfortunately, is an opportunity lost for China. Certainly, the country prevented protesters from using the Olympics as a platform to draw attention to their causes, but only at the cost of delaying what may be inevitable. One might have thought that, for a government as manic about control as China’s, more forward-thinking leaders would see this as an opportunity for heading off protest problems by co-opting them and miring them into the country’s bureaucracy, making the whole system slightly more amenable to reform, while lessening the threat of any major future upheaval.

Unfortunately, this is now just another opportunitiy lost.