Skin in the Games: Beijing’s nervy Olympics

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. For years, the European Union has been wrestling with a growing problem of migration across the Mediterranean. Our investigation reveals one of its solutions. Propping up the Coast Guard of Libya, whose methods wouldn't fly inside the eu. And America's gun owners remain mostly white and mostly male. But our correspondent finds a growing number of gun enthusiasts among women, ethnic minorities and LGBT groups. Good for fans of inclusion, bad for fans of gun control. But first, we're taking you to Beijing.

Hello, Hello, Hello. Yeah, hello. So I am currently in the security checks about to go into the Bird's Nest Stadium for the opening ceremony.

David Rennie is our Beijing bureau chief. At the Winter Olympic Games. Earlier today he we successfully battled with monumental Covid restrictions without even crossing into the so called closed loop of athletes, support staff and journalists.

We've all been given color coded Beijing Olympic face masks to wear against Covid so that we're all wearing the same red and blue face masks as we go in. We've been in various different security checks and Covid tests for several hours already. And I think that reflects the extraordinary high stakes. This is an Olympics taking place in the middle of a pandemic in a country which has decided to try and crush Covid completely. And in the midst of that pandemic, they've admitted about 30,000 foreigners into China for the Olympics. And so if you add together China's obsession with order at the best of times, you end up with this extraordinary mixture of police and medical checks and security and kerfuffle.

And so how has it been to get this far?

So this is very much an invitation only public event. So about a couple of weeks ago, they announced that the general public would not be coming on a ticket basis and that state work units would be allocating tickets for sporting events, but also for the big ceremonies like this. So the foreign Ministry has an allocation of tickets which they've given out to foreign journalists based in Beijing. Not all. And it was interesting. We were just in a kind of several hours of waiting around, changing buses and I was talking to some of the other Chinese spectators who've been invited to the opening ceremony. There's a lot of universities who've been allowed to send 100 or so students each. I talked to them, they'd known for ages that they were coming. And they're all members. The ones that I spoke to at least members the Communist Youth League. But then I spoke to another woman who was a teacher trainer from a teaching training institution and she told me that she had only known for a couple of weeks that she was coming to the opening ceremony. So you can see that there's been a bit of a scramble to assemble a reliable, well behaved and, you know, in their view, deserving crowd to come to this event.

And aside from the ones who have been lucky enough to be invited, what's the mood more generally in Beijing about the Games?

I mean, you know, the usual propaganda machine is now kicking into gear. But I've been in China for other very big events and this is not being given the full welly, to use the technical term. And I think that that reflects a couple of things. One is that winter sports are just not an enormous thing. I think there is a basic tension about the fact that the Chinese public is very, very focused on the idea that the outside world is a source of infection and disease and chaos. And that as a result, you know, the idea of allowing all these foreigners into the country does make them a bit anxious. And so I think that is inevitably a slight damper.

And what about the Games on the international stage? This should be an event for a country to shine. What does that look like this year?

I think there's a real sour edge to it, but it's not universal. And I think what that tells you is that you, if you look at the list of countries that are doing some form of diplomatic boycott, the most obvious ones are America and their closest Anglo Saxon allies. And that's not lost on Chinese officials and diplomats who make the point that the French aren't boycotting, the Germans aren't boycotting. This seems to be about the Anglo Saxon world, these arrogant English speaking countries that in China's telling are nostalgic for the days when white men who spoke English ran the world. And they don't like having a rising China from a different civilization at the top table. And so I think they're Very keen to play up the fact that you have dozens of foreign leaders, mostly it has to be said, from non democratic countries, a lot of kind of Central Asian leaders, some other Asian leaders. Vladimir Putin is, I think, the guest of honor, you would say, who also had a summit today with Xi Jinping. And so if you want to talk about the fact that this is a very divided world and one of the ways in which this world is dividing is in views of China and whether China is a normal country whose big public celebrations are the kind of things you would want to send your leaders to celebrate. This Olympics is an absolutely classic example. It's just another milestone on that long journey towards the division of the world into camps who take a very different view of China's rise.

Do you think there are any risks for Xi Jinping and the party machinery here that something might make it come unstuck?

Their attention to detail is always impressive, but they're clearly very, very anxious for everything to kind of look beautiful. I think part of that stage management has a darker edge to it, which is should an athlete get very angry about COVID controls, because there is this daily testing going on of the athletes who are inside the closed quarantine bubble. And if they test positive for any reason after arriving, then they're isolated and in some cases might not get to compete. So. So I think there is, you can imagine scenarios in which athletes end up getting very upset with the strictness of the COVID controls here. And if that goes out on social media, I think that could be quite an issue. Certainly the extreme strictness of these controls that I've been going through. I've had four Covid tests, or I will have had four Covid tests by the time I'm done with this opening ceremony in the space of a few days. That is because the greatest risk, I think, for Xi Jinping would be after two years of extraordinary sacrifice to achieve a zero Covid situation in China. If the Olympics was the thing that brought a big wave of COVID into China, that would clearly be an own goal for the party.

But beyond controlling Covid, though, there is one thing that may be out of the party's control and that is political dissent. The Olympic Games have been a place for people to make statements. Do you think we'll see any?

It's very hard to know whether an individual athlete may. May choose to say something about what's happening in Xinjiang or in Tibet. It's not out of ban. You know, there have been previous famously black power salutes at Olympics years And years ago, China is a pretty intimidating place if you're planning a political protest, it has to be said. And I think that national teams have been telling their athletes, really this is not the country to try and play the hero and make a political protest. We've seen senior Chinese public security officials say that anyone who breaks Chinese law will be subject to certain punishments. They have lifted the usual Internet censorship for those athletes who are inside the closed loop bubble. So they will be able to use social media and Google and Snapchat and Instagram in ways that are not possible outside in the rest of China. I was talking to some diplomats here about whether they thought their countries would have athletes who had staged political protests. One of the things they said is that, you know, sports is a big business now and if you're a young athlete who wants to make a career of this, you know that you're going to be damaging your career fairly severely if you choose this place to make a protest. So it's very hard to note, but.

It seems unlikely, given just how big a deal it is for China's leadership, that all of this goes smoothly.

So every big public event that is on the global stage is a big deal for the Chinese Communist Party. Remember, this is a party that stakes its legitimacy on its successful performance. It doesn't win elections. The Communist Party doesn't have opponents who it can beat in order to gain a mandate. It is a country entirely based around the claim that its way of governing may be iron fisted, but is successful and orderly and efficient. So any big public event like the Olympics is a test of that performance legitimacy. But this year is particularly crucial.

Why?

Because China feels it's locked in a competition with the west, that it is winning. The west has done so badly at managing Covid that that this is proof that China's iron fisted one party system is just superior and keeps people safe in a way that is morally superior to decadent, dysfunctional Western democracy. But also the end of 2022, there's going to be a very important once every five years party congress which all people expect Xi Jinping, the current leader, to seek a third term as China's supreme leader, which is unprecedented. And so he needs more than ever a completely orderly, completely successful 2022. And this ceremony at the beginning of February is the first bookend of a year that in his dreams ends with the second bookend of his elevation to a level of power and undisputed authority not seen since the days of Chairman Mao.

David, thank you very much for joining us. And Enjoy the ceremony.

Thank you.

Alongside the spectacle of the Olympics, China is celebrating the start of the Year of the Tiger. But the tiger may be caged. The zero Covid strategy that's made David's trip so difficult today isn't the only thing putting pressure on China's economy. The economy, the enormous property sector, has slowed and crackdowns are crimping some of the most dynamic industries. On this week's episode of Money Talks, our sister show on business, finance and economics, our China experts size up the looming threats to the country's growth. Look for Money Talks wherever podcasts enjoy common prosperity. A European Union report leaked last week detailed inhumane conditions facing migrants crossing the Mediterranean to Europe from Libya. Those conditions had already been the subject of an investigation carried out by the Economist and the Outlaw Ocean Project, a journalism nonprofit looking into human rights abuses at sea.

This story caught my attention because there was this distinct entity, this odd creature, the so called Libyan Coast Guard, which is unlike any other coast guard in the world. Rather than facing outward to protect a country from external threats, it actually faces inward toward Libya. And its job is to stop migrants from reaching Europe.

Ian Urbina leads the project and has been reporting the story from the capital, Tripoli.

We focused on the story of one migrant in particular, this young man, 28 year old, from Guinea Bissau, which is a small coastal nation in West Africa. And he was a quintessential climate migrant in that he was deeply poor and from a very rural section of the country. And so he decided to roll the dice and try to make his way to Europe. So this person, his name is Aliu Konde, left home, made his way through the very dangerous sort of militia, rich, terrorist, rich stretch of the Sahara to get across the border into southern Libya. He reassures his family that everything is in God's hands, essentially. He found his way to a paid trafficker who would put him in a boat and did with 130 other migrants to make their way across the Mediterranean. Libyan Coast Guard came, scooped them up, arrested them, brought them back to land and put them in prison. Al Mabani, which is the prison that we focused on on any given day, will have anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 detainees, usually held in prison cells that are meant to hold only 200 people. In al Mabani, he tried to sort of keep a low profile and stay out of trouble. This is an audio recording that was sent surreptitiously by Aliukande on March 30. That puts him about almost two months after he's been incarcerated in this awful place. And you can tell from his voice that he's desperate and afraid. And he's asking his brothers to try to get in touch with their father. And the hope here is that they can quickly help raise the money that he needs to pay the guards to be released. That doesn't happen. There is no money to raise. And it's the last recording that the brothers ever receive from Aliu. It's only about six days later that Aliu is shot and killed by a guard.

The Libyan Coast Guard would be infamous enough just for the way it goes about its own operations. But what makes it particularly controversial is that it's backed by the European Union.

Greg Karlstrom is the Economist's Middle east correspondent. He's been looking into the mistreatment of migrants off the Libyan coast and the role that the EU plays.

In effect, the EU has outsourced its border protection, its southern border, to a group of militias operating in Libya, which are operating in ways that would clearly not be allowed on European soil.

What do you mean by it's outsourced its border protection?

The goal for European states is very simply to keep migrants from reaching European soil. Of course, this has become a very controversial issue in European politics over the past decade. And so the, the objective here is just to make sure that migrants cannot cross the Mediterranean. To that end, the eu, led by Italy, which is of course right across the Mediterranean from Libya, has been training, equipping and funding the Libyan Coast Guard to serve as a sort of proxy maritime force. So it spent tens of millions of euros over the past few years to build it up, supplying fiberglass boats, four wheel drive vehicles, uniforms, radios, satellite phones, all sorts of kit paid for by European taxpayers sent to this coast guard in Libya.

But the situation in Libya, as we've discussed on the show before, is not exactly stable. I mean, how does that work?

Practically speaking, that's part of the problem here. When we talk about the Libyan Coast Guard, it sounds very official. It sounds like a military or paramilitary organization that's operating at the direction of a state. And that's not the case. That's not the case with most things in Libya at this point. This is a country where much of it is controlled by militia groups. Even state institutions in many cases are either controlled by or beholden to militias. There is a geographic divide between western Libya and eastern Libya. You have large ungoverned spaces, particularly in the south, where criminal gangs and people smugglers operate. And the country has been trying for months now to hold an election which it has not been able to hold. It's been postponed because there's no constitution and there's no legal framework for voting. So this is the environment in which the so called Libyan Coast Guard is operating. And again, like many institutions in Libya, it's really a collection of militias that are operating under the name of Libyan Coast Guard, but are operating somewhat autonomously. They run their own patrols in the Mediterranean, they operate their own detention centers, and they have just banded together under this heading of calling themselves the Country Coast Guard.

So this Coast Guard that sounds official in name, running its own detention centers, that's not normally how things work.

No, it's not. And it's particularly unusual to operate them the way the Libyan Coast Guard does. These are thinly veiled vehicles for extortion. People are detained there under the pretense of having violated immigration law. To secure their release, they're made to phone up their families in their home countries and have them send money while they're in detention. They are a pool of people who are very often forced into labor. Men have been forced to work on construction sites, women have been forced into prostitution. Of course, all of this is a money making enterprise for the militias that operate these facilities. It's also a very dangerous environment for the migrants who are kept there. There is ample evidence from groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch of migrants who have been beaten, tortured, even killed in some cases in these detention centers. Obviously goes without saying that all of this would be very illegal if it were happening in Europe, but it's not. It's happening in Libya. And the EU has said that it has no authority over these groups operating in Libya.

But the EU is holding the purse strings. Does that not give them the power they need to police this?

It doesn't. And in fact, European officials themselves will acknowledge that they have very little influence over the militias that make up the Coast Guard. There was a leaked EU report in 2019 which acknowledged that Europe in many cases can't even monitor what the Coast Guard is doing, and particularly what's happening in these detention centers. I can't even monitor that, let alone control what's going on there. There was also a very telling case in October of last year where an Italian ship's captain was sentenced to a year in prison by an Italian court because he picked up stranded migrants at sea in the Mediterranean and returned them to Libya. Now, under international law, if you pick up stranded people at sea, you have to bring them to the nearest safe port. And the Italian judicial system apparently does not think that Libya qualifies as a safe port. So there is a recognition again, even within the EU that Libya is not safe for migrants and that what the Coast Guard is doing is largely outside the control of the eu.

So how might any of this ever change if the EU essentially throws up its hands, says we can't control this, and the Libyans, meanwhile, are relying on their support, their funds.

What Europe has done, in fact, is not only to support the Coast Guard, but to make it difficult even for aid workers that are trying to help migrants in the Mediterranean. You have various groups that have ships that go around the Mediterranean trying to rescue stranded migrants. Since 2018, Italian ports have been closed to those ships. European navies used to run their own rescue operations in the Mediterranean. And of course, migrants that they picked up were brought to European ports. They have stopped doing that now. And what European navies do is provide intelligence for the Libyan Coast Guard to make sure that they can intercept migrants at sea. What they are doing in policy and what they are doing in funding is geared very much towards supporting the Libyan Coast Guard, supporting these militias. And as long as Libyan state institutions are predominantly made up of militias, I don't think there is any policy approach from the EU that is really going to protect the rights of migrants.

Greg, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you.

Annette Evans probably doesn't match the image that pops to mind if I say the word gunslinger.

I first started shooting because I thought.

That every girl should learn how to shoot again.

She's Chinese American, lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and identifies as socially liberal. But if there's one thing Ms. Evans loves, it's shooting.

Nicely done.

Everybody's scared for different reasons right now. And this is one of the ways in which we can take some control over our own safety.

She's part of a growing group of Americans arming themselves, not the ones you might expect.

Gun buying really took off in the past few years, but something that really stuck out was the number of non white and women gun owners.

Kenneth Werner is our U.S. news desk editor.

Of the 7.5 million Americans who bought a gun for the first time between January 2019 and April 2021, half were women, a fifth were black, and a fifth were Hispanic. That's a big shift. Most longstanding gun owners are white and male.

And what's the guess on what's changed since 2015 to get this new trend?

Overall, there's kind of a longer shift in gun culture that's worth mentioning. People used to buy guns in America for recreational shooting, things like target shooting. And skeet shooting and for hunting. But in the past few decades, a lot more people buy them for self defense. And so gun ownership has really shifted to being something about personal safety and self defense. And the pool of people who could partake in things like shooting and hunting was pretty limited. But self defense is a universal concern. Everyone fears for their safety. So we've seen a lot more gun owners for that reason. And then there were a few catalysts just in the past few years. Homicides surged in America in 2020, and then again in. In 2021, there were concerns about safety. For that reason. African Americans in particular are more likely to be the victim of homicide crime. And then there was some headline grabbing violence in the murder of George Floyd and other unarmed black men. There was a big jump in anti Asian hate crimes. So all of these factors contributed to a surge in gun buy among minorities and women in particular.

So really, this is just a spike in the number of people who want to be prepared for self defense. Yeah.

People who don't fit in the traditional gun owning mold talk very openly about how guns are a kind of equalizer and how they serve as a remedy for any vulnerability they feel. There's an LGBT shooting group called the Pink Pistols, and their slogan is Armed queers Don't get bashed. There's a famous saying among female gun owners, which is that God made man and woman, but Sam Colt made them equal. And Sam Colt popularized the revolver. In America, people who feel vulnerable to crime or who hold less faith in the police are generally more likely to buy guns. Among African Americans, there's a long history of gun ownership. Harriet Tubman carried them. Martin Luther King, the champion of nonviolent resistance, actually kept them at home for self defense. But this kind of tradition of African American gun ownership hasn't really been talked about. It's long been something that's more surreptitious. But that's starting to change. In 2020, the National African American Gun association grew its membership by 25%.

And so has this shift basically changed the demographics of gun ownership? Is the typical American gun owner now different?

Most gun owners still largely white and male. 73% are white, 63% male. I went to a shooting range in Los Angeles.

All right, Shitter.

And I saw some ethnic and racial diversity, but not a whole lot. And there weren't really very many women there at all. This trend of more diverse gun ownership would have to continue for a while for the overall profile of an American gun owner to change.

And what about how it might change or might not the discussion around gun rights and advocacy in America.

So as you could probably expect, people who own guns are a lot more politically active around gun issues than non gun owners. They really organize around this. So it's not good news at all for advocates of gun control in America. In fact, in 2021, we saw support for stricter gun control drop by 5 percentage points to 52% and that was its lowest point in seven years. So we're already starting to see this have an effect.

Kenneth, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Marguerite Howell, Kim Gittleson and Chris Impey. Our senior producers are Stevie Hertz, Sam Westrin, Jack Gill and John Joe Devlin. Our producers are Rory Galloway and Alize Jean Baptiste and assistant producer Abesoye Ocean Dairo. And our sound engineer is Will Rowe. We'll all see you back here on Monday.