FOR the past two years, China has protected the Sudanese government as the United States and Britain have pushed for UN Security Council sanctions against Khartoum for the violence in Darfur. But the past week has seen a major shift in Beijing's stance. A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, travelled to Sudan to push the government to accept a UN peacekeeping force. Zhai even went all the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps, a rare event for a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries how to conduct their internal affairs.
The credit goes to Hollywood - Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg in particular. Just when it seemed safe to buy a plane ticket to Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, nongovernmental organisations and other groups appear to have scored a surprising success in an effort to link the Olympics, which the Chinese government holds very dear, to the killings in Darfur, which until recently Beijing had not seemed too concerned about.
Farrow, a UN goodwill ambassador, has played a crucial role, starting a campaign to label the games in Beijing the "Genocide Olympics" and calling on corporate sponsors and even on Spielberg, who is an artistic adviser to China for the games, to publicly exhort China to do something about Darfur. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, Farrow warned Spielberg that he could "go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing games", referring to a German filmmaker who shot Nazi propaganda.
Four days later, Spielberg sent a letter to President Hu Jintao of China, condemning the killings in Darfur and asking China to use its influence in the region "to bring an end to the human suffering there", according to Spielberg's spokesman, Marvin Levy. Soon after, China sent Zhai.
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