| Page 3 of 4 < > |
A Mission of Dissent In the Heart of Beijing
|
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
So on July 31, he boarded a plane to Beijing.
The Adjustment
Maron met his co-conspirators in a two-bedroom apartment hotel in the central part of the city. None spoke Chinese, and only one had been to Beijing before.
They spent the first few days checking out their assigned target -- a tourist spot near the Great Wall -- but they found security there too tight. They needed a new plan.
Armed with a Lonely Planet phrase book, they hit all the other major sites in Beijing in search of a new location: the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Sanlitun bar street. They were careful not to blow their covers. They ate Chinese for every meal, went drinking, played a few matches of Ping-Pong.
"We were tourists through and through. They would have gotten really bored if they followed us," Bockman said.
In their spare time, the group's members worked on the banner in their apartment, using pens to carefully write F-R-E-E T-I-B-E-T in giant letters. They copied the four Chinese characters with an equivalent meaning from a piece of paper they had brought from the United States.
All the while, they carefully followed a set of rules: limit personal e-mail; use pay phones to check in with family and friends; in phone conversations, use vague phrases such as "Hi, I'm fine" and "We're having a great time."
When they talked about the protest in their hotel room, they turned on the shower or the TV to try to drown out any listening devices that might have been planted. All notes were ripped into tiny shreds, separated into piles so they could not be reassembled easily, and disposed of in multiple trash cans on the street.
One day they were riding in a taxi along Beijing's Third Ring Road when Bockman spotted the gleaming new CCTV building, an imposing structure of twisted steel, and suggested it might make a good target.
Security around the building was light. While the tower was under construction and probably dangerous to climb, a row of billboards nearby with steel frame grids seemed sturdy.
Most of the signs had corporate ads, but one of them said simply "Beijing 2008" and featured the Olympic rings.
Perfect.
