There is controversy over sponsoring North Korean and Sudanese athletes

BEIJING — After Nike Inc. and Adidas AG locked up most of China’s athletes in juicy sponsorship deals, Chinese sportswear brand Erke decided to boldly go where the global giants wouldn’t. It would outfit North Korea’s Olympic team.

But that decision is raising alarms with human-rights activists. And for Erke, working with such an insular nation hasn’t been easy. During the Opening Ceremonies, for instance, the North Koreans refused to wear Erke’s logo for fear it would compete with their country’s Communist red-starred flag.
[Photo]
ColorChinaPhoto/Newscom
North Korea has medal prospects in sports like weightlifting, soccer and judo.

Erke isn’t the only Chinese brand that has made an alliance with a pariah state’s Olympic delegation in an effort to sell more sportswear at home. And human-rights activists worry that such sponsorships will become a larger trend. The deals by Chinese firms could start “a new race to the bottom — using the pretext of competition — to engage in what is morally wrong,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch.

Tdaxp has a round up of Olympic protests around the world.

Now, I have no problem with protesting the Olympics and I most certainly enjoy watching Chinese officials going out of the way keep everyone under wraps and suck the fun out of the games.

My question is, “In the eyes of the Chinese people, why should they believe in your cause?”

While the concept of human rights seems obvious to Westerners, it’s different for the Chinese, since they are commonly the very people accused of being human rights violators.

The point is not whether the Chinese are complicit in human rights violations (they are), but whether protestors are making a case to the Chinese that what they are doing is wrong.

Based on the round-up… not really. The point of protest is to convince others of your position, not feel good about sticking it to the man.

I spend a lot of time criticizing the Chinese government and its people for its treatment of North Koreans. But given the chance to tell them in their face, I better be more engaging and less embarrassing.

Somehow, North Korean TV exposed a grain of truth, just a grain

Aug. 4 (Bloomberg) — North Korea, which the World Food Program says faces its worst food crisis in nearly a decade, is broadcasting reports to its people highlighting food shortages elsewhere in the world and blaming the U.S. for the problem.

According to NHK, Japan’s public Broadcasting Corporation, North Korea’s state-run TV has been running a series of programs on the world food crisis. In one sequence re-broadcast by NHK today, an economist strongly criticized the U.S. and other developed countries for consuming agricultural products to make bio-ethanol and said this was causing the food crisis.

Here in the US, food crisis means my meal went up a dollar or two, in North Korea that means stripping bark off of trees for consumption.

While way out of context, it does contain a grain of truth about bio-fuels. However, in the US the government purchases certain crops at subsidized prices which then goes to food aid.

Unlike other “news” from the KCNA, this one took a bit of effort to debunk.