No medals for China, IOC from rights groups

China won effusive praise from the International Olympic Committee for staging Games that surpassed expectations. Human rights watchdogs also declared the Olympics to be all they had predicted, if not more.

Potemkin protest zones China set up to assuage critics led to real arrests, journalists were roughed up and two elderly ladies were sentenced to labour camps -- often only miles away from splendid Olympics venues where athletes dazzled the world.

"Of all the ways in which we tried to game out what rock bottom would look like, even we would not have anticipated that two septuagenarians would be sentenced to re-education through labour while the Games were going on," said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.

"The Chinese government continues to give us an endless stream of material to work with and has an incredible tin ear," she said in an interview.

The New York-based group was one of watchdogs to conclude that China had broken many of the human rights commitments that helped Beijing get the Games and that the IOC and foreign governments had simply looked the other way.

"Behind all of the pomp and glitter, an untold number of Chinese citizens are now languishing in labour camps, prisons or simply missing as a result of these Games," said Jennifer Windsor, head of the Washington-based Freedom House.

Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based press freedom advocacy group, counted some 100 cases where journalists or bloggers covering China outside Olympics venues were harassed, detained and in a few cases, beaten or jailed.

"This repression will be remembered as one of the defining characteristics of the Beijing Games," Robert Menard, the group's secretary general, said in a statement.

Critics seized on China's statement that none of 77 applications citizens had submitted to protest legally in designated Beijing parks had been approved. Among applicants detained for their petitions, Wu Dianyuan, 79, and Wang Xiuying, 77, were sentenced to one year of re-education through labour.

Far from Beijing, the Muslim Uighur ethnic group in the western region of Xinjiang, scene of a deadly bomb attack before the Games, braced for tough times after the Olympics.

Supporters of Tibet, rocked by riots in March and April, also warned of a tightening of already harsh policies in the remote region. Ten activists from Students for a Free Tibet were still in detention as the Olympics ended and faced deportation for staging a series of peaceful protests in the Chinese capital.

Like Olympic medals in Beijing, there was plenty of blame to go around for the troubles, with the largest share going to the Chinese hosts and to the IOC, the rights groups said.

Reporters Without Borders said the IOC and its president, Jacques Rogge, bore "much of the responsibility for this failure" to uphold freedoms in Beijing, and had repeated their error by choosing Sochi in Russia as the 2014 Winter Olympics host city.

Asked about the protests over China's human rights record, Rogge told Reuters: "We knew there would be criticism." But he said the Games had helped change China and open it to the world.

"The Chinese definitely have experienced that they cannot live in splendid isolation," he said on Thursday.

Host Beijing's spokesman Wang Wei dismissed criticism as the work of biased foreign media who were ignoring the "true story".

"People walking on the street are so happy, so optimistic about their own tomorrow. The athletes are happy about their performance, about the competition, about everything they see," Wang told a news conference on Friday.

The abuses that to many outsiders tarnished China's twin successes -- staging a widely admired Olympics while leading the world in gold medals -- spoke volumes about the host country, said Jamie Metzl, executive vice-president of the Asia Society.

"There is one narrative that is the accepted narrative. If you are on board with that narrative, you can fully enjoy the Games, you can get excited by the Chinese gold medals, you can be part of this national project," he said in Beijing.

"If you question it in any way, you are on the side of the enemies of the Chinese state and you had better look out."