The Battle of Beijing

You can always count on the Olympic Games to provide drama. Next year's games in Beijing will be no different; they too will produce powerful stories and riveting television. But this time the images will not just be athletes overcoming the odds or breaking records. They will also focus on the clashes between the Chinese police and the activists who will arrive from all around the world. The causes that motivate their activism range from human rights to global warming, from Darfur to Tibet, from Christianity to Falun Gong. The clashes outside the stadiums are likely to be more intense and spectacular than the sports competitions taking place inside. And the showdown will be captured as much by the videocameras in the cell phones of protesters and spectators as any news agencies' camera crews. In fact, the Beijing Olympics will not just offer another opportunity to test the limits of human athletic performance; it will also test the limits of a centralized police state's ability to confront a nebulous swarm of foreign activists armed with BlackBerries. A governmental bureaucracy organized according to 20th-century principles will meet 21st-century global politics. Lenin meets YouTube.

The athletes are not the only ones training hard for the Olympics. The Chinese government and the activists are getting ready for the battle in Beijing, too. The Associated Press reports that China’s intelligence services, police, and government think tanks are compiling lists of foreign organizations and individuals in what has been described as one of the "broadest intelligence-collection drives Beijing has taken against foreign activist groups." According to Xinhua, China's official news agency, Zhou Yongkang, the minister of public security, has ordered the police during the games to "strictly guard against and strike hard at hostile forces at home and abroad."

And the various "hostile forces" will test China's mettle. In Prague, an organization called Olympic Watch was established in 2001 with the explicit mission of using the Beijing games as an occasion to challenge China's policies on freedom of speech, the death penalty, Tibet, religious freedom, and forced labor camps. Darfur campaigners are calling the Beijing games the "Genocide Olympics" and are demanding that China stop supporting the Sudanese government. The Washington Post dubbed the games the "Saffron Olympics" to denounce China's support for Burma’s murderous regime and the massacre of its saffron-clad monks.

This pressure is already on, a little less than a year before the games. What will happen when the games start and thousands of foreigners travel to Beijing not to watch the games but to try to change China? How will the authorities know that the old lady from Denmark is actually coming with her church group to protest China's abortion policies, or that the young Australian couple is actually part of a militant environmental organization? In short, what if the $40 billion the government is spending to showcase modern China yields the ugly global image of a thuggish regime?

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