ANDREW WONG/Getty Images

Get used to this: Chinese athletes are poised to take over the world of sports—and that could be a public-relations nightmare for the policymakers in Beijing.

It’s a familiar story these days: After years of unrivaled U.S. supremacy, a booming China is catching up. Americans—and many of their European counterparts—find they can’t keep pace. All the while, China’s rapid rise fuels allegations of foul play.

Although this story usually plays out in the business pages, it fits in the sports section just as well. The Beijing Olympics are less than a year away, and the United States, whose athletic dominance has gone virtually unchallenged since the end of the Cold War, is likely to find itself in an unfamiliar role: second place. If breathless predictions about China’s athletic prowess come true, the sporting world’s response may not only resemble some of the economic criticisms leveled at China, but feed them as well. As billions of viewers across the world see a victorious China on their television screens, they may view the Middle Kingdom with greater suspicion. And their impressions could have an impact that goes well beyond sports.

Already, the buzz in the athletic world sounds a bit like what you might expect to hear from factory workers in Ohio or textile makers in Italy—with China depicted not just as a rising power, but a new threat. Earlier this year, Simon Clegg, the chief executive of the British Olympic Association, said, “In sporting terms, actually, we’re all at war against China.” Using results from recent international competitions, his organization projected that China will win 11 more gold medals than the United States in Beijing next summer. Add its home-field advantage, and the overall medal count may indeed be China’s for the taking.

Given all the media attention on Olympics-related action off the field—from antipollution efforts to Free Tibet dissidents—China’s athletic rise means that what happens on the pitch will likely take on its own political importance. As in manufacturing, China’s emergence as a sports giant has inspired fear because it has been both so sudden and so impressive. In training centers that conjure memories of Soviet and East German Olympic “factories,” the Chinese have been able to develop world-class competitors in sports that had virtually no presence in the country only two decades ago. China didn’t even send a women’s beach volleyball team to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta; now, it boasts two of the four top-ranked pairs in the world. In events such as table tennis or badminton, Chinese teams are so dominant that the only question is whether they will sweep the golds. Last month, Steven Roush, a top U.S. Olympic Committee official, spoke of China’s athletic gains in language befitting an arms race: “… China has arrived as a sports superpower and we now will have to refine our game to match the investment they are making.”

Predictably, China’s new golden touch has inspired complaints of an uneven playing field. As legislators in Washington rail against currency manipulation or export subsidies, their counterparts in the sports world point to doping violations or age-fixing scandals. These criticisms involve some amount of hypocrisy—for example, American sprinters such as gold medalists Justin Gatlin and Tim Montgomery haven’t exactly passed their drug tests with flying colors—but they are also rooted in legitimate fears. In the early 1990s, Chinese long-distance runners emerged from obscurity to shatter world records, only to fall off the map again when faced with the scrutiny of antidoping investigators. China’s swimmers also seemed ready to dominate international competition, until more than 40 team members tested positive in drug tests over the course of the decade. And last summer, Chinese staffers were caught red-handed injecting teenage athletes at a sports school in Liaoning Province. It was only the latest piece of evidence suggesting that performance-enhancing drugs still play a central role in Chinese training regimens.

Indeed, cynicism toward China’s behavior has grown so deep that even when its athletes lose, the results are taken as further evidence of foul play. At this spring’s swimming world championships in Melbourne, a disappointing performance by the Chinese team fueled rumors that the squad was keeping a reserve of star swimmers in secret—a ploy that would shield them from the scrutiny of drug testers. Dick Pound, the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, publicly warned China that it would face an international backlash “[if] you come [to the Olympics] with 1,000 athletes that nobody has ever seen before and you win all the medals.”

Chinese officials are fond of saying that politics have no place in the Olympic Games. It’s a self-serving claim usually meant to deflect criticism from human rights organizations. But since the end of the Cold War, that statement has largely been true. After all, one of the upshots of a unipolar world was that it lowered the political stakes of international athletic competition. There are no modern equivalents for U.S.-Soviet grudge matches in basketball or ice hockey. After all, al Qaeda doesn’t have a soccer team.

Yet China itself is choreographing the games to achieve maximum political effect on the world stage. Beijing has made no secret that it sees the Olympics as a coming-out party for a newly confident country. By its own design—in everything from the architecture of the Olympic venues to the opening ceremonies, which Zhang Yimou, an acclaimed filmmaker best known for such epics as Hero and House of Flying Daggers, is directing —China is well aware of how crucial the Games will be in shaping world public opinion.

But even if organizers can somehow pull off an Olympics free of both pollution and protestors, they can’t control what happens on the field. And ironically, just as China’s leaders emphasize its “peaceful rise,” the athletic juggernaut in which they have invested so much may inadvertently send the opposite message. That may not be fair. After all, while the Chinese sports machine deserves its share of criticism for being both soft on doping and hard on its athletes, few Olympic programs elsewhere can claim absolute innocence. But for an international audience whose Sino-anxiety has already been fueled by product recalls and factory closings at home, Olympic success could serve as one more reminder of how Chinese growth is unsettling their lives—and offer one more reason to ask their leaders to push back. In simply going for the gold, China may find that its public-relations drive will fall victim to its own athletic success.