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...