Olympic Fever

At the auspicious time of 8:08 p.m. on Aug. 8, precisely one year before the Olympic Games are to open in Beijing, China held a celebration of the coming festivities in Tiananmen Square. The Gate of Heavenly Peace, where Mao Zedong's portrait still hangs, was bathed in red and gold light for the event, which featured intricately choreographed dance routines, multiple pop stars and, of course, fireworks.

The evening was gaudy confirmation of why next summer's Games are often referred to as China's coming-out party. For its rulers, the Olympics are a chance to show that their country is no longer a jittery backwater of a nation but a dynamic, confident giant. For many human-rights activists around the world, however--for whom Tiananmen is a word signifying more than a square in the middle of Beijing--China's Olympic dream is nothing to celebrate. So the one-year mark before the Games has seen an outpouring of protest as much as of pageantry. On the Great Wall, a massive banner that read ONE WORLD, ONE DREAM, FREE TIBET 2008, was unfurled by half a dozen supporters of Tibetan independence. Outside the Beijing Olympic organizing committee's quarters, officials from Reporters Without Borders called for the release of imprisoned Chinese journalists. As if to dramatize their point, police detained a group of foreign reporters covering the event. Protesting Beijing's support for repressive governments like those of Burma and Sudan, some activists have launched a campaign to boycott the Games if China's policy does not change.

Chinese officials have repeatedly demanded that the Olympics not be politicized. But Olympic history--from the horrors of Munich in 1972 to the boycotts of the Games in Montreal, Moscow and Los Angeles--suggests that's a forlorn hope. "The Olympics are about human nature," says Bao Tong, a former adviser to Zhao Ziyang, the reformist Communist Party General Secretary at the time of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. "You cannot separate the Olympics from human rights." You might suppose that the Chinese government would have thought of that before it entered its bid to host the games.