Quotes From Around Yon Olympicsphere

DETAIL OF BEIJING NATIONAL STADIUM LATTICEWORK

Saying "I told you so" does little good for those who are being thrown in jail so the government can avoid any "trouble" like demonstrations or wayward activists giving interviews to curious journalists. But the question must be asked nevertheless; what in God’s name where those superannuated idiots on the IOC thinking when they gave the games to China?

The games will go forward. Billions will watch. Athletes will be seen smiling on the victory stand, proudly listening as their national anthems are played.

And languishing in dark prisons will be thousands of Chinese whose only crime is that they want more freedom.

I personally plan my own boycott of the games. I refuse to watch as long as the media is a willing tool of the oppressors and, in accordance with the directives of the Chinese government, refuse to cover the human rights angle during the games.

They owe it to those who are suffering the consequences of the IOC's groveling before the Chinese government.

-- RICK MORAN

SHANGHAI — For the past two decades, China’s people became richer but not much freer, and the Communist Party has staked its future on their willingness to live with that tradeoff.

That, at least, is the conventional wisdom. But as the Olympic Games approach, training a spotlight on China’s rights record, that view obscures a more complex reality: political change, however gradual and inconsistent, has made China a significantly more open place for average people than it was a generation ago.

Much remains unfree here. The rights of public expression and assembly are sharply limited; minorities, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang Province, are repressed; and the party exercises a nearly complete monopoly on political decision making.

But Chinese people also increasingly live where they want to live. They travel abroad in ever larger numbers. Property rights have found broader support in the courts. Within well-defined limits, people also enjoy the fruits of the technological revolution, from cellphones to the Internet, and can communicate or find information with an ease that has few parallels in authoritarian countries of the past.

-- HOWARD W. FRENCH

The hype machine is now in high gear. You would have to live on the moon not to know: The Olympics are almost here. Prepare yourself to see world leaders dancing in the aisles at the opening ceremony -- those who will be there, anyway (Am I the only one who remembers Al Gore's hypnotic gyrations in Sydney?); to listen to countless hours of platitudes about world peace; to see hours of melodramatic footage documenting the life challenges faced by individual athletes; and, of course, to enjoy some world-class sport. Also in the mix, as seems unavoidable, will be mini-documentaries about China's place in the world, the advances it's made, where it's going, etc. We'll see images of picturesque rural landscapes and cities the size of Chicago that none of us have ever heard of.

I must admit, part of me looks forward to all of this, the spectacle even more than the sports. But lost in the pageantry will be the reality that the Olympics—not just those to be held in Beijing . . . but the entire Olympic system—is not always the rosy celebration of international peace and cooperation it purports to be.

-- BRUCE FALCONER

ZHENGDING -- Behind the gray walls and barbed wire of the prison here, eight Chinese farmers with a grievance against the government have been consigned to Olympic limbo.

Their indefinite detainment, relatives and neighbors said, is the price they are paying for stirring up trouble as China prepares to host the Beijing Games. Trouble, the Communist Party has made clear, will not be permitted.

"My bet is the authorities won't let them out until after the Olympics," said Wang Xiahua, a veteran anti-government agitator from this farm town 180 miles southwest of Beijing and a supporter of the imprisoned farmers.

The Olympic Games have become the occasion for a broad crackdown against dissidents, gadflies and malcontents this summer. Although human rights activists say they have no accurate estimate of how many people have been imprisoned, they believe the figure to be in the thousands.

-- EDWARD CODY

We have Olympic fever! But not as much as Beijing-ians. The Chinese government is like an overanxious mama, worried her kid might start picking his nose on stage at his preschool graduation. So they're bombarding the wayward citizenry with propaganda posters directing them how to act when all the weird foreigners get to town. The oddest thing is that they go to great lengths to explain how to make pale Westerners feel at ease, when in fact much of the etiquette advice seems totally unrelated to American life. It's a culture clash that will make you chuckle! Below, actual instructions to the Chinese: Whatever you do, don't ask what someone does!

-- HAMILTON NOLAN

BEIJING - Some International Olympic Committee officials cut a deal to let China block sensitive Web sites despite promises of unrestricted access, a senior IOC official admitted. . . .

China had committed to providing media with the same freedom to report on the Games as they enjoyed at previous Olympics, but journalists have complained of finding access to sites deemed sensitive to its communist leadership blocked.

Attempts at the main press center to access the Web site of Amnesty International, which released a report slamming China for failing to honor its Olympic human rights pledges, continued to prove fruitless by mid-week.

Other Web sites, including those relating to the banned spiritual group Falun Gong, are also inaccessible.

-- MSNBC

President Bush is so emphatic about going to the Olympics in China that one might think flying halfway around the globe to attend the games is what presidents do.

But never before has an American leader shown up at an Olympics on foreign soil. And Bush is doing more than just dropping by. He is planning to soak in as much as he can, with large blocs on his Beijing schedule devoted to watching athletes compete.

For this president, perhaps the most avid in a long line of White House sports buffs, it is an event that begins and ends with sports.

Yet politics have intruded in Olympics past, from Cold War boycotts to terrorism, and host China is right at the intersection of debates over human rights, security and trade. Even the Olympic torch relay fell victim to protests in Europe and the U.S.

-- BEN FELLER

Sello Maduma comes from one of the black townships of Pretoria, South Africa, a place called Mamelodi where most children live in a world circumscribed by decades of racial segregation and poverty.

"Not many people expect someone from the townships to be on the Olympic team," Maduma said.

Especially not in fencing.

Soccer is the sport of the townships. Maduma, 21, was lured to fencing eight years ago by a recruiter from a local sports club.

Now he is the first black male fencer to make a South African Olympic team.

No matter how far he goes in the competition, Maduma knows he already has reached well beyond the borders of the township where he lives with his mother and two younger brothers on a family income that allows them, in his estimate, to "just survive."

"The opportunity of being in the Olympics is something so big -- it doesn't get any bigger than this," Maduma said by phone from South Korea, where the South African Olympic team has been training. "It is an overwhelming feeling, something I have to take with both hands and make the most of."

It is athletes with stories like Maduma's who give fans someone to cheer in the Olympics, even as they have been beset by doping and biased judging and bid-city vote buying scandals and commercialization, even as they have become less relevant to the X Games youth of the developed world.

-- PHILIP HERSH

Photograph by Dan Chung