Beijing 2008: The Olympics in the belly of the beast.

Here we go again: Beijing is trying to get the Olympic Games, for 2008. In the early '90s, they made an all-out effort to win the Games for 2000, losing out by a hair to Sydney. Now they are the clear front-runner; a decision is expected next summer. The Chinese insist aggressively that the 2008 Games are their due. So it is time to consider, once more, whether the Games-which are extremely important to much of the world-should be staged in a totalitarian capital.

Back in 1992 and '93, when the Chinese made their first attempt, Tiananmen Square was a fairly fresh memory. (That massacre took place in 1989.) The authorities needed a leg up with both the world and their own people. So they craved the Olympics even more desperately than they do today. In a breathtaking campaign, they earmarked billions of dollars for "Olympic construction." They offered to pay transportation and room-and-board for the many thousands of athletes and officials who would attend the Games. They initiated a public-hygiene crusade: "Mobilize the Masses to Create a Fly-Free City!" They enlisted the citizenry to scrub and festoon the capital. They held contests in speaking English and other foreign languages, with cold cash going to the winners. They forbade residents to burn coal (as most of them did for their basic needs): The sky had to be blue! Every day, it was put out more flags, brandish and recite more slogans.

And the deciders? They got the royal (Communist) treatment. Said one Beijing official, "We look upon the International Olympic Committee as God. Their wish is our command." The government ordered the air force to disperse the clouds over the capital, lest it rain on the Committee's grandees. They took the step of nominating Juan Antonio Samaranch, boss of the IOC, for the Nobel Peace Prize. They provided each member of the Committee with all manner of comforts, including a chauffeured black Mercedes. They pledged to build a monument on the Great Wall bearing the names of all ninety IOC members.

And, for a special treat, they stopped following foreign reporters-stopped putting tails on them, giving them a little more space. Nevertheless, there were human-rights objections here and there. The U.S. Congress adopted a resolution opposing the granting of the Olympics to Beijing; the European Parliament did the same. This hardly pleased the IOC. Samaranch grumbled that the United States was happy to trade with China but not to give them the Olympics. Another Committee official said-poetically if absurdly-"If we always picked a city wearing a halo, we wouldn't be celebrating our hundredth anniversary "

The Chinese dissident community itself was split. Most were opposed to letting the regime have the Games, but a few prominent spokesmen were not. Wang Dan, a student leader in Tiananmen Square, was released in February 1993, about a half-year before the Committee's vote. Somewhat reluctantly, he favored giving the Games to Beijing, hoping that this plum would "accelerate China's opening to the rest of the world." Wei Jingsheng, another widely admired dissident, felt the same. He was released a grand total of nine days before the Committee voted, after being imprisoned for 14 and a half years. As a further sweetener, Beijing delayed the prosecution of about twenty other democracy activists-men and women who were pawns in the regime's Olympic game.

Today, Wei opposes Beijing 2008, for reasons that we will explore in a moment. (Wang Dan, who now, like Wei, lives in the United States, was unavailable for comment.) Wei brings up-as do many others-the specter of Berlin '36. These were, of course, the Hitler Games. The standard American view of these Games is that they blew up in Hitler's face thanks to the historic performance of the (black) U.S. track-and-field star Jesse Owens. This view is handed out to Americans in kindergarten along with crayons and construction paper. But it is untrue: The opportunity to host the Olympics was of great importance to Hitler and the furtherance of his regime, as scholars of the period uniformly acknowledge.

Berlin got the '36 Games in 1931, two years before the Nazis rose to power. Once Hitler was installed, however, a movement took shape to boycott the Games. In 1933, the American Olympic committees voted to stay away from Berlin if Hitler refused to allow Jewish athletes to participate on German teams. The regime found two token Jews, both of them living in exile, and this gesture satisfied the Americans. All hope of a boycott faded. Hitler also relaxed-just for a bit-his general persecution of the Jews, a period that become known as his "Olympic Pause."

In 1935, the American consul in Berlin, one George S. Messersmith, wrote the following to secretary of state Cordell Hull: "To the [Nazi] Party and to the youth of Germany, the holding of the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 has become the symbol of the conquest of the world by National Socialist doctrine. Should the Games not be held in Berlin, it would be one of the most serious blows which National Socialist prestige could suffer." As Duff Hart-Davis, author of Hitler's Games, relates, the Nazis ensured that Berlin was nicely and benignly turned out, creating the mirage that the Fuhrer's Germany was "a perfectly normal place, in which life went on as pleasantly as in any other European country." Freedom-suppressing governments-such as China's-become expert at erecting Potemkin villages. Hart-Davis further writes, "That the success of the eleventh Olympiad gave Hitler an enormous boost, both moral and political, nobody could deny." The journalist William Shirer recorded in 1984, "Hitler, we who covered the Games had to concede, turned the Olympics into a dazzling propaganda success for his barbarian regime."

Whether a boycott would have made a difference is a matter for speculation. Germany was banned from the 1948 Games, held in a London that still bore marks of the Blitz.

Political questions have never been divorced from the Games, and probably never will be. The chance to host the Olympics is panted after by many nations, for many reasons. By the end of 1972, the IOC had awarded the Games to all three of the major aggressor powers in World War II: Italy (1960), Japan (1964), and Germany (1972). This was a way of welcoming those countries back into the family of nations, and of rewarding them for taking the democratic road. For Cold War reasons-"balance" and all that-the Committee felt it necessary to give the Games to the USSR in 1980. But in December 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and as former president Richard Nixon put it so memorably, "You can't just go over there and high-jump with them." China, for its part, has always been an Olympic problem. For years, the regime refused to participate in the Games if Taiwan were permitted to do so. As it stands now, Taiwan is allowed to compete, but only under the awkward name "Chinese Taipei."

One truly interesting case is that of the 1988 Games, held in Seoul. The fact of the Olympics there is often credited with hastening the democratization of that country. As Don Oberdorfer, former Washington Post reporter and a Korea expert, explains, "The dictatorship in Seoul, which had pledged free elections, faced huge protests in 1987," a year before the torch was to be lit. Strongman Chun Doo Hwan "considered calling out the military, but the prospect of the Olympics stayed his hand. President Reagan, too, sent a letter warning him not to do it, but the coming of the Olympics was the biggest factor." The rest, for South Korea, was smooth sailing out of authoritarianism. Oberdorfer is one who hopes that Beijing will get the Games for 2008, believing that this "would have a restraining effect" on that regime.

Wei Jingsheng thinks otherwise. In 1993, he notes, "I was used to enhance the Party's effort to get a high score on its application for 2000." And "there was a sudden improvement in human rights"-a Chinese "Olympic Pause." In those days, he favored the Games in Beijing because "I thought the Party would be able to hold on to power for a few more years in a very stable form, and I thought having the Games would promote the opening of people's minds." Yet the wheel has turned. "The regime is relatively unstable, and by 2008 it might be in a state of great turmoil. The Games would do the Chinese people no good, and the Olympic movement itself no good."

Then there is the key question of nationalism. "If China gets the Games," says Wei, "that would inflame extreme nationalism. It would play a harmful role in the moral and spiritual lives of the people. The Party would promote itself to anti-Western elements, and it might even be encouraged to attack Taiwan." In this regard, "there is a clear parallel to Berlin-the regime would be bolder." But if Beijing were again denied the Games, would that not incite further nationalism and xenophobia? "Just the opposite," answers Wei. "The regime would have gone unrewarded. When the bad boy is not behaving himself, we should not encourage him, but find a way to tell him he is wrong."

Justin Yu, a Chinese journalist working in New York, points out that the regime uses sports to puff itself up before its own people, much as the Eastern-bloc countries used to do. The Olympics, according to Yu, are strictly "a tool for Beijing to use. The Games give them a reason to crush Falun Gong, for example. [These are the meditators and slow-movement exercisers who so vex the Party, and who are arrested, tortured, and killed.] The regime can say, 'So many foreigners are coming, we have to show our good side. So let's chase out all the trouble-makers, hunt them down to the very last one.' They will say to people, 'We have to show the world that we are unified. You have no freedom, but we have the Olympics. So sacrifice more, be patient, and accept more people in jail.' And if people believe that having the Olympics will raise the prestige of the PRC, they will go along with it."

What, though, of the argument that the Olympics would put the government "in the spotlight"? Yu scoffs: "People are always talking about the 'spotlight': The Asian Games in 1990, the International Women's Conference in 1995-these international events are supposed to put the regime 'in the spotlight.' Actually, they just provide an excuse for the regime to cleanse and purge the city. They make a Disney village-clean and nice. Where is Mickey Mouse? They move out laborers from the country, who may not look so good. Intellectuals, dissidents, certain important political prisoners held in Beijing jails-all are moved out, transferred, because the government doesn't want anyone to visit with them."

Concludes Yu, "The government's general line is: 'Whoever is against us shows us no respect. You're either for us or against us. The Dalai Lama-he is against us. Against China. We have an international event now, so let's crack down on anyone who might embarrass us.'" In other words, "The Communists create an atmosphere, a mood, in which they can do anything."

Su Xiaokang, the Princeton, N.J.-based editor of Democratic China, an online magazine, puts it this way: "After Tiananmen Square, the government had no authority. So they had to find another source of support-that was nationalism. They made everything a matter of Chinese pride. They had lost trust, and something like the Olympics is a way of getting it back. They took Hong Kong back. They want to take Taiwan back. The Olympics would strengthen them, make them look good. That's why they want them so badly." Do they ever. The authorities are back to their old tricks-having the streets polished, insisting that bare-chested men put on shirts, offering English lessons on buses. They even went so far as to withdraw 27 athletes and 13 coaches on the eve of the Sydney Olympics. They had been "doping," of course, and China was loath to see anything tarnish its Olympic image with another vote coming up. More ominously, the mayor of Beijing, rallying the troops, made so bold as to say that China must "battle and crush Falun Gong and other cult organizations." With so much at stake, not an ounce of deviation can be tolerated.

The regime is also playing very heavily the numbers card. The argument is: We are almost a fifth of the earth's population, so how can you withhold the Games from us? Lectured one official, "The Olympic Games belong to the whole world. The fact that the Games have not yet been held in China is a failure of the Olympic movement." Pressed on human rights, the official said huffily, "There is no excuse for denying the dreams of 1.3 billion people to hold the Olympics in Beijing."

This line may prove hard to resist. But, again, the "international community" confronts a question: Is holding the Games in a country like China consonant with the ideals of what we used to call "Olympism"? And should the Games be used as a political carrot, or stick? Those of us who-even into adulthood, despite layers of scandal and commercialism and cynicism-love the Olympics should choke on the idea of watching tyrants and butcherers preside smilingly over the Games, just as Hitler did. (And, ultimately, what one thinks of the Olympics in Beijing probably comes down to what one thinks of the regime in Beijing.) Of all the cities in this great, vast world, from Tipperary to Timbuktu, why the capital of Red China?

Here is a first principle, a simple criterion: The Games should not be held in any country whose own people are not free to leave. That is just for starters. Juan Antonio Samaranch and his boys have four other finalists for 2008: Paris, Toronto, Istanbul, and Osaka. Any of them would do. Beijing would be a disgrace.