Since China was awarded the Olympic Games in 2008, human rights organisations and politicians have applied pressure on the International Olympic Committee to use the Games as a lever to improve China’s human rights record. But what is the rationale for regarding the Olympics as a source for political and social change?

Organisers of the Olympic Games in Beijing have promised that foreign journalists can travel freely around China, interview who they want and enjoy uncenscored access to the Internet during the Games. New freer regulations on reporting in China up to and during the Olympics came into force on 1 January 2007 but the application of the new rules show that there is still some way between promises and reality.

Intense criticism has surrounded China’s planned route for the Olympic Torch relay prior to Beijing 2008. Human rights groups have also slammed China’s human rights record, their voices joined by US politicians who oppose China’s alleged sale of arms to Sudan.

China has long held a prominent position in the Western imagination. From Marco Polo onwards, China – or the Middle Kingdom – has been viewed as a mystical, unknown and unknowable place.

China has issued a new set of rules for foreign journalists who want to cover issues in China up to and during the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. According to a spokesperson from the Foreign Ministry, foreign reporters will be allowed to travel anywhere in the country without prior permission from local authorities.

Two years before more than 20,000 international journalists are expected to go to China to cover the Beijing 2008 Olympics, a survey by the Foreign Correspondents Club of China shows that Chinese authorities frequently detain foreign reporters, and occasionally use violence against them and their sources.

During the Olympic Winter Games in Turin, the IOC got a taste of the political dilemmas the organisation mayface in the run-up to the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008 as a Buddhist monk and two young Tibetans went on hunger strike in Turin demanding that the IOC should live up to its own promise of monitoring the human rights situation in China in the run-up to Beijing 2008.

When it comes to Beijing 2008, China’s human rights record is not the only thing worth talking about. At Play the Game 2005, the debate broadens its scope from human rights to including the Chinese concept of humanistic Olympics and how China might change our idea of Olympism.