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.

The Chinese authorities are trying to limit the number of climbers on Mount Everest’s north side in Tibet. Officially the Chinese are preparing a trial run of the torch relay for the Olympic Games on the summit, but many speculate that the real reason is that Everest is close to Cho Oyu where Chinese army guards shot at Tibetan refugees in September.

Knowledge bank: Chinese football has become a showcase of what happens when match fixing is allowed to continue for too long. Fans and sponsors have almost given up on the sport, and in a new attempt to turn the tide, the China Football Association (CFA) and the Chinese police set up a task force in October 2006 to stamp out football corruption.

Chinese anti-doping officials have uncovered a case of collective doping at a sports school for young athletes in the Liaoning province. On a surprise visit to the school, officials found steroids and EPO and saw school staff inject teenage students with banned substances. The case highlights China’s special doping problem amongst junior athletes.

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.

Mary Nicole Nazzaro, lecturer and former sports journalist, gave an attention-grabbing address to Play the Game on her experiences in China. Taking time out from her job lecturing on sports journalism at Shantou University, Ms Nazzaro spoke of the conditions that currently exist for sports journalists in the world’s most populous nation, and also looked to the future.