What will constitute a shift will be the requirement to cooperate with Beijing on intelligence matters. It is easy to imagine that, as the event approaches, Beijing's main weapon -- trade -- will focus on a new commodity, that of cooperation on security. Following this logic, countries that, for one reason or another, refuse to cooperate with China on that sector will be subjected to blackmail of the kind we have seen time and time again at the UN and other international institutions. Unfortunately, the lure of future trade with China, which Beijing will never decouple from the supposedly apolitical Olympic Games, means that most countries will choose cooperation over morality.
The consequences of this decision will be that intelligence services the world over will become proxies of the Chinese apparatus, whether they like it or not. Beijing will send what are known as "trace requests," or requests for information on suspected individuals to its sudden international allies, who will look into their database, perhaps launch investigations of their own, and whatever information is found will find its way back to Beijing. Through this process, flags will be affixed to the files of countless individuals who will either be barred from entering China or, if they do, face the risk of imprisonment.
In the name of cooperation, in the spirit of the Games, various intelligence agencies will thus become complicit in repression. Terrorism will be redefined, if only temporarily, as anything that opposes the authoritarian practices of the government in Beijing. Unless the world's security services take the moral path -- a very unlikely possibility, sadly -- those will be Games for individuals who have given in to tyranny.
The marathoners will run, the swimmers will swim and the cyclists will cycle, but around them, cheering, will be the architects of a repressive regime and an army of hollow men, leaning together.
J. Michael Cole is a writer based in Taipei.
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