Their other successes look equally fragile. The EU has imposed sanctions, but Western energy companies ask with justice why they should be told not to compete for gas contracts the Chinese will snap up.
More importantly, they are running into a problem familiar to anyone who campaigned against 20th-century dictatorships: where to find allies.
If you are protesting about an aspect of US policy -- Guantanamo Bay or attitudes to global warming -- this is not an issue.
You can ally with and be informed by US activists, journalists, lawyers and opposition politicians. The resources of the civic society of a free country are at your disposal and you can use them to shift US opinion. A subject of the Chinese Communist Party who helps foreign critics put pressure on Beijing risks imprisonment, and none but the bravest do.
PETERING OUT
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband showed he understood the dilemmas of the new century when he gave a lecture in honor of Aung Sang Suu Kyi in Oxford last week. He described how the great wave of democratization, which began with the fall of Franco's dictatorship in the 1970s, moved through South America, the Soviet empire, South Africa and the tyrannies of East Asia, was petering out.
The foreign secretary was undiplomatic enough to continue that the economic success of China had proved that history was not over and he was right. Its combination of communist suppression with market economics is being seen as a viable alternative to liberal freedoms, notably by Putin and his cronies, but also by anti-democratic forces across Asia.
The only justification for the Beijing games is that they will allow connoisseurs of the grotesque to inspect this ghoulish hybrid of the worst of capitalism and the worst of socialism close up. The march of China's bloodstained allies round the stadium will merely be the beginning.
The International Olympic Committee and all the national sports bureaucracies will follow up by instructing athletes not to say a word out of place.
The free-market chief executive officers of Coca-Cola, McDonald's, General Electric and all the other sponsors who have made money out of China will join the communists in insisting that outsiders have no right to criticize. Any Chinese dissident who hasn't been picked up before the world's journalists arrive will face terrifying punishments if he speaks to them.
I know sportsmen and women are exasperated by demands to boycott events they have dreamed of winning for years. Why should they suffer when no business or government is prepared to turn its back on the vast Chinese market? For all that, they still should not go.
The hypocrisy of the 2008 Olympics will make all but the most hard-hearted athletes retch. They will not look back on it not as a high point of their careers, but a nadir.
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