After long months of controversy, the Olympic Summer Games will finally open in Beijing next week. However, the world's eyes are on not the athletes but on the Chinese authorities and the way they handle protests, which will inevitably be held.
The danger is that China will overreact, as it tends to do. If so, the Olympics, instead of being China's coming out party, may leave China with a worse international image than before, something that would be bad for it and the rest of the world.
The manhandling on July 25 of Hong Kong journalists trying to cover the chaotic scenes of people scrambling to buy Olympic tickets is a warning of what could lie ahead. The way the media is treated is particularly sensitive since Beijing had promised the International Olympics Committee when it won the right back in 2001 to hold the Games that the press would have total freedom in which to operate.