Transparency THE promise was clear. China, its leaders said, would open up for the Olympics. "We will give the media complete freedom to report," declared Wang Wei, the official who led the campaign to secure the Games. Yesterday, however, journalists weren't so sure he was right.

Transparency
THE promise was clear. China, its leaders said, would open up for the Olympics. "We will give the media complete freedom to report," declared Wang Wei, the official who led the campaign to secure the Games. Yesterday, however, journalists weren't so sure he was right.

Beijing's Foreign Correspondents Club, which represents international reporters, has recorded 270 cases where its members have been detained or harassed since January 2007, when China introduced its special "Olympic" reporting freedoms. Earlier this week, two Japanese journalists were beaten by police while trying to cover the aftermath of a terrorist attack in the largely Muslim province of Xinjiang. A BBC camera crew covering the same story was also questioned by police.

True, the new rules - under which foreign journalists, at least theoretically, can go wherever they like without asking for permission - are a far cry from the old days when they could barely take a stroll without a posse of "guides" from the China Travel Service.

The Chinese media, meanwhile, remains strictly controlled. Only a handful of regimes, such as Cuba, North Korea and Burma, rank lower for press freedom. The internet, too, is subject to severe restrictions. Earlier this week the Beijing authorities finally gave foreign reporters access to some critical English-language sites, in a move written off as a PR stunt. Critical sites in Chinese are still closed and 50 "cyber-dissidents" and 29 journalists are in prison.

So can the Games help China open up? Optimists still think so. The very fact the Games are being held in Beijing brings the world to China, with all sorts of unforeseen consequences, they said. The 1980 Olympics in Moscow, they argue, played a largely untold role in undermining the old Soviet regime.

Human rights
THE thousands of journalists coming to cover the Olympics were supposed to put China under a brighter spotlight than ever before. International scrutiny, the theory went, would mean the Games brought a huge boost to human rights. Did they? "If anything, things are worse," said John Watson, of Amnesty International in Scotland. "In the years since the Games were awarded, there was talk of human rights improving in China. That hasn't happened."

Chinese authorities, in fact, have been busily tidying away dissidents and government critics in recent weeks, part of what they see as a clean-up of Beijing ahead of tomorrow's opening ceremony. Migrant workers - many of whom helped build the infrastructure needed for the Games - have been packed off out of the city. So too have thousands of other "undesirables": beggars, prostitutes and the thousands of penniless Chinese who come to the capital to petition officials for help redressing wrongs committed in the provinces.

Worse, campaigners who complained of the wholesale Olympic demolitions of Beijing's "hutongs", its narrow streets of low-rise homes, have been locked up.

"The Chinese government and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have had seven years to deliver on their pledges that these games would further human rights," Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch said yesterday. "Instead, the Games have prompted a rollback in some of the most basic rights enshrined in China's constitution."

Amnesty International will use the Edinburgh Festival to highlight the jailing of Hu Jia, one of the few who stood up for the families evicted to make way for the Games.

All hope, however, is not lost. Mr Watson believes the Olympics and outside attention have prompted many Chinese to wake up to abuses of their rights at home.

China abroad
CHINA has not just come under fire for its human rights at home. The world's biggest nation has also been accused of helping to prop up some equally authoritarian or corrupt regimes elsewhere. Western powers are worried about its role in Zimbabwe and Sudan, where it is perceived as a friend of the regime responsible for ethnic cleansing in Darfur. Experts, especially on the other side of the Atlantic, have long predicted that the next 100 years will turn into a battle for influence between democratic America and authoritarian China. Many reckon China will have the upper hand by the end of the century.

But is China really a force for evil in places such as Africa? Ian Taylor, a professor at St Andrews University and an expert in Sino-African relations, sniffs double-standards in some of the Western criticism. "I think it's a bit hypocritical, coming from Western governments supporting regimes like Saudi Arabia," he said yesterday. The Chinese, he said, have recently been playing a more positive role in some African hotspots, mindful that there own interests are not served by conflict.

"In 1997 Chinese trade with Africa was worth $5bn (just over £3bn at the time). Last year the figure was £74bn. It is expected to be £100bn in 2010," Prof Taylor said. "Whether this is positive or not will depend on the Africans. A lot of these countries are run by crooks who really don't care about development."

China now does more business in Africa than either Britain or France, the continent's two main colonisers. So how much influence does China have on the rest of the world? It rarely throws its weight around in world diplomacy unless it feels its interests are in danger, on issues such as the future of Tibet or Taiwan.

The world's biggest polluter
SOME Americans last week arrived in Beijing clutching masks to their faces, such was the reputation of the city's air. The capital, Chinese officials have conceded, has had its problems with smog, partly thanks to the 3.3 million cars that have squeezed most cycles from its roads. But Beijing is not as polluted as some foreign critics claim, they said.

Arne Ljungqvist, chairman of the IOC's medical commission, agreed, dismissing the haze over Beijing as a "mist" that meets World Health Organisation standards.

Beijing people are relatively lucky. The air in other Chinese cities is far, far worse. Last year it was claimed that a World Bank report had been censored to remove figures for the number of Chinese who die because of the quality of the air they breathe. The figure, the Financial Times said, was as high as 700,000 a year. A further 60,000, it was claimed, lose their lives because their water is polluted.

Most experts reckon China has overtaken the US in the world league table of greenhouse gas polluters. Carbon dioxide emissions have jumped from 7% of the world total in 2002 to 24% now. China, as almost every school pupil here now knows, is building a new coal-fired power station every week.

"Everybody sees China as this monster polluter, but it is doing so much more than that," Changhua Wu, a Chinese environmentalist, said yesterday. The country, she claimed, would soon be a world leader in green technologies.

Duncan McLaren, of Friends of the Earth Scotland, stressed that many of China's current emissions were effectively exported from post-industrial states like Britain. "We closed Ravenscraig," he said. "But we didn't stop using steel products."

Last month, scientists at the University of York announced that UK greenhouse gas emissions, far from diminishing, were in fact rising as fast as ever, if the environmental costs of goods imported from China were taken into account.

'Made in China'
THEY are the three little words that sum up the world economy in 2008. Cheap goods from China fuelled the feel-good Scottish economy of the past 10 years as much as rising house prices and apparently endless credit.

China's economy is now third only to America and Japan. At current growth rates - it clocked another 11% rise in GDP last year - it will overtake both in coming decades. Growth has averaged nearly 10% a year since the once-closed nation threw open its doors in the first economic reforms of 1978.

But China is not immune to world markets, and there are real infrastructure problems that could slow the pace of growth. Despite massive investment, China's roads, railways, sewers and telephone exchanges simply cannot cope.

The Scottish Government, however, is more than aware that, sooner or later, China will be the world No 1 economy. It has a special strategy, not least at luring more Chinese, as tourists, skilled migrants and students, into the country. It wants 200 Scots schoolchildren to study Chinese by the year after next. This spring First Minister Alex Salmond announced he was considering plans for a Scotland House - effectively an embassy - in Beijing.