Chinese games - 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing

With less than a year before the start of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, the world community has trained its gaze on China. The Games present an opportunity to pressure that nation's communist government to correct some of its worst abuses in the areas of human rights, press freedom and individual expression.

Along with reports on the pageantry of the Games, attention should be lavished on China's atrocious human rights record. This includes the despicable practice of forced abortions that result from the nation's one-child policy. Reliable reports abound of women being taken from their homes and made to undergo abortions, even in the ninth month of pregnancy.

This is a good time, too, to highlight China's abuse of dissident voices. In a case all too familiar in China, self-trained lawyer Chen Guangcheng was sentenced to more than four years in prison in 2006 for bringing attention to abuses by family planning officials in Shandong Province in eastern China. Chen, who is blind, is being held in isolation from other prisoners. Villagers at his trial allegedly were tortured into testifying against him.

The human rights group Amnesty International is working to bring attention in the run-up to the Games to such cases, as well as China's broad employment of the death penalty without a fair trial and its stranglehold on free expression and Internet access.

Meanwhile, pledges made to improve press freedoms remain unfulfilled. China said it would lift restrictions it places on foreign media until the Games end next August. But according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Chinese journalists continue to be harassed, threatened and jailed. Foreign reporters say China regularly disregards even the temporary rules it put in place to give international media a freer hand.

China's misdeeds don't just harm its own citizens, as a sobering New York Times report on the country's massive pollution problems pointed out last week. Just as industrialized nations are coming to realize the peril of unabated carbon emissions, China could overtake the United States as the world's leading producer of greenhouse gases as soon as the end of this year.

The government has been lax on pollution control to avoid exerting drag on the country's red hot economic engine. Companies have freely dumped chemical waste into surface water, releases of which recently sent toxins flowing into Russia. The sun is perpetually darkened by pollution over some Chinese cities, and large swaths of Chinese coastline are devoid of marine life. Children suffer high rates of lead poisoning, and disease caused by pollution is a leading cause of death.

What's more, China's rapid development is run mostly on dirty, obsolete coal technology.

Despite the far-reaching power of China's strict authoritarian government, experts say the pollution might be impossible to control because of a thorny Catch-22 . China's growth is fueled by exports made cheap in part by laissez-faire pollution regulation. Slowing that growth could foment social and industry unrest that would threaten Communist Party rule. The same could result from unmitigated environmental degradation.

The international pre-Olympics spotlight also has illuminated Beijing's investments in Africa, including in Sudan, where that government is funding a genocidal war in Darfur.

Recent recalls of lead-poisoned toys, adulterated pet foods, toxic toothpaste and dangerous tires have awakened Americans to the hazards that go with saving money on cheaply made Chinese goods. To that add flagrant copyright piracy to the issues China must confront head-on.

This is not the time to let China bask in the pride of its Olympics coup, but to use the global attention to make it clean up its act.

www.chron.com