When Mao Meets YouTube.(World View)(2008 Beijing Olympics)

You can always count on the Olympics for drama. Next summer's Games in Beijing will produce powerful stories and riveting television. But much of the action this time will occur outside the stadiums: in the streets, where Chinese police will clash with activists from around the world. These clashes promise to be spectacular and well documented -- by protesters' camera phones, if not by professional news crews. Given that, the next Olympics will offer more than another opportunity to test the limits of human athletic performance. They will also test China's ability to thwart a nebulous swarm of foreign activists who will be well-armed with BlackBerrys. A police state organized according to 20th-century principles will meet 21st-century global politics; Mao will meet YouTube.

Like the athletes, the China's government and the activists from around the world are already training hard for the showdown. Beijing, which will spend a total of $40 billion on the Games, has, according to the Associated Press, already begun its "broadest intelligence-collection drive [ever] against foreign activist groups." Xinhua, China's official news agency, has reported that Zhou Yongkang, the minister of Public Security, has ordered the police next summer to "strictly guard against and strike hard at hostile forces at home and abroad."

Meanwhile, planning by these "hostile forces" -- the activists -- is well underway. A Prague-based nongovermental organization that calls itself Olympic Watch has been hard at work since 2001 crafting various ways to use the Games to challenge China's policies on freedom of speech, the death penalty, Tibet, religious freedom and forced-labor camps. Darfur campaigners have started using the term "Genocide Olympics" to pressure Beijing to stop supporting Sudan's government. And the recent upheaval in Burma has led some activists to coin the term "Saffron Olympics" in order to underline China's support for the murderous Burmese junta and its massacre of unknown numbers of saffron-clad monks.

Such efforts will only intensify as next summer approaches. Once the Games begin, a huge tide of foreigners will flood Beijing, making it extremely difficult for authorities to spot the activists among them -- to pick out the old lady from Denmark who has traveled to Beijing with her church group to protest China's abortion policies, or the young, seemingly innocuous Australian couple who are actually members of a militant environmental organization.

It's fair to say that Beijing probably had no idea what it was getting ...