Attendees at a hearing of the House Oversight Committee on Darfur and the Olympics, June 7, 2007 in Washington, DC. (Photo: Genocide Intervention Network)

It’s almost show time for the Olympic Games in Beijing.

China fought hard to get the games, and has spent at a level without precedent on preparations that have remade its capitol and wide swaths of the country.

For activists, the Olympics were a chance, when China was at its most sensitive, to push the country on Darfur, Tibet, human rights and its own legal system.

Now, with the opening ceremony in Beijing just days away, August 8th, we’re looking at where China has moved under that pressure. Where it hasn’t. And what may come next.

This hour, On Point: Olympic leverage and what it’s wrought with China in the homestretch to the Beijing Games.

-Tom Ashbrook

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Guests:

Joining us from Beijing is Melinda Liu, Beijing bureau chief for Newsweek. She writes the “Countdown to Beijing” blog at Newsweek.com. She opened Newsweek’s Beijing Bureau in 1980 and is president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China.

Joining us from Amherst, Massachusetts, is Eric Reeves. He has been at the center of a global campaign against China’s policy on Darfur and Sudan, labeling the Beijing Olympics the “Genocide Olympics.” He is author of “A Long Day’s Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide.”

And joining us from New York is Jerome Cohen, one of the world’s top authorities on China’s legal system and Chinese human rights. He is a professor at New York University School of Law and a senior fellow for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Tags: China, Darfur, human rights, Olympics, Tibet