Foreign visitors to the Great Wall of China in recent weeks have had petitions supporting Beijing's bid for the 2008 Olympic games thrust in their faces to sign. In downtown Beijing, colorful Olympic banners and signs greet you at every turn. China wants to host the international games in the worst way, and it's willing to make almost any accommodation to secure the honor. Except one: It refuses to temper its egregious violations of human rights.

While some humans rights groups and members of Congress are horrified by the idea that the world's pre-eminent sporting event could be held in a city known for the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, China reportedly has the edge in the competition. About the best opponents can hope for is that the government will clean up more than Beijing's dirty air in its attempt to make a favorable impression on the outside world.

In addition to Beijing, four cities are in contention for the 2008 summer games: Paris, Toronto, Istanbul and Osaka. A recent evaluation of the bids by the International Olympic Committee made clear that only Beijing, Paris and Toronto are seriously in the running. Of those three, Beijing is the most controversial. China's abysmal human rights record and its authoritarian central government raise the specter of the games being used as a political device to gain international legitimacy. No one wants another propaganda spectacle like the 1936 games held in Nazi Germany, when the world came to Hitler. But Chinese President Jiang Zemin, while willing to be brutally repressive, is no Hitler or Stalin.

Officially, the United States takes no position on who should get the nod (in fact the United States is "vigorously neutral" on the question). However, some members of Congress have expressed angry opposition to Beijing's bid, and human rights activists have launched a campaign to persuade American companies such as Coca Cola and Kodak to object to the Chinese location.

Their approach could prove to be counterproductive to human rights. Beijing needs the international spotlight that would come with the Olympics. There's reason to hope that if China is selected to host the 2008 games, it could follow the path of South Korea, which, after hosting the 1988 summer games in Seoul, soon emerged as a more open and democratic society, although no one would suggest the Olympics were the critical factor. Some of the same forces driving South Korea's political transformation -- economic growth, a growing middle class and pressure to accommodate global trading partners -- are at work in China these days. It would be naive to expect a sudden lurch toward democracy, but the Olympics bid might keep China from taking some rash action, such as a military assault on Taiwan, between now and 2008.

China needs more interactions with the world community to encourage it to abide by international norms. Consider the accommodations China will have to make: An international media corps would descend of such size and complexity as to be uncontrollable. Visas would need to be distributed freely, which means activists for a free Tibet, an independent Taiwan and the rights of religious minorities would have access to Chinese soil. And members of Beijing's Olympic Bid Committee told a group of visiting journalists recently that Taiwan would be welcomed as a nation with its own roster of athletes.

The 126-member IOC is scheduled to make its final decision on Friday at a meeting in Moscow. The Chinese ask that the decision be made on the basis of sports, not politics. That's unrealistic. If anything, the politics of the decision could work in China's favor. The Olympic bureaucracy and many developing countries reportedly favor Beijing's bid. The list of human rights violations the IOC will have to ignore grows longer by the day -- executions, the imprisonment of dissidents, religious persecution and spy charges against scholars with U.S. citizenship. Denying China's host bid would do nothing to improve human rights inside the world's most populous country. There is at least a chance, however, that if China winds up hosting the 2008 Olympics, something positive could come of it.

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