The Olympic Effect

Newsweek, May, 2007 by Melinda Liu

Late in March, the actress Mia Farrow wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal calling for a boycott of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Denouncing China for its support of the murderous Sudanese government (which happens to be China's sixth largest oil supplier), she dubbed the upcoming Games the "Genocide Olympics."

Beijing, which has been wary of Hollywood's PR power ever since Richard Gere and others began campaigning for Tibet's independence years ago, quickly kicked into damage-control overdrive. Even as the state-run China Daily complained that it was an "insult to the Olympic spirit to wantonly blame China for the Darfur crisis," Beijing sent a special envoy, Zhao Jun, to Khartoum to press the regime there to accept U.N. peacekeepers; Sudan duly agreed to such...

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