After China’s announcement of an 18 per cent increase in its official military budget for 2007, Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte requested that China be more transparent about its true levels of defence spending and its intentions. The coincidence of China’s announcement and Negroponte’s visit risks giving the impression that China is becoming the dangerous military adversary that ultra-conservatives have long foretold. But few countries have a greater stake in preserving the current world order.

The real threat from Beijing comes rather from its pursuit of energy resources, trade, and profits at the expense of human rights. China, as a preeminent investor in Sudan’s oil reserves, has been financing that regime’s genocidal crimes in Darfur. Beijing also acts as the principal ally of Burma’s military dictatorship and as a ruthless overlord in Tibet.

The world’s free-market democracies appear indifferent to China’s role as enabler to murderous regimes. So it is left to international civil society to challenge Beijing and teach China’s leaders that there can be no path to peaceful development that does not lead to respect for human rights. That is the lesson to be taught by human rights groups that plan on branding the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing as the Genocide Olympics. — The Boston Globe