When six-time NBA all-star Yao Ming revealed on Tuesday that he’d sustained a season-ending stress fracture below the small toe of his left foot, Houston Rockets fans weren’t alone in their anguish.

A nation of one billion-plus wept with them.

Yao is arguably China’s most visible Olympic athlete, and although the national team boasts other NBA-caliber players, the country’s hopes for its first medal in basketball rested squarely on the Shanghai giant’s impossibly broad shoulders. Until now.

At Tuesday’s press conference, the Rockets announced that Yao would be sidelined for three to four months before beginning full rehabilitation training. That leaves the 27-year-old with only a month or two to regain his competitive edge before the Olympic Games begin August 8 in Beijing.

Looking dejected, his voice deeper than usual as if hoarse from crying, Yao said, "If I cannot play in the Olympics for my country, it would be the biggest loss of my career." Afterwards, Houston reporters were quick to criticize Yao’s comments, accusing the 7-foot-6 center of putting his country before his employer.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time injuries have forced Yao to ride the pine. In his previous two seasons he’s missed 59 games due to an assortment of injuries, compared to the one game he missed during his first three seasons in the NBA. And he broke the same foot once before in 2006.

Chinese orthopedic experts remain optimistic that Yao will be ready in time for the Olympics. Qiao Wei, medical education director of Beijing University of Physical Education, told a People’s Daily reporter on Thursday that he thinks, “there is enough time for Yao to be ready in August. He will spend three months in bed and one month for basic rehabilitation, then he can play on the court.”

However, Qiao echoed the complaints of Chinese medical experts that the fracture was a direct result of the Rockets’ failure to find an adequate substitute for Yao, which required him to play for more time than is healthy for a man of his size: "Yao could not have avoided the injury given his size and a 38-minute average playing time per game. It is not because of a hit or a stretch during the game, it is a long-time thing. I think it is a reflection of his hectic season."

Yao and the Rockets still haven’t decided whether to put his foot in a cast or under a surgeon’s knife. Now all Chinese fans can do is hold their collective breath and pray that Yao can stage a comeback of messianic proportions. His size 22 shoes are just too big for anyone else to fill.

A friend and I managed to watch a diving event as part of the "Good Luck Beijing" games -- sort of a rehearsal for the 2008 Olympics -- at the newly opened National Aquatics Center, popularly known as "The Water Cube" for its bubbly, transparent exterior. The event was the Men’s 3m Synchronized Preliminaries (part of the 16^th FINA Diving World Cup to select August’s Olympians).

Just getting the tickets was a mind-numbing experience.

China's visa squeeze is very real, according to reports we've been getting from various corners of the Beijing expat community. My colleague Mary Hennock's recent visit to Beijing's visa bureau suggests the pre-Games clean-up includes a shake-up inside the police bureaucracy:

The Chinese police have a new computer network that's got a few teething problems. You've probably been through similar misery; every IT upgrade risks a few weeks of lost data and puzzling glitches. My recent visit to Beijing's main visa office suggests its personnel are experiencing just this type of problem.

Having recently joined Newsweek's Beijing bureau, I went there to collect the precious J visa that allows foreigners to work as journalists. I took with me a carefully-assembled packet of documents - the Foreign Ministry's OK, a health certificate (stating I'm not suffering psychosis, syphilis or the plague) and my current residence permit.

As Newsweek International reported earlier this month, ["Beijing's Visa Crackdown" Feb 18], the police have toughened up on lax enforcement of China's visa rules as part of a wide-ranging pre-Olympic house-cleaning. They've cracked down on an army of shady visa agents who rely on corrupt deals with local police to procure visas for money. Strictly-speaking these visas are illegal, but they have been widely tolerated.

Name: Wang Liqin (王励勤)
Age: 29 (dob: June 18, 1978)
Hometown: Shanghai
Previous Olympic Medals Won: Gold in Men's Table Tennis Doubles at Sydney 2000, Bronze in Men's Table Tennis Singles at Athens 2004

It’s no secret that China is home to outstanding table tennis players, and Wang Liqin is no exception. The Olympic gold medalist has twice won the world championship, first in 2003 and then again in 2005, aided by his impeccable shakehand (as opposed to penhold) technique and imposing size. At just over 6ft tall, with exceptionally long arms, Wang is appreciably larger than his competitors in a sport otherwise dominated by the diminutive.

He’s had a paddle in his hand since he was six, and the Chinese national team snapped him up at the tender age of 15. Wang has more than a decade’s worth of experience playing in the most competitive table tennis environment in the world. Which means he’s no joke. Early in his career, Wang was touted as a new kind of table tennis player by coaches and fans. His superior size and powerful strokes seemed to be the qualities of a player who could change ping-pong in the same way Tiger Woods has changed golf.

Yet individual success at the Olympics has eluded Wang. Sure, he shone at Sydney when competing alongside his teammate, Yan Sen, in the Men’s Doubles finals (against two of his other teammates, Kong Linghui and Liu Guoliang; just to give you some idea of how hardcore the Chinese table tennis team is).

But his bronze at Athens in singles competition was considered a disappointment in light of his enviable talent and wealth of experience. Fans worry that he lacks the necessary mental stamina to compete on the international stage. When asked after Athens by a reporter from China’s official Xinhua News Agency what he needed the most to win, Wang immediately replied, “Ferocity. At critical points, I lack ferocity.” Can a hometown crowd drive Wang to be more aggressive and ascend to what many consider his rightful place in China’s pantheon of ping-pong stars?

Chinese citizens have embraced Valentine's Day traditions as we know them in the West: Beijing street vendors sold the requisite roses, and restaurants offered specials for cooing two-somes. But at least in one department, the mood was less than lovey-dovey.

On Thursday—our supposed day of Cupid— state-run media announced that Chinese people were "disgusted" over recent attempts by prominent Westerners to use the 2008 Summer Olympics as a means of pressuring Beijing to do more to end the conflict in Darfur. Chinese Foreign Ministry officials once again decried the "politicization" of the Olympics, in what is by now a familiar refrain.

The proximate cause was Tuesday's very public announcement that famed American Hollywood director Steven Spielberg had given up his responsibilities as an artistic adviser to Olympic ceremonies because of China's support for Khartoum, as well as a letter signed by nine Nobel Peace laureates urging Chinese President Hu Jintao to change his nation's policies toward Sudan.

Brits are making waves in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. And I don't just mean the athletes' gag order brouhaha mentioned in the previous post. Prince Charles, a known supporter of the exiled Tibetan religious leader the Dalai Lama, has already said he would not travel to China for the Games even if invited. He once described Chinese leaders as “appalling old waxworks” in a journal he kept while attending the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty.

Reporting conditions for foreign media in China meanwhile have been another hotly debated Olympic topic. Recently British embassy officials told me that -- at least according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, which tracks such things closely -- 40 percent of the foreign correspondents who’ve been detained by Chinese authorities, or have otherwise run into trouble while reporting, have been British. With about 700 foreign media accredited in China, the Brits are definitely punching above their weight class.

Beijing recently passed the “six months to the Games” date, and there’s been lots of news on the Olympics front. My colleague Mary Hennock and I just closed a Newsweek article about Beijing’s political “housecleaning” in preparation for the August festivities – cracking down on dissidents who’ve criticized the Games; freeing several political prisoners early in gestures of goodwill; and tightening up on visas in order to get a better handle on the motley foreign community in Beijing.

The big headline today is Steven Spielberg’s withdrawal as artistic director for the 2008 Games. The move is a blow to Beijing’s international prestige. It came after Spielberg had written two letters to Chinese President Hu Jintao asking that Beijing use its leverage with the Sudanese regime to help stop the genocidal conflict in Darfur.

In a Tuesday statement, Spielberg said his “conscience will not allow me to continue with business as usual,” and stated that “the international community, and particularly China, should be doing more to end the continuing human suffering [in Darfur]…China’s economic, military and diplomatic ties to the government of Sudan continue to provide it with the opportunity and obligation to press for change.”

A Chinese embassy spokesperson in Washington said, “As the Darfur issue is neither an internal issue of China nor is it caused by China, it is completely unreasonable, irresponsible and unfair to link the two as one.”

Yet it's a temptation to link the Games with all sorts of controversies, from Darfur to Tibet to media freedoms. Or at least that’s what the British Olympics Association (BOA) must have thought. It was reported earlier this week that the BOA tried to force British athletes to sign a 32-page contract promising among other things not to criticize China’s patchy human rights record – or else face being banned from traveling to Beijing for the August Games. (The British team is likely to include luminaries such world record holder Paula Radcliffe, as well as the Queen's granddaughter Zara Phillips.)

It would have been the first time a clause requiring athletes “not to comment on any politically sensitive issues” was to appear in the athletes’ contract, which also referred to Section 51 of the Olympic Charter which states “no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”

But the proposal triggered such a stink that the association had to back down and promise to re-visit the neuralgic clause. On Sunday BOA chief executive Simon Clegg said the "interpretation of one part of the draft BOA's Team Members' Agreement appears to have gone beyond the provision of the Olympic Charter."

A spokesman for Beijing's Games organizers, Sun Weide, said he had no comment on the British brouhaha. But Sun said all competitors would be expected to respect the Olympic Charter , drawn up by the International Olympic Committee, outlawing political acts. Chinese officials keep saying they don't want to see the Olympics politicized, but of course it's already too late.

Fireworks are exploding like crazy outside my balcony, as Beijingers celebrate the advent of the Year of the Rat. The foreign correspondent community here has another reason to celebrate, too. Yesterday Straits Times correspondent Ching Cheong was freed from a Chinese prison, after serving  part of a five-year sentence on charges of spying for Taiwan.  I've known Ching, a Hong Kong resident, since the 80's and was relieved to hear news of his release.

Today I spent a couple hours e-mailing colleagues on the board of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China (FCCC), of which I am president, about issuing a statement on Ching's release. Since his detention in 2005, the FCCC's been pressing Chinese officials to free him and remove the veil of secrecy surrounding his case. Perceived as a goodwill gesture as Beijing gears up for the 2008 Summer Olympics, Ching's parole is a positive move, of course. I hope it means Chinese authorities are moving towards genuine transparency and due process, and not simply making a gesture with an eye to the Games.  Here's today's statement by the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China:

Name: Yi Jianlian (易建联)

Age: 20 (dob: Oct. 20, 1987)

Hometown: Heshan, Guangdong Province

Previous Olympic Medals Won: None

Little is known about how Yi Jianlian will perform in the ’08 Olympics, his first on the Chinese Olympic Basketball Team. Surely mainland fans hope he’ll fare better than he has during his rookie season with the Milwaukee Bucks. Wisconsin fans have been understandably disappointed by the 7ft power forward who was once compared to German superstar Dirk Nowitzki.

Although Yi won a spot as a starter with the Bucks, he’s posted an anemic 9.8 points and 5.8 rebounds per game, small potatoes compared to the 24.9 points and 11.5 rebounds he averaged during his final season with the Guangdong Tigers. A sense of disappointment may be mutual. When he was first drafted, Yi complained that a Chinese star with his talent ought to play somewhere with a larger market and a larger Chinese population -- like New York City. Critics have since painted his poor performance as a silent protest.

On January 30, David Thorpe, who writes a column for espn.com called Rookie Watch, dropped Yi to number 10 on his list of the top 10 rookies in the NBA (Yi was once as high as number 2) because he’s, “ still slipping, especially inside as a rebounder. We'd like to see him engaged in battle a lot more. So far, January is proving to be Yi's worst month in the NBA, in terms of raw production.”

Perhaps playing in front of his fellow Chinese citizens will drive Yi to excel. He showed signs of life, scoring 19 points and grabbing 9 boards, when more than 100 million Chinese viewers watched his Bucks take on Yao Ming and the Houston Rockets in Houston on November 9, 2007.

It is interesting to note that for several years Yi has been at the center of a growing controversy regarding his age. Investigative reporters have accused the Guangdong provincial government of conspiring with Yi to falsify his date of birth so he could play in junior competitions. Although his residency permit and passport say that he was born in 1987, other sources indicate that he may have been born in 1984. In 2004, he was listed as being born in 1984 in China's Four Nation Tournament, although authorities later claimed it was only a typo.

Perhaps the most damning evidence is that the Chinese government is usually unwilling to give official permission to a player to enter the NBA draft unless he is more than 21 years of age -- which is why Yao Ming (dob: September 12, 1980) had to wait until 2002 to declare his eligibility. If Yi really was born in 1987 it would mean he was only 20 when he entered the draft in 2007. Regardless, these questions probably wouldn’t matter as much if Yi could silence his critics with an Olympic-caliber performance on the court.