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.