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.