China's president greeted the Monday arrival of the Olympic flame in Beijing, at the start of what looks certain to be its most controversial journey ever. The risk of the torch relay being ambushed by demonstrators along its 130-day route through 21 cities on five continents has grown since Beijing's clampdown on violent protests in Tibet.

It wouldn't have been a Chinese state occasion without a secret and a rumor. The secret was why the timing of the welcoming ceremony was changed, and the rumor was that it must be for security reasons. China's Olympic organizers say otherwise. They pointed to the early arrival of the plane carrying the torch from Greece, and Beijing's weather forecast portending fog later in the day. While it's certainly true that the ceremony went off smoothly in brilliant sunshine, and the sky clouded later, the whole episode left me wondering.

It's begun. The official Olympic torch-lighting ceremony in Greece was marred by protestors waving a banner showing Olympic rings transformed into handcuffs, and rushing behind Beijing Games Organizing committee head Liu Qi as he presided over the event. Three representatives of the press-freedom group Reporters Without Borders were hustled roughly off the scene by security personnel. RSF is calling on international VIP’s to boycott the Games opening ceremony to protest China’s imprisonment of more than 100 journalists, Netizens and cyber-dissidents.

The relay will become a gauntlet of anti-Beijing protests, as my colleague Mary Hennock and I blogged about earlier. The Olympic flame is slated to pass through 20 countries and 31 Chinese provinces before arriving in Beijing for the Aug. 8 Olympics opening ceremony. Monday Free Darfur activists announced they were mobilizing demonstrations urging China to “extinguish the flames of genocide” in Darfur in San Francisco on April 9, the day the flame passes through the city.

One of Thailand's six torchbearers has withdrawn in protest. Environmentalist Narisa Chakrabongse said she now declined to take part in the relay to "send a strong message to China that the world community could not accept its actions."

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.

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:

Beijing Olympics organizers have shifted into hyperdrive. Games-related press conferences and other media events are being laid on thick and fast by BOCOG (the acronym for the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games).

Wednesday they corralled an array of experts to field media questions about the latest Olympics-related weather news. Ho-hum, you might say. And in any other country this might not be exactly a headline-grabber. But in pollution-plagued Beijing, authorities are scrambling to perfect ways to change the weather – yup,  the press is hot on the heels of a unit with the Orwellian title of the Weather Modification Office. Its scientists acknowledged they have techniques to “stop the rain” – or “rain mitigation”, as they call it -- for special events like, say, the Summer Olympics opening ceremony on Aug. 8, 2008. (Beijing’s notoriously muggy rainy season begins in July.)

Access to Beijing’s cloud-seeding bases are so much in demand that the capital’s weather czars decided to discourage such press trips. Turns out Beijing’s weather modifiers are too busy giving interviews when they should be perfecting their wild and wonderful methods for taming Mother Nature in time for the Olympics. (I must say, years ago I enjoyed interviewing a weather-modification cadre at a cloud-seeding base in the Western Hills; she confessed she might have lost her job if rain hadn’t subsided on the 50^th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic; that day in 1999 the rain stopped about an hour before the big National Day parade.)

On Monday the story of the day was the number of casualties suffered by laborers working on Olympic venues. Earlier the Sunday Times had alleged Beijing was covering up at least ten deaths by laborers killed in construction accidents while working on the National Stadium.

BOCOG shot down the story, claimed an excellent safety record at all its venues, and repeatedly stressed there had been no major accidents during their construction. But with two press events on Monday – the morning’s formal opening of the “water cube” aquatics center, and a BOCOG press conference in the afternoon – the question was sure to come up.