Not until a few years ago the term "Genocide Olympics" was just as foreign as the idea of the Holocaust when the 1936 Olympics kicked off in Berlin.
But thanks to Hollywood actress Mia Farrow and others vocal on the Darfur crisis, the world has learnt of China's complicity in the ongoing genocide.
The Sudanese Arab Islamic dictatorship of Lieutenant General Al Bashir has been responsible for the deaths of as many as 400,000 Africans in the western province of Darfur.
A further 2.5 million villagers have been displaced and are in a constant state of deprivation. If disease and starvation were not enough, these refugees are the target of constant attacks by militiamen that result in more murders and gang rapes that are employed as a specific policy to induce terror and demoralization among women.
The Chinese communist regime has invested upwards of $US10 billion to develop Sudan's oil fields and over 60 per cent of the oil now produced goes to satisfy China's apparently insatiable thirst for the black gold.
The People's Republic of China (PRC) is also Khartoum's main supplier of weapons, many of which end up in the hands of the Janjaweed militiamen committing the atrocities in Darfur.
In addition to propping up the Bashir regime and ignoring its policy of ethnic cleansing, the Chinese communists have consistently vetoed any attempts by the UN Security Council to send a peacekeeping force to the region or impose sanctions. That was until, inspired by Mia Farrow, people around the world started talking about the "genocide Olympics".
The PRC recently sent an envoy to Sudan to apparently try and persuade the Government there to accept UN peacekeepers. In an unprecedented step Zhai Jun, the PRC's Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs, even visited three refugee camps over the border in Darfur: this after years of turning a blind eye to the atrocities being perpetrated on the area's inhabitants.
However, with regard to the Darfur issue the Chinese Communist Party is likely to employ its usual tactics of trying to give the impression of "doing the right thing", while actually carrying on with business as usual, just as with the much touted, but completely bogus "relaxation" of media restrictions in the run up to the Games.
But the calls for the communist regime to clean up its act on all fronts are getting louder and increasingly impossible to ignore.
Mia Farrow categorically stated on American television that: "China is complicit in the genocide in Darfur". She went on to point out that while the PRC's Olympic slogan may be "one world one dream", the reality of Darfur is in fact "one nightmare that China cannot be allowed to sweep under the rug".
Feeds