Sideline Cut:With just over a year to go until the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese are being asked some tough questions. In the latest awkward development for the host city, the Hollywood legend Steven Spielberg has said he may have to relinquish his role as artistic adviser for the opening ceremony.

Spielberg's initial involvement was surprising and intriguing. It is hard to know how he can enhance the traditionally extravagant, camp and daft Olympic opening show unless he intends digging ET out of the special-effects cupboard, dressing the little guy up in a Chinese singlet and shorts and having him light those symbolic rings with that luminous digit of his. What a wonderful way that would be for China to give one finger to the world!

Like the rest of the movie set in Lotus Land, Spielberg has got himself in a bit of a lather over China's quiet refusal to follow the example of the West and sanction Sudan for what has been described by Georges as diverse as Bush and Clooney as "a genocide".

Darfur has become the hot cause among filmmakers. Mia Farrow complained about China back in 2004, but with Hannah and Her Sisters making little impact at the Asian box office, nobody paid much notice.

It was different when the likes of Clooney, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie pitched in with protests. That got headlines; if the really beautiful people were worried, then there must be a real problem.

Don Cheadle, who gave a riveting portrayal as the face of conscience in the genocide movie Hotel Rwanda, has gone so far as to co-author a book - with the human-rights activist John Prendergast - entitled Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond.

The UN figures suggest 250,000 people have been killed in Darfur since 2003 and some two-million more have been uprooted from their homes. China, the roaring economy of the East, buys up two-thirds of Sudan's oil and the government would rather turn a blind eye.

They are not alone. Jacques Rogge, the International Olympic Committee president who talked a tough game about drug-busting, was notably meek a few months ago when asked about the Chinese situation. Employing language not heard since the days of Obi-Wan Kenobi, he said the Olympics were "a force for good wherever they are staged".

But for Spielberg, whose film Schindler's List was the most globally popular dramatic account of the Holocaust, the current situation is highly compromising. He has already written to the Chinese president, Ju Jintao, suggesting that maybe the government intervene in the persecutions in Darfur - but to no avail.

If Spielberg resigns, it will be the first real international blow to the esteem and prestige of the Beijing hosts.

For the past couple of years, stories have trickled out about how China has been sweeping its floor before opening its door to the Olympic family. There have been reports of many deaths on the Olympic sites, with actual fatalities far higher than official reports have acknowledged. Citizens are being lectured on how to imitate Western etiquette; provincial habits like spitting in public are being discouraged. There has been a focus on the practice of selling disabled children into a life of virtual slavery through begging, vivid reports of helpless and physically disadvantaged youngsters begging from the tourists in Tiananmen Square. It hardly matters that begging has a long tradition in China, that it is seen as a legitimate means to an end.

All of these stories reinforce the perception of China as being different: impenetrably vast, dark and somehow cruel of soul. In the West, visitors tut-tut at the plight of the disadvantaged Chinese, as if there were no begging or slave trade in Europe or the United States.

The Olympics give China the same chance as all previous host nations: a chance to star in the most expensive shop window in the world. They will want 2008 to be like no other Olympics. One of the most mind-boggling reports has been that the hosts will, if necessary, fire rockets into the sky on the night of the opening ceremony to ensure rain cannot spoil things (why didn't the Streisand promoters think of that one?)

In the meantime, Beijing will have to deal with the implicit question as to whether the Games are morally compromised by the thousands of people killed in Darfur. That charge will grow more explicit and louder in the coming months.

I have been lucky enough to cover the last two Olympics, in Sydney and Athens, and there is no doubt that as events go the Olympic Games are intoxicating. The Olympics do not just take over the streets and stadiums of the host city; they infiltrate the state of mind of everybody in that city.

You become an Olympic Citizen, where everyone smiles, there seems to be no crime, no looting, no begging, no problems. Every single day brings with it a flood of human achievement, of the best running, swimming, jumping, lifting, shooting and throwing mankind has ever seen. The Olympics are like a powerful barbiturate.

And at the back of your mind, you know much of it is an illusion. You see the big advertising slogans shining down on you like sun gods. You know the history - the slaughter of the Israeli athletes in 1972, the Third Reich Games of 1936, the ongoing litigation in the former East German cities where dozens of Olympians are suing the state for the gross physical deformation caused by the narcotic cocktails they were force-fed by coaches.

You remember one evening hearing Brian Glanville, the great English sportswriter, talking on the radio, and you recall being struck by the rage and disgust in his voice when he spoke of stumbling upon the student protest in Mexico City on the eve of the 1968 Games and watching, appalled, as the army gunned down 30 people in the Plaza of the Three Cultures, and how during those same games, Tommie Smyth and John Carlos were deemed to have brought disgrace on the Games by giving their Black Power salute.

That was it between Glanville and the Olympics: his conscience would not permit him to attend or write about an event he believed had become a poisonous charade.

You remember all the boycotts (1976 by African nations over New Zealand's links with South Africa; 1980 by the USA because the Soviets invaded Afghanistan; 1984 by the Soviets in retaliation) and how the Olympics are a gawdy platform for making political statements. And somewhere in your heart, you know the show is a mess.

But look! Is that the great Carl Lewis in the stand there? A courtesy bus to see Ali in person . . . who would pass that up? Ten rows back for the 100-metre final . . . Asafa Powell warming up beneath you and the stadium - the centre of the world for that fortnight. Anthems. Ten-thousand flashbulbs. Cheering. Tears.

The Olympics get under your skin better than any Hollywood movie. They make their hosts feel fantastic.

Beijing faces a tricky season or so and, who knows, maybe even the threat of boycott. But on the night, it will become the greatest show on earth. Television and newspaper journalists worldwide will announce that the Chinese certainly know how to throw a party. Jacques Rogge will voice approval. The city will look fantastic. Westerners will make plans to visit.

Soon, George and the boys will be too busy making Ocean's 14 to be shouting about Darfur. And this week, oil went up to 75 bucks a barrel. No time to go turning off the tap in Sudan. Not when you have an Olympic City to light up.