The new U.N. secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, has asked the United States and Britain to delay stronger sanctions on the murderous Sudanese government so that he can have more time to persuade President Gen. Omar al-Bashir to allow U.N. troops into his land of mass killings, rapes and refugees. But according to Jackson Diehl in The Washington Post (April 2), George W. Bush, raising his voice, recently demanded that his envoy to Sudan, Andrew Natsios, come up with stronger sanctions.

Economic sanctions - or travel curbs on Sudanese dignitaries - have not, and will not, work so long as the Khartoum regime has Big Brother China as its vital economic partner - sitting with veto power in the U.N. Security Council. China imports more than 60 percent of Sudan's bountiful oil output and has otherwise heavily invested in that nations' genocidal economy.

China, a ceaseless violator of the human rights of so many its own citizens, is not going to be moved by a mere holocaust of black Africans in Darfur. And its complicity in these crimes against so much humanity has hardly blighted China's increasingly influential economic presence in other African countries and in Latin America while the corpses mount in Darfur.

However, as China moves steadily to replace the United States as the world's most powerful nation, China also desires worldwide respect as an eminently civilized nation with so long and rich a cultural history.

Savoring its delight in being selected as host of the 2008 Olympics, China created a slogan - "One World, One Dream" - for these ennobling events that will attract intense international attention on glistening Beijing. Memories of blood-soaked Tiananmen Square have faded around the world. But for those who remember, the Chinese government's massacre of thousands of students in June 1989 - horrifying as it was - pales in comparison with the more than 400,000 black Africans obliterated by China's close partner, Sudan, in Darfur - along with the mass rapes of so many painfully surviving black African women.

I expect the present Chinese leaders - as the glories of the 2008 Olympics approach - would not want any references to their complicity in the ongoing holocaust in Darfur. It is because these horrors are unabated that Francois Bayrou, a leading candidate for the presidency of France, declares (Associated Press, March 22): "if this drama does not stop, France would do itself credit by not coming to the Olympic Games (in Beijing)."

This is not the only call for shaming the host of the 2008 Olympics. In an article in the March 28 Wall Street Journal, "The Genocide Olympics," human-rights activists Mia Farrow and Yale law student Ronan Farrow (both of whom have traveled to Darfur) call for corporate sponsors of the 2008 Olympics to recognize that: "one thing that China may hold more dear than their unfettered access to Sudanese oil (is) their successful staging of the 2008 Summer Olympics. That desire may provide a lone point of leverage with a country that has otherwise been impervious to all criticism."

Mia and Ronan Farrow are appalled that "so many corporate sponsors (of the Olympic games) want the world to look away from that (genocide) atrocity during the games." The Farrows also cite "Steven Spielberg (who is preparing) to help stage the Olympic ceremonies to sanitize Beijing's image."

It astonishes me that the same Spielberg so admirably founded the Shoah foundation that records the testimony of the survivors of the Nazi's Holocaust. How can he fail to make any connection with Shoah and the holocaust in Darfur?

The Farrows also ask whether "the various television sponsors (of the Beijing Olympics) want to share in that shame" of the host's complicity in genocide - along with such American corporate sponsors of the games as Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, General Electric and McDonald's.

Some of their customers might want to question their partnership with genocidal China.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First and many other humanitarian organizations, religious groups and deeply concerned people around the world have been working insistently, without success, to stop this genocide. Focusing on the forthcoming Beijing Olympics, they can organize a last-chance rescue of the Darfur survivors by an international shaming of China. And I hope there will be nations who boycott the summer Olympics.

Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights.

(April 18, 2007)