Turns out an authoritarian government that operates without a conscience is superbly equipped to stage the enormous enterprise that the modern corporate Olympics have become. The power to bulldoze communities for venues, command a limitless labor force to work limitless hours and reach into bottomless pockets to pay for it all - well, that eliminates most of the obstacles facing other host cities.

The London 2012 organizers are already taking care to lower expectations.

"You are unlikely to see Games of this stature ever again," London Organizing Committee chairman Sebastian Coe said.

These are not the first Olympics to be held in a controversial place and widely praised for their superb organization and unforgettable spectacle. Americans remember the 1936 Olympics in Berlin for Jesse Owens' four inspiring gold medals. We forget Germany finished atop the medal count and rode that wave of nationalist fervor right into Poland and France, a world war and the Holocaust.

While China isn't likely planning to invade Japan and Russia (we're less sure about Taiwan), the parallel still holds. This is a government that does not honor human rights, domestically or abroad. This is a government that controls and jails journalists, that sends dissidents to labor camps, that props up a genocidal regime in Sudan.

China has the world's largest population and is caught in the whitewater currents of modernization. There is a chance these Olympics wind up speeding China along.

Ultimately, it is up to China whether these Games are remembered as an international embarrassment like Berlin or as a major step toward an open, modern and ultimately more free China.

"I believe these Games have opened up the country," Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, told the Associated Press. "On one hand, people will understand China better with all its challenges. They will remain critical on many issues; that is their right. On the other hand, the Chinese definitely have experienced that they cannot live in splendid isolation."

Sounds good, but there are huge holes in Rogge's position. When he wants to defend awarding the Games to Beijing, he talks about the power of the Olympic movement to nudge China forward. When it is time for accountability for China's shameful actions and broken promises - not to mention Rogge's complicity in some, such as the continued blocking of some media Web sites - the Olympics are merely a sporting event.

"You should not look on the International Olympic Committee to solve the world's problems," Rogge said as protesters disrupted the Olympic torch relay earlier this year.

Just yesterday, IOC director of communications Giselle Davies delivered a breathtaking exhibition of the organization's Beijing doublethink. Asked about the outrageous and indefensible arrest of two women in their 70s for applying to use one of the designated protest zones, Davies said with a straight face: "It's the principle of the IOC that it doesn't make comments on countries' laws."

Think that through: The protest zones exist only because the IOC gave Beijing the Olympics. Therefore, these women were assigned to "re-education through labor" camps as a direct result of the IOC. But the IOC's "principle" is not to comment.

That's not a principle, it's a lack of spine.

The uncomfortable truth is that the IOC, with its roots in European nobility, has been run more like China during its history than like a Western democracy.

If the Beijing Games wind up being a force for good, it will have little to do with the IOC and everything to do with China. Will the government be encouraged to embrace the inevitable move toward a more open society? Or, rubber-stamped by the IOC and its many corporate enablers, will it feel emboldened to become even more authoritarian and controlling?

The early signs aren't good. The broken promises about media freedom and the arresting of would-be protesters suggest a continued disregard for world opinion.

The government, of course, is not the same as the people. Thousands of China's young people - the students who volunteered to work these Games - have had a perspective-altering experience that is all but certain to ripple into the future. Millions of average Beijingers have interacted with thousands of Western visitors.

The glimpse those visitors got of day-to-day life here suggests that China is changing at fast-forward speed. The Western clothes and music, the bootleg DVDs and pervasive Internet exposure - you can only wonder how it looks to Chairman Mao as his portrait gazes from its spot overlooking Tiananmen Square.

The world's gaze will turn away from Beijing when the torch goes out tonight. Tibet and Darfur and the rest of China's dirt will slip off the front page.

What will the legacy of these Olympics be? That's up to China.