This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 6, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

China is telling the world we are ready for the Olympics and for the scrutiny such an event brings.

Jim Dorne, the Cato Institute's Vice President for Academic Affairs and editor of Cato Journal,

comments on what China wants the world to see,

what it's doing to make sure we see it.

I think the Chinese leadership sees it as a really an opportunity to showcase what China has accomplished

over the last 30 years by moving towards a more open-s well not so much

open society as an open economy and opening to the outside world.

They've made tremendous progress in terms of increasing the standard of living,

but yet they won't let reporters freely report from Tiananmen

Square.

People are basically imprisoned for giving away, state secrets for example like during

the earthquake making announcements on the website or something so in that sense the leadership still has its head in the sand and if you're going to have an open economy

you also need to have free flow of information and you ought to be able to criticize the government

openly.

And if you lack that ability to criticize, you really don't have a dynamic free society and I think we may witness some of that

during the Olympics. In the effort to make China appear presentable to the world.

The political leadership has decided

that certain industrial processes are just going to stop for the duration, trying to clear

the skies of pollution.

Vast quantities of water and other resources are being moved from one part of the country

to another in order to satisfy the demand that will be in Beijing. How know, how far removed is China from a country like North Korea where vast

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