Dan Blumenthal asserts: "The Olympics will not pry China open. The Communist Party's repressive techniques will grow stronger thanks to Western technology and training."

Jacques deLisle counters: "The Olympics are likely to have a modestly positive impact on freedom, civil and political rights, and kindred values in China."

Minxin Pei doesn't know: "It remains unclear whether the Beijing Olympics will be auspicious for the future of freedom in China. If history provides any guidance, it offers little encouragement."

From Washington to Tokyo to Canberra to New Delhi, and indeed in many other capitals, pundits of all stripes are trying to determine whether the Olympic Games, scheduled to open on Aug. 8, will help or hurt the cause of freedom in China.

The American Enterprise Institute, a moderately conservative think tank in Washington, sought to illuminate the issue by asking eight established China watchers for their judgments. Their responses in AEI's online magazine, The American, ranged from the decidedly pessimistic to the cautiously optimistic. "Nobody knows" might be the safest guess.

Blumenthal, a China scholar at AEI itself, contended: "No one should be under any illusion that the Olympics will pry China open." He argued that everyone has "legitimate concerns about terrorist threats during the Olympics. The problem is that the CCP's (Chinese Communist Party) definition of 'terrorist' includes Tibetans and Uighurs agitating for greater religious and cultural freedom."

An Australian scholar at University of Technology, Sydney, David Goodman, wrote that the games "will showcase the achievements of economic liberalization" over the last three decades." Even so, he said, "it is unlikely that the Games will expedite China's social liberalization." Political change in China "is unlikely absent a major reform movement within the CCP, a state crisis and widespread unrest."

David Kang, professor of government at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, said: "Nobody has any idea whether or when China will become democratic, whether or when China's economic and intellectual rights will match its GDP (gross domestic product) growth, or whether the CCP can 'muddle through' for the next generation."

Another Australian, and a prolific writer on China, Ross Terrill, was pithy: "The Beijing Games will display China, not change it." During the games, he said, "the Chinese regime will do what it takes to put on a good show."

Terrill contended: "In the short term, freedom will shrink for those Chinese who are always on the threshold of repression" because of an authoritarian clampdown. Long term, "there may be a slight gain in freedom's prospects, as sometimes occurs when the Chinese party-state has to rub shoulders with non-authoritarians."

Minxin Pei, a Chinese scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, wrote: "With the Olympics approaching, the instinct of the Chinese government is not to relax political control but to strengthen its 'stability-enhancing' capabilities and ensure that the Beijing Olympics will not be tarnished by unwelcome incidents of political protest or social unrest."

On the other side, Jacques deLisle of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia said marginal change was "more likely than the bleak vision of a Beijing Olympiad reminiscent of the 1936 Berlin Games, which handed an odious host regime a propaganda coup." He referred to the Nazi German dictatorship of Adolf Hitler.

James Dorn, a China specialist at the libertarian Cato Institute, argued: "The Olympics will allow the Chinese to take pride in their progress and to show the rest of the world that China is a peaceful rising power, not an inevitable enemy of the West."

An Indian scholar who teaches at the Harvard Business School, Tarun Khanna, maintained: "The Olympics offer another opportunity to continue China's bridging to the world." He wrote: "During the Olympics, the government promised limited press freedoms in return for restraint exercised by foreign journalists. But it is hard to let this press freedom genie out of the bottle only partially."

Both Pei and Terrill cautioned that outside pressures on China during the games would probably backfire, making the government more repressive. "Indeed," Pei wrote, "there is a real risk that the cause of freedom in China might suffer a further setback due to such a nationalist-populist backlash."

In publishing these judgments, AEI suggested the Olympics would be "as much a political event as an athletic spectacle." With such appraisals around the world, it might be better said that the Olympics will be "as much a political spectacle as an athletic event."

Richard Halloran is a Honolulu-based journalist and former New York Times correspondent in Asia. His column appears weekly in Sunday's Focus section.