It was never going to be an easy ride for China. The murmuring started when the IOC made its controversial decision to award the venue for the Olympic Games in 2008 to Beijing. At an EU parliamentary hearing a Chinese activist said that China had not fulfilled its Olympian promises on human rights. The man was jailed for three-and-a-half years.
Human rights have always been the Big Murmur, but there have been others: China's stand over Darfur and Myannar in particular, its treatment of the Falun Dong, and of Tibet, which led, in April, to protests against the Olympic torch relay in many countries, won her no friends.
May's terrible earthquake earned China some respite, but an Amnesty International report published earlier this week stated quite bluntly that there had been "a continued deterioration" in China's human rights record. Dissenters found themselves being sent for "re-education through labour", a euphemism for keeping them away from the media and inside a camp.
That having been said, or perhaps because of that, China has spent lavishly to make the Games an event that will not quickly be forgotten. It has built the world's biggest international airport terminal, a visitor's first impression of a land which, 30 years ago, could boast only of its military power and, less happily, displayed its communist drabness in ill-fitting grey tunics, grey trousers and pretty well grey everything. That is no longer the case today. For all its authoritarianism, China has opened itself to the world and the world was only too pleased to step in, invest and contribute to an economy that may well become, in a decade or two, the most powerful in the world.
Nobody needs doubt that today's opening ceremony will be breathtakingly spectacular. A spirit of regimentation and nationalism will see to that. But there will be far more substance than that as the Games unfold and medals start to be won. It is generally thought that China will bag the largest number of golds. This is a far cry from 1984 when China won its first and only gold and the US won the largest number of gold medals in its history.
The country that competed unsuccessfully in 1936 and 1948, when Mao had not yet declared China a communist republic, and without success again in 1952, stopped taking part in the Games until 1980 - when Mao was dead and China embarked, slowly and painfully, on its long journey to become a modern economy. By 2004, a new spirit had set in. Not only had the Dragon been roused; China was strutting its stuff in the global market. That year, in Athens, China was not quite neck and neck with the US but it was breathing down America's neck. Received wisdom has it that in this Olympiad, China will be the victor ludorum.
In terms of population, this makes sense. With more than a billion people to choose from China has a quantitive start. The discipline it asserts on those who show promise from the cradle to the track, ensures that the quality would not be lacking. With 10,700 competitors from more than 200 countries taking part, many records will be broken but there is one event above all others that will be watched with excitement and anxiety - the basketball match between the US and China. Will America's idols fail this all-American test?
Keep watching.