One month from now, and athletes are lined up for the start of the men's 100m final. As the tension rises, along with the flexed muscles, what would happen should a protester run across the track carrying a Tibetan flag, or if a group of Californian students unveiled a Free Tibet banner at the end of the race?

Would it appear on television back home? The answer to that question appears easy at first: the International Olympic Committee says that all events are to be shown live, and broadcasters with the correct rights can have cameras that will allow transmission of what is happening live in the stadium - both political and sporting - for viewers back home. Britons and Americans, of course, would expect nothing less from the BBC or NBC.

But it is a bit more complicated than that. Up to 30,000 journalists are expected to descend on China during August and at least a third will not be there to report on the Games. The Chinese promised a few months ago that Western journalists could travel and operate freely around the country (except Tibet) and that they could write and film as they saw fit.

With the new freedom due to run out in October, the August Games represent a unique opportunity for unfettered reporting in the world's most populous country - and perhaps some unfettered troublemaking too. Imagine what could happen if, in another part of China, a journalist from a reputable newspaper or broadcaster got themselves arrested while covering a sudden, violent confrontation between the police, or the army, and demonstrators.

Veteran reporters on China wonder whether the authorities are really geared up to cope with coverage that could possibly be construed as provocative. So far though, this liberal reporting policy has worked fairly well as shown by the international sympathy that followed the coverage of the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake.

But this week's decision to restrict live filming at Tiananmen Square shows official jitters: the 1989 protests and massacre remain one of the areas that China is most sensitive about.

However, it is patronising to assume the challenges are all for China, and whether it can adapt to the demands of the Western media. Broadcasters and newspapers face other pressures and not necessarily in objectively reporting the story they want. They must also consider the 1.3 billion Chinese viewers who live in a country where the dominant mood is one of proud patriotism: any criticism by Western news organisations might not be so readily accepted. That means “watch out”, as a series of spring time skirmishes have shown.

Few people in China are allowed to watch the BBC or CNN or read English newspapers, but that is irrelevant. In March, the website anti-cnn.com appeared “to expose the lies and distortions in the Western media” and criticised what it considered to be hostile reporting. That site, significantly, could not be uploaded yesterday, but the underlying sentiment remains.

The output of all large Western broadcasters and newspapers is closely monitored and anything deemed disagreeable (regardless of whether it is based inside or outside the country) is made public in China, which in turn provokes public criticism.

Jane Macartney, the China correspondent of The Times, received a barrage of hostile calls in March from people complaining about a comparison made by another Times columnist about the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the Beijing Games. Was that orchestrated? Perhaps it was. But once Chinese people learnt of the offending article much of that anger was genuine.

CNN suffered the worst and had its reputation among the Chinese shattered after commentator Jack Cafferty said in April that China was being run by “basically, the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the past 50 years”. A simplistic comment, perhaps, but this is a commentator who specialises in being provocative. It took two apologies from CNN to placate the Chinese Government by which time the damage was done. A journalist reporting on the Sichuan disaster found rural families asking: “Are you CNN?” before agreeing to be interviewed.

Who can tell what will happen during the Olympics but neither the foreign media nor the Chinese are looking for a fight. That doesn't mean that Western media coverage won't still be closely monitored and scrutinised. Such is the significance of the Olympics that this “working relationship” between news organisations and China will define relations for a long time to come.

If China were ever to open up to individual Western media organisations, how the next six weeks goes could be crucial in determining which companies end up doing well in China and which do not. That does not mean there will be corporate censorship - neither journalists nor viewers back home would care for that. But it still seems much too easy to provoke the Chinese - even a simple remark or sentence could have all sorts of unintended consequences.

Interesting times, as the Chinese curse has it, lie ahead.

dan.sabbagh@thetimes.co.uk

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