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It was unprecedented to have President Hu Jintao take foreign correspondents to task in their reporting of the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing. Hu urged them to cover and report China and the games in objective ways. With over 20,000 journalists from around the world descending on Beijing, the middle kingdom will be under the world's microscope for at least the next three weeks until the end of August and beyond. Media phobia is common, not only in China, but also among leaders and ruling parties elsewhere when their countries are closely scrutinised by outsiders.

China is one of the world's oldest civilisations, dating back 5,000 years. So it should not be afraid of the foreign media. After all, China has come far; the country has progressed and become richer. Its political and economic influences have grown meteorically. It has been a time-tested destiny. Indeed, Beijing is not facing a critical foreign press for the first time with the summer games. When the country embarked on its modernisation drive in the late 1980s, it was heavily ridiculed by outsiders because of the perceived stoicism of the ruling Communist Party. Now, nearly three decades have elapsed and China's progress and two-digit economic growth are the envy of the international community. In the next decade it will easily become the world's leading economy.

When China won the right to host the Olympics, nobody thought it would be possible. But Beijing has shown that with commitment and effort, China can achieve anything. Now with only three days to go, the foreign press are doing what they do best - reporting on the games as well as other aspects of China. That is the beauty of the games because non-sporting activities become intertwined with the event.

Hu told the foreign press that the Olympics should not be politicised. It was easy for him to say. In the history of the games, politicisation has been common. The US boycotted the games in Moscow in 1980 and in return the Soviet Union was absent from the Los Angeles games in 1984. In history the event has sometimes been a show of pure politics. During the 1933 games, the Nazis wanted to prove Aryan supremacy, only to have a black American athlete, Jesse Owens, destroy that dream.

Of course, news coverage in the coming days and weeks will be mixed, especially when assessing the current air quality in Beijing. When the games start, there will be other issues such as Chinese sports professionalism and judging quality. Indeed, the Chinese authorities should learn from the past that news censorship is not possible. During the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989, China received international condemnation for cracking down on the pro-democracy movement. Negative media reports on the violent crackdown created a deep official concern about the media's role. At that time, satellite TV reports became a lethal reporting instrument.

Now, it is the Internet that connects billions of people. So it would be futile for the Chinese authorities to block any news. The blocking of "undesirable" websites, as Beijing has constantly done, cannot be permanent because the flow of information, especially in electronic and digital forms, can be tricky to control. Rerouting information to beat the Internet's firewalls is an art that every civil society organisation is learning to apply with great efficiency.

China should fulfil its commitment under the agreement of the International Olympic Committee without fail. Otherwise, news about the Olympics will concentrate on the failure of China to comply with the IOC rules rather than the competition itself. Beijing should be more open-minded about the foreign press. At the end of the day, when the dust settles, China will realise that amid negative reports there will be positive news about its great achievements. That will be sufficient to make up for all the unfavourable reports. Assessing the media, especially the international media, cannot be done in a moment. It takes long years, even decades, to do so.