I get a kick out of this headline, captured this morning from a story on MSNBC which has probably changed by the time you’re reading this, but luckily for you I’ve posted a screen shot of it here.

It has a bizarrely predictive quality, as if MSNBC looked into the future and saw that Beijing will basically sweep all of the games in 2008. What’s so interesting about this is how, unconciously or not, China is playing a larger and larger role in the West’s psyche. As the next great capitalist frontier, there’s a growing willfulness towards the idea that, if China does well, then we all do well. (Granted, there’s a corresponding anti-Sino mentality on the rise too.) I think that sentiment is very much at play here, not only in the Olympic Committee’s decision, but in MSNBC’s double-entendre headline. Get ready for more of it.