We all knew China's population was graying rapidly, but Wednesday authorities drove home the point by sentencing two elderly women to the gulag. Wu Dianyuan and Wang Xiuying are both citizens in their late 70's who walk using canes; Wang is partially blind.  They'd applied for permission to protest in one of the three government-designated "protest corners" in  Beijing public parks. Their grievance is a common one: that they received inadequate compensation for their homes which were demolished in a recent pre-Games wave of urban redevelopment. Permission to protest was not granted; none of at least 77 applicants have received permission, in fact. Then the two elderly ladies each received a suspended sentence of one year of "re-education through labor", an extra-judicial punishment that doesn't require the decision of a court judge.

The Olympics is the world's greatest sports contest and it'd be strange to come to the world's greatest sporting event, or even simply have it arrive on the doorstep as has happened for those of us who live in Beijing year-round, without catching any sport. So today, I headed for the men's diving finals. They were battling for the gold medal for synchronized pair-diving off the 10 meter platform (the highest board, if like me you're new to this).

The event was a gold medal chance for one of the youngest athletes in the Beijing Olympics, 14-year old schoolboy Thomas Daley from the UK. He lost, ending last among the eight teams along with his diving partner Blake Aldridge, aged 26. The Chinese pair won, and the US team bumped along in the middle through all six dives in the contest. When it was over, the US duo was placed fifth.

An ugly spat then erupted between the British prodigy and his partner after the event as Aldridge blamed his much younger team-mate for their dismal ranking. "Tom was very nervous, more so than ever before. I think he really struggled to get through the competition, and as his partner it was hard for me to get up there and try and ease him into it," Aldridge said.

Aldridge revealed that 14-year old had "had a pop" at him before their final dive. "When we were sitting down I saw my mum in the audience and I asked her to give me a call but Tom went to me: 'What are you on the phone for? We're in a competition and we've got another dive to do'", Aldridge said. "That's just Tom being over-nervous. That's how it was today. Tom should not be worrying about what I'm doing. Today he was worrying about everyone and everything and for me that is really the sole reason why he didn't perform today." Nonetheless, even the pair's previous personal best of 446 points wouldn't have got them the bronze today.

Though he's young, Daley (still only an inch over 5 feet tall) showed that he's already seasoned at batting off journalists. "It was a great experience....It just didn't happen for us today", he said smoothly. He admitted to being "very nervous" - as indeed he was. He could be seen sucking in air before dives, but insisted he'd enjoyed himself, learned valuable lessons for the 2012 Games and was looking forward to competing in the individual 10 meter platform event. Aldridge is not competing in any other events in Beijing which might explain the depth of his disappointment. "For me, my time is now to get a medal. I believe I'll still be around for 2012, but diving's evolved so much," he said. 

American Thomas Finchum, 18, said took much the same diplomatic line at the young Brit by the way: "We stayed consistent...we didn't miss anything. We just didn't hit it to the best of our potential." It seems to be the soundbite of choice when you lose.

The Chinese were always hot favorites to win. They grabbed the lead with their first dive, and never lost it. The real battle was for silver and bronze. The Russian pair was in second place for most of the contest, but Dmitriy Dobroskok wobbled on the fifth dive and entered the water with his legs flipped back. It was a technical error that couldn't be blamed on nerves, he said ruefully afterward. As a result, the German pairing of Patrick Hausding and Sascha Klein scooped Germany's first silver medal of the Games.

It was my first time inside the Water Cube, a magnificent building that glows blue on the outside as light shifts across the giant bubbles that make up its polyurethane surface. Inside, it's smoothly cool, transparent and neutral, unlike the bitter rows going on inside its walls. 

It's not the only place in this giant country where tensions are high but inside the bubble of Olympic politics and sporting rivalry it's hard to remember there are other sources of friction. China is suffering its worst spate of terrorist attacks in years, for instance. State media reported that 10 militants and a security guard died in suicide bombings and a shootout in Kuqa in Xinjiang province in western China on Sunday and "dozens of unexploded bomb devices" were seized.  While the body count suggests the police won this round, a week ago it was the authorities who got hit hardest when 16 border guards died in explosions elsewhere in Xinjiang. The Chinese authorities blame separatists in the largely Muslim region. 

It also emerged over the weekend that Zeng Jinyan, the wife of a jailed dissident, disappeared on the day before the magnificent Olympic Games opening ceremony. The Chinese Human Rights Defenders group says it fears she "has been taken into police custody and might be mistreated." She was under house arrest and her husband Hu Jia is serving a three and a half year jail term for inciting subversion after criticizing China's human rights record in online testimony to the European Parliament.

Today I decamped at dawn to watch the torch relay in you-know-which-famous-square. A couple dozen other journalists and I were herded to a spot facing Mao’s portrait. We waited and waited. The last time I’d waited that long in that place, that early in the morning, was in 1989 during a brief and ill-fated Beijing Spring.

Waiting for Yao Ming and the torch relay

Back then I was waiting for Chinese police to come clear the square of hundreds of youthful protesters who’d hung colorful silk banners off official flagpoles in front of the granite obelisk known as the Monument to the People’s Heroes. (Chinese look down on your political movement if you don’t have flags made of luxuriant silk, and if you don’t

 
Aritz Parra/AP

The first skirmishes in the guerrilla war between Chinese authorities and human rights protesters took place on Wednesday. Plenty of what China doesn't want to happen has happened here today, but so far it's been small-scale, with a scrappy, subterranean feel, and very little of it has occurred in public. By the end of the afternoon, four Free Tibet protesters had been detained and a film show was canceled. Human rights groups staged at least four protests.

The day's most successful stunt came from Students for a Free Tibet. Two men--American Phil Bartell and Briton Iain Thom--climbed pylons near the showcase Bird's Nest National Stadium at dawn and hung out banners saying "Tibet will be Free" and "One World, One Dream, Free Tibet". Police detained the climbers and their two helpers–one man and one woman–who were acting as spotters at the base of the pylon, and there has been no word of them since. It's likely they've been deported. Despite the small scale of this incident, the stadium is the icon of the Games and will be the site of the opening ceremony on Friday. It's blow to the police for activists to get so close so such a sensitive site.

Free Tibet activists also organized film showings in hotel rooms, notifying reporters by text message. The first show went ahead, attended by Reuters and BBC reporters, but Newsweek's invitation was to the later event in a second hotel. There was a distinctly amateur feel to this occasion as two dozen reporters milled round the lobby of the modest Hotel G (no secrecy here, that's its full name) in east Beijing, trying to gain entry to Room 612. While management insisted that 612's occupant did not want us admitted, reporters dialed the room and were told to come up. After a while, though, Room 612 stopped answering. Seven journalists who did make it inside appeared and said that management had switched off the TV and ordered them out. The UK-based organizers included Dechen Pemba, a Tibetan woman with a British passport who was deported from Beijing in July. Before the film, Pemba gave a 10 minute introduction by video, Reuters reported.

Hotel rooms were a creative theme of the day. If the film show was art-house, the day's third event was more like an art school degree show installation. Selected reporters were invited to go to two hotel rooms a couple of miles apart, locate the room key taped to the back of the "Do not disturb" sign and let themselves inside for a private viewing. What they found, according to a photographer with the Spanish paper El Mundo, were walls daubed with slogans and a life-size black-clad figure laid out on the bed with a splash of red paint at its neck. Daubed directly onto the walls was the slogan "Speak out for those who have no voices", the Beijing 2008 logo and the names of five jailed dissidents. The names in both rooms were the same: AIDS activist Hu Jia, Pastor Zhang Rongliang who supports unregistered churches or "house churches", journalist Shi Tao, human rights activist and lawyer Guo Feixiong, and Falungong member Xu Na. There was no sign of the organizers (who presumably paid cash for their rooms) according to Richard Spencer of the UK-based newspaper The Daily Telegraph. It's not clear who organized these spectacles.

These guerrilla actions are small scale affairs, but the Games haven't started yet. There almost certainly will be more protests in the days ahead.

The Hotel G was shut down after this incident, according to an email from the film show's organizers. "According to many sources the guests of Hotel G. were forced to leave their hotel and find other places for the coming night," it said.