For two weeks and more, China's stance on questions about its politics and policies has been straightforward: It's the Olympics, and we're not talking about these things.
That changed Thursday at the Beijing organizing committee's last regularly scheduled daily news conference Thursday, three days before the end of the Games. The persistent and polite refusal to answer such questions gave way to the usual state of affairs at news conferences with Chinese officials — emphatic, calibrated answers about the country's most sensitive situations.
