Hollywood får Kina att agera i Sudan

Farrow, a good-will ambassador for the United Nations Children's Fund, has played a crucial role, starting a campaign last month to label the Games in Beijing the "Genocide Olympics" and calling on corporate sponsors and even Spielberg, who is an artistic adviser to China for the Games, to publicly exhort China to do something about Darfur. In a March 28 Op-Ed article in The Wall Street Journal, she warned Spielberg that he could "go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games," a reference to a German filmmaker who made Nazi propaganda films.

Four days later, Spielberg sent a letter to President Hu Jintao of China, condemning the killings in Darfur and asking the Chinese government to use its influence in the region "to bring an end to the human suffering there," according to Spielberg's spokesman, Marvin Levy.

China soon dispatched Zhai to Darfur, a turnaround that served as a classic study of how a pressure campaign, aimed to strike Beijing in a vulnerable spot at a vulnerable time, could accomplish what years of diplomacy could not.