U.S. speed skating gold medalist Joey Cheek said he was “shocked” at the revocation of his visa by Chinese authorities. Cheek, who donated the $35,000 he won in bonuses from the U.S. Olympic Committee for winning two medals at the Turin Games, is the president and co-founder of Team Darfur, a group of athletes formed to convince countries like China to help end the ethnic killings in Sudan.

But barring Cheek from the Games shows once again shows once again the two faces of China continually shows the world. It has, as former NPR China correspondent Rob Gifford says, led to a division among the China watchers between the “Panda Huggers” and “Dragon Slayers.” The huggers say China is doing wonderfully and isn’t a threat to anyone. The slayers say China threatens everyone and needs to be contained.

Yes, Gifford says, there is an economic boom in China. But he points out the vast majority of people have no access to it. If you need money to have power in the United States, he postulates you need power to get money.

“Just go a mile from the neon road of the Bund and Nanjing Road [in Shanghai] and you will find thousands of people living on $40 per month,” Gifford writes in his 2007 book China Road. “They have no health insurance and if they become really sick, all they can do is go home and die.”

Yet the World Bank says China is doing something unheard of, lifting 400 million people above the poverty line since 1978. That’s more than the entire population of South America.

“China messes with my head every day,” said Gifford, who is fluent in Chinese. “One day I think it really is going to take over the world, and that the Chinese government is doing the most extraordinary thing the planet has ever witnessed [by lifting so many out of poverty.] The next day it will all seem built on sand and I expect it to all come tumbling down around us.

“I’ll be disgusted at the way the Communist Party treats its people and shocked at the sheer cost of it all, the human cost, which seems acceptable to the government in everything it does.”

Cheek’s ban from China, the attempt by Chinese officials to block certain Web sites from the media in Beijing, unrest in the country’s mostly-Muslim Xinjiang province and continued human rights issues concerning Tibet shows the dark side of these Olympic Games—and we haven’t even had the Opening Ceremonies yet.