Over there to the right of these words is a picture from NASA called "Eastern China Pollution." Yes, you can't actually see the Great Wall from space but you can see the air pollution over it.

So the question for traveling families and other visitors becomes, "Do I have to pack breathing equipment?"

Officials have been closing factories and taking unimaginable numbers of cars off the streets, and local activists have been tucked quietly away in preparation for the 2008 Olympics.

Even so, Jacques Rogge, head of the International Olympic Committee, has warned that duration events may have to be postponed because no country wants to bring home marathoners with bronchial toxicemia (a pollution-based disease I just made up).

(Which is not to say there aren't real illnesses you get from breathing too much air pollution, as Guangzhou's traffic cops could attest. Or even this humble typist, whose lungs still remember the bout with pneumonia that came along when Daughter wriggled adorably into his life.)

Luckily for most adopting parents (and breathing people everywhere), the Olympics is the Biggest Game to hit China for a long time, and it's made pollution take precedence over everything, since the Olympics mean new visitors and new visitors mean new money (even though some visitors are more outspoken than others when it comes to things like human rights).

(And no, you probably couldn't see the banner they hung from space, either.)

Some visitors, of course, won't be in country for sporting events at all, but will be heading out to various welfare institutes to meet very small national representatives who need diaper changes and warm bottles at regular intervals.

To us, the Olympics might be nothing more than an inconvenience - a kink in our otherwise arcane and labyrinthine travel plans. Clear skies? Lovely. Where'd you pack the baby wipes?

But there's more than just a symbolic weight behind the Big Game, and travel might be restricted in some more profound ways. (Might!) As Tiananmen has seen celebrations marking the one-year countdown to the Olympics, Beijing has also been making some public noises that have financial commentators actually using the T.W. words - "trade war." Usually, these are used following the phrase, "I don't think we'll see a...," which is nice, but they've also been followed lately by the phrase, "...but you never know."

Witness warnings that China is considering the "nuclear option", triggering a dollar collapse if America doesn't straighten up and fly right by their lights. It's certainly a thing that has everyone talking - and, for better or worse, your future family is viewed in some quarters as a diplomatic exercise, and since these are the quarters that issue and approve passports and visas, this means T.W. might as well stand for Travel Worries and Tired of Waiting.

An all-out trade war seems unlikely (war always does), because then China would lose the incredibly valuable export markets for its not terribly sturdy cars, which are being prepared for shipping overseas even....

Oh.

Well.