You know the world is descending into a mad fit of Olympian proportions when Peter Mandelson sounds like the voice of reason. This week the old new Labour fixer called threats to boycott the Beijing Olympics a “political gimmick”, and cautioned against trying to humiliate China. Give that creepy Euro commissioner a medal for common sense.

Of course, Mandelson's speech on the eve of a trade mission to China was itself a political gimmick. So was Beijing's bid to host the Olympics, and London's for 2012. The bid to humiliate China, however, is in a class of its own. It has become a one-size-fits-all political gimmick for anybody who wants to promote any cause anywhere in the world. Right and Left, economists and environmentalists, Buddhist leaders and Catholic bishops have all embraced the new Olympic spirit: that it's the taking part in running down the Chinese that matters.

China is now blamed for everything from human rights abuses, war and genocide to pollution, abortion and rising food prices (how dare those Asian Olivers want to eat more!). Students of doom-mongering may have assumed that man-made global warming was responsible for every woe. Now it seems that the Chinese are to blame for climate change, too.

I carry no torch for the Beijing authorities, but neither do I want to see the Olympic torch exploited as an all-purpose weapon with which to beat down the uppity Chinese. Those out to humiliate China seem unconerned about recycling toxic old prejudices. For example, today's attacks on the Chinese for polluting the planet might seem to echo one view of them a century ago as “racial, physical and social pollutants”. And anybody repeating the bonkers mantra that Beijing 2008 will rerun “the 1936 Nazi Olympics” might reconsider some other racial views of that era, such as Winston Churchill's considered opinion that “Chinks” and “dirty baboos” in the East needed a good thrashing with “the sjambok”.

The Olympic furore is underpinned by fears about the rise of China at a time when, if we did boycott Chinese goods, there really would be a recession on the high street. In a saner world it would surely be seen as a good thing that the Chinese economy is booming - and subsidising the West - and that China is investing in roads, railways and hospitals in Africa; makes a change from UK charities sending the odd goat. But to suggest so today is to risk being seen as mad - or worse, Mandelson[].

Back with British winners of medals for common sense, Paula Radcliffe says that she is more worried about the marathon runner's old enemies of heat and humidity than about air pollution in Beijing. It reminded me of Steve Cram's response when a TV interviewer asked if he could handle the Los Angeles smog at the 1984 Olympics: “I'm from Sunderland - it seems very nice here.”

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