At the Olympics, a people without a team sees their very existence at stake. China could win every medal but still lose the respect of the world.

Thanks to Hollywood’s wish to cultivate a market of 1.3 billion moviegoers, America’s latest pop-cultural images of China are cute as a button. Think Mulan, terracotta soldiers (in this summer’s Mummy sequel) and Kung Fu Panda.
History calls other pictures to mind, like a lone protestor facing off with a tank in Tiananmen Square, the Red Menace of the 1950s and the ongoing oppression in Tibet.
Those images were supposed to be erased by the pageantry of the Beijing Olympics. As it turned out, however, hosting the games exposed one of the world’s least transparent nations to very close inspection—at an exquisitely sensitive moment—by an international press grown ravenous with unrequited curiosity.
What was China thinking?

Up in Smog
The theory was appealing. By hosting the games, China could remind the world of its capacity to execute huge infrastructure projects (the Great Wall, Three Gorges Dam; now Bird’s Nest Stadium, the Water Cube and $40 billion in other civic improvements). At the same time, they could advertise China as not only an economic giant, but as a thoroughly domesticated one, perfectly safe for foreigners. And, of course, foreign investment.
That was the idea in 2001. In seven years, they figured, they could even clean up the air in Beijing.
This idea failed to anticipate China’s alliance with the government in Darfur, a persistently weak grip on human rights and the rule of law at home, and exports of poisonous toys and dangerous medicines. And the persistence of athlete-choking smog, outside as well as inside Olympic venues, produced unwanted images of athletes wearing masks in order to breathe fresher air.
Though the Chinese don’t like it, the Olympic torch has become a beacon for China’s restive ethnic populations. From Tibetan protestors in the U.S. designating the opening days of the Olympics as “Tibetan Flag Week” to Uygur separatists killing 16 policemen, the world is getting a lesson in Chinese demographics.Watch a video interview with Mathieu Ricard, the Dalai Lama’s sometime French translator, on Tibet’s heartbreak.
The Torch Lights a Fuse
Kung Fu Panda and Olympics pageantry aside, no picture of China is fresher in American minds than that of the People’s Armed Police (PAP), a paramilitary force trained for deployment against political demonstrations, facing off against Tibetan monks last spring.
The wave of protests began on March 10, the 49th anniversary of an uprising against China’s takeover of Tibet. Although the protests were meant to force the release of five imprisoned monks whose crime was to celebrate the Dalai Lama’s receipt of a Congressional Gold Medal from President Bush, it was peaceful. Police had obviously been instructed to use restraint.

Later that day, 15 monks calling for independence unfurled the prohibited Tibetan flag in a square in the center of Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. The last time this happened, in 1988, the two men holding the flag were shot dead. This time, the monks were arrested.

Next day, 500 monks marched to protest those arrests. The PAP briefly released tear gas but took no further action, and allowed the monks to hold a sit-in.
Over the next two weeks, there were dozens of protests throughout China and around the world, some of them violent. The casualty count is unknown.
Thanks to the Dalai Lama and his many admirers in the U.S., the Tibet protests achieved political traction in this election year. John McCain recently met with the Dalai Lama in Aspen, Colo., and Barack Obama released a letter of support for the Tibetan cause. (The Chinese response was to remind the world that their view is the Dalai Lama is trying to split China.)

The candidate’s gestures reflect America’s heart more than its national interest. The fact is that the U.S. is unlikely to have any effect on the cause of the Tibetans or any other ethnic minority in China. One thing we can do is try to understand.
The first step is to recognize that the situation in both China and Tibet is more complicated than the partisans on either side want to admit.

In our interactive timeline, find out about the tortured last half-century that has shaped the political tensions in Tibet.
License to Reincarnate
“It has been more than 50 years since Tibet was invaded,” says author Mathieu Ricard, the Dalai Lama’s sometime French translator. “According to international law, it is an occupied nation.”
The U.S. government sees it differently.
American policy—one of whose priorities is engagement with China—considers Tibet to be Chinese territory. At the same time, the U.S. supports Tibetans’ claims to cultural and religious freedoms, among other basic human rights.
Few outside China would deny that those rights have been grossly violated.
Monks are forced to renounce the Dalai Lama, and monasteries are closely monitored. Since 2006, monks have actually had to petition the state for the right to be reincarnated. Party members must foreswear religious observance. Infractions and complaints are met with peremptory arrest.
However, the real engine of change has been Beijing’s sowing of rapid economic development, which is quickly erasing Tibet’s distinctive characteristics. Thanks to the increasing affluence of the Tibetan plateau and a new train from Qinghai that began running in 2007, there has been a vast inflow of Han Chinese.
The Han—not the native Tibetans—have reaped the development windfall.
“The root [problem] is that we Tibetans are distinct from the Chinese,” says Rinchen Dharlo, president of the Tibet Fund and a longtime representative of the Dalai Lama in North America. “We have our own culture, our own way of life, our own language. Right now, Tibetans are losing that identity. We are becoming a minority in our own country.”
Newly flooded with cash and increasingly populous, the ancient capital of Lhasa has sprouted hundreds of karaoke bars and brothels, where patrons tend to be Han Chinese. The prostitutes are drawn from other ethnic groups, including Tibetans. Increasingly, Lhasa is a Chinese—not a Tibetan—boomtown.

Watch a video interview with Mathiew Ricard, the Dalai Lama’s sometime French translator, on why the Tibetans finally erupted. Also, watch an interview with Rinchen Dharlo, president of the Tibet Fund, on life for Tibetans under Communist Rule.

An Inconvenient Truth
The picture is complicated by the fact that the worst violence was a rampage by Tibetans against Chinese people and businesses in Lhasa, an incident known throughout China by its date, “3/14.”
Police were forced to retreat from central Lhasa when an angry crowd of young Tibetan men began showering them with stones and Molotov cocktails. They moved on to burn a thousand Chinese-owned shops. A dozen people were burned alive in their hiding places, and a half-dozen others died from beatings.
What happened when the PAP responded is unclear, as the city was closed to journalists. Tibetan sources say 80 Tibetans were killed. Beijing insists police never opened fire. Still, authorities admit 1,000 Tibetans were detained, and a local party official promises the guilty will get their due with dispatch—“quick trial, quick execution.”
The Dalai Lama’s first response was to call for an investigation of China’s “genocide” against Tibetans. He also reiterated his position that Tibet needs not independence but autonomy within a Chinese federation.
His failure to achieve any progress toward that in talks with officials in Beijing, however, has encouraged those who believe that China will not be moved without violent revolt. Meanwhile, more Han Chinese get off the train in Tibet every day, fanning out across the country to create a new demographic fact of life. Not only culturally but also numerically, Tibetans soon will be (if they are not already) a minority in Tibet.

Watch a video from the demonstrations in Tibet on March 14, 2008.
Signs of Movement?
As both the Chinese leadership and the Dalai Lama are aware, he is running out of time to make a deal.
Trying to preempt an increasingly radical line among the Tibetans in China and in his exile community in Dharamsala, India, he has already modified his demand for Tibetan autonomy to allow for continued rule by the Communist Party, renouncing his hopes for local democracy as well as the “one nation, two systems” formula that covers Hong Kong.
To make further progress, he will probably have to make territorial concessions as well. What is now called the Tibetan Autonomous Region is the area ruled by the Dalai Lama before 1950, and the Chinese are unlikely to accept the current Dalai Lama’s proposed expansion to include Tibetan enclaves in the provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan.
After the Dalai Lama expressed support for victims of the May Sichuan earthquake, the Beijing leadership has shown some openness to what they interpret as a sign of good faith. According to Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times, the Beijing leadership secretly considered allowing him to visit China for a memorial service.
The moment passed, and talks between the Dalai Lama’s representatives and the Chinese government so far have been without result. But the very fact that anyone considered allowing the Dalai Lama to visit China for the first time since he fled in 1959 suggests that Beijing is listening.

At a recent press conference in Sydney, watch a video of the Dalai Lama on the need for compromise.In our interactive graph, learn how the population of China is at war with itself. As the 18 distinct ethnic minorities that have populations of at least 1 million come into conflict with the ethnic Han (the dominant group), tensions rise in several key regions.

The Olympic Option
Tibetans are only one of China’s ethnic minorities. There are 54 others. Taken together, they are a small percentage of a very large pie—only ten percent of China’s total population, but that adds up to quite a bit more than the combined population of the 250 largest U.S. cities, from New York and L.A. to Billings and Wichita Falls.
Small wonder the officials of Beijing worry about stability and unity. “What they are greatly afraid of is what happened in the former Soviet Union, where the republics—when given the chance—simply broke off,” says Dr. Elizabeth Economy, director of Asia Studies for the Council on Foreign Relations.
Despite America’s compassion for the Tibetans’ plight and admiration for the Dalai Lama, there is very little we or the rest of the world can do to help, at least in the short run. China is notoriously protective of its sovereignty, touchy about incursions into its internal affairs and resistant to preachment.
If history is any guide, two scenarios seem most likely: enlightened Chinese leadership conspires with moderation among aggrieved citizens to encourage a safe process of political evolution, or violent cycles of repression and rebellion lead to a chaotic breakdown, with Beijing essentially assuming that demographics and time are on its side.
Only one of them would get a medal.
Watch a video interview with Dr. Elizabeth Economy, director of Asian studies for the Council on Foreign Relations, on the chances for a peaceful resolution.