Welcome to the Olympics

AFP

IT HAS become a public-relations quagmire and China is struggling to escape. Senior Western diplomats have been summoned to the Chinese foreign ministry to watch gory videos of atrocities allegedly committed by Tibetan rioters. Select foreign journalists have been invited to Tibet to see the damage. Officials are suddenly less certain that this summer's Olympic games in Beijing will be the diplomatic triumph they had craved.

On March 25th, a fortnight after the start of the biggest wave of anti-Chinese unrest in Tibet for nearly 50 years, France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, said he could not rule out boycotting the opening ceremony of the games on August 8th because of the crackdown. Only a few hours earlier Li Zhanjun, who speaks for Beijing's Olympic organisers, had been boasting about how many foreign leaders and members of royalty would attend: over 100, he said, compared with 60-odd at the 2004 games in Athens.

Thousands of troops are keeping a tight grip on Lhasa, which was swept by ethnic violence by Tibetans against Han Chinese on March 14th and 15th. But other areas of Tibet and ethnic-Tibetan regions close to it remain volatile. On March 24th police opened fire during a clash between Tibetan protesters and police in Garze prefecture of Sichuan province, which adjoins Tibet. China said one policeman was killed and several others injured by protesters armed with knives and stones. It said the police fired warning shots to disperse them. Tibetan activists in India said the shooting itself killed one person and critically wounded another. Reuters reported that hundreds of people joined a sit-in protest in Xinghai county in Qinghai province on March 25th after anti-riot police stopped them from staging a march.

The unrest is being fuelled by the Olympics. Many Tibetans see the games as a chance to highlight their grievances and put pressure on the authorities to relax religious and political controls. As China pours more security forces into the region, foreign human-rights activists and Tibetans living outside China are stepping up their protests. An international relay of the Olympic flame provides a ready target. A flame-lighting ceremony in Olympia, Greece, on March 24th was briefly disrupted by a protest by three members of a French press-freedom lobby, Reporters Without Borders. A Tibetan woman lay on the ground blocking the torch-relay route.

China's main worry is about torch-carrying events in Tibet and neighbouring areas in May and June. Mr Li, the spokesman, says foreign journalists will be invited to cover these and that plans remain unchanged despite the recent unrest. He says there is “no market” in China for calls to disrupt them. Few, however, expect a rapid easing of the tight security measures in Lhasa. The authorities say that more than 280 people in the city have handed themselves over to the police since the rioting there and another 380 in Aba prefecture in Sichuan, the scene of several days of unrest after the violence in Lhasa. But the police are still hunting for suspects.

It is highly unlikely that Tibet will be open to more than occasional, tightly controlled, groups of foreign correspondents in the months ahead. On March 26th a group of two dozen reporters (selected by officials) was allowed to visit Lhasa, the first such tour since the rioting. They were closely shepherded at all times. Even so, their visit to the Jokhang temple, the city's holiest shrine, was disrupted by a group of monks screaming that there was no religious freedom in Tibet and that the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader, was not to blame for the recent violence. Despite promises to make China more open to journalists in the build-up to the games, the authorities are turning foreign reporters away from other protest-hit areas.

China's own press has accused foreign journalists of distorting events in Tibet by overstating the vehemence of the crackdown and failing to highlight what was indeed racial violence unleashed by Tibetans in Lhasa. They have heaped abuse on the “Dalai Lama clique” for allegedly organising the unrest, but have played down the Dalai Lama's threats to resign should Tibetans continue to use violence.

Western diplomats say that, since the Lhasa riots, foreign ambassadors based in Beijing have been called by China's foreign ministry at all hours to attend briefings intended to convey the brutality of rioters. One group was made to watch a lengthy video, which showed the leg of a policeman with a large piece of flesh gouged out of it and the charred remains of five people, including an eight-month-old boy, killed when a motorcycle shop was set on fire. Some foreign journalists in Beijing were invited to a press conference by the Ministry of Public Security, at which a spokeswoman's voice faltered with apparent emotion as she described these deaths. She left without taking questions.

There is little sign that Chinese officials are considering any imaginative solutions to Tibet's malaise. In a telephone conversation with President George Bush on March 26th, China's president, Hu Jintao, said China was willing to “continue contacts” with the Dalai Lama. But he repeated the usual precondition, that he forgoes demands for independence (he has, in fact) and added another, that he stops “activities to fan and mastermind violent activities” and efforts to “sabotage” the Olympics. The Dalai Lama has denied any involvement. The last round of informal contacts between his representatives and China was held last July.

Meng Jianzhu, China's most senior police official, also toured Lhasa on March 23rd and 24th. His words were not encouraging. Monasteries, he said, should step up “patriotic education”—ie, a much resented government-led campaign that requires monks to state their rejection of the Dalai Lama, who is hugely revered in Tibet.

Chinese officials have also been angered by Britain's prime minister, Gordon Brown. On March 19th, after the rioting in Lhasa, he announced he would meet the Dalai Lama when he tours Britain in May. China believes that the Dalai Lama's meetings with Western leaders, including Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, in September and President George Bush in October, helped to inspire anti-Chinese dissidents in Tibet. One Chinese official says demands by Britain and other Western countries for direct talks between China and the Dalai Lama himself would be hard to meet because of the depth of Chinese public antagonism (inspired by official propaganda) towards the Dalai Lama in the wake of Lhasa's racial attacks.

There is relief in Beijing that no Western government has yet called for a boycott of the opening ceremony of the games, let alone of the event itself. But officials are acutely aware that Tibet grips public attention in the West far more than China's connections with Sudan—hitherto the main stalking horse of critics of Beijing's Olympics. A Western diplomat says China would have to start “mowing people down in the streets” to precipitate government-led boycotts of the games. This discounts the dozens who exiled Tibetans say have already died in the crackdown. And the coming months will provide much opportunity for miscalculation by China in its handling of Tibetan unrest.