China's president greeted the Monday arrival of the Olympic flame in Beijing, at the start of what looks certain to be its most controversial journey ever. The risk of the torch relay being ambushed by demonstrators along its 130-day route through 21 cities on five continents has grown since Beijing's clampdown on violent protests in Tibet.

It wouldn't have been a Chinese state occasion without a secret and a rumor. The secret was why the timing of the welcoming ceremony was changed, and the rumor was that it must be for security reasons. China's Olympic organizers say otherwise. They pointed to the early arrival of the plane carrying the torch from Greece, and Beijing's weather forecast portending fog later in the day. While it's certainly true that the ceremony went off smoothly in brilliant sunshine, and the sky clouded later, the whole episode left me wondering.

Been playing cat-and-mouse out West on the Tibet beat, and the cliche resonates on a few too many levels. When your movements are cut off and cornered by shifting, shrinking boundaries, you're prone to feel like just some lab rat in an uncontrolled test of reform. It’s very hard to prove any side right, and much easier to slip into the trap of going wrong. 

Indeed some inconvenient slip-ups have occurred. In turn China's state media machine, along with many hostile Chinese Netizens, have pounced on the Western news media, accusing certain outfits of distorting images of the rioting and condemning the press corps in general for allegedly slanting coverage to demonize China and focus on the victimization of Tibetans. The topic of media perceptions is worthy of debate -- Western media did make some mistakes in recent coverage, including serious photo caption errors. But needless to say,  the government has cropped down its own narrow version of events. The state media lens trains on outbursts of violence by Tibetans, and blocks out government treatment of them before and after the fact.

In an awkwardly timed interview a week and a half ago, Reuters asked a top government media chief in London whether relaxed travel guidelines on foreign correspondents would be extended beyond the time of the Olympics and Paralympics in Beijing. The provisional guidelines, unveiled on Jan. 1, 2007 and due to expire this September, have freed up journalists to work in all regions of China (except for Tibet) without story-specific approvals from local government offices.  Unlike in the past, all that's needed now -- according to the new rules -- is interviewees' consent. "Since this new regulation is so popular," answered State Council Information Office vice-director Cai Mingzhao, “Why should we change it?"

One big reason the regulation needn't be changed is that its implementation still can and does change on the ground. Our boundaries sure have shifted over the last two weeks. Correspondents emerged from Tibetan hot zones with more first-hand coverage of being shut out of those areas than of the areas themselves. Most of those who got somewhere owe it to colleagues who reported back from the front on their run-ins with authorities.

Our story was a little bit of both.

You've read about the press tour of 26 government-selected international correspondents to Lhasa this week.  Now it's the diplomats' turn.  Embassies are abuzz with plans for a diplomatic contingent to visit Lhasa imminently. Will they also witness unscripted moments, like the distraught Jokhang temple monks who disrupted this week's media trip with shouts of "Tibet is not free!"?

The envoys heading Lhasa-ward represent influential nations --  "all the heavyweights," as one diplomat put it -- such as the U.S., Britain, European Commission, Russia, a number of European countries and so forth.

In fact ambassadors in Beijing have been swiveling over Tibet for days now. The Chinese Foreign Ministry have been summoning them in -- even at odd hours, such as late at night or over the weekend -- for meetings and video showings of the Lhasa violence, now dubbed "the 3/14 beating, smashing, looting and burning incident". In it, the camera lingers on grim evidence of ethnic Chinese burned to death or injured by rioting Tibetans, such as the policeman who had a chunk of flesh cut out of his backside.

The other reason diplomats are being summoned is that Chinese authorities are urging their governments to publicly endorse Beijing's response to the Tibetan unrest.  Not long ago the Foreign Ministry announced that 100 nations had sent in such expressions of support.  Here's how this sort of thing happens: at one point Arab League nations' representatives were asked to come  to a meeting. The envoys were told Beijing's side of the story, then informed that China hoped other Muslim nations would publicly back China "the way Sudan has." 

"It's a fascinating peek into China's crisis management style," one diplomat told me recently, "Now we're beginning to see the tit for tat," such as in the case of Sudan where Chinese economic engagement is key to the Khartoum regime's survival. "We can see there's a price to be paid [for China's support]."

The one thing Beijing is desperate to nip in the bud is any move advocating a boycott of the Summer Olympics.  One diplomat has been summoned a handful of times to relay Beijing's warnings against any such measures. This week,  French President Nicolas Sarkozy said he could not rule out the possibility that he might boycott the Games opening ceremony on Aug. 8 due to the Tibet crackdown.

But U.S. President George Bush, who phoned Chinese president Hu Jintao this week to urge a resumption of dialogue with the Dalai Lama, maintains he'll attend the opening ceremony.  U.K. is not likely to make to many waves, either, as London is slated to host the next Summer Olympics. Once upon a time, the lights shone late into the night at the Foreign Ministry headquarters mainly for breaking developments related to big politically taboo topics known as the "three T's and an F" -- Taiwan, Tibet, Tiananmen, and the banned spiritual Falungong sect.  Now, or at least for the next few months, we should refer to "three T's, F and B" -- by adding "boycott" to the alphabet soup.

The Tibetan crisis has brought tragedy to everyone—except, possibly, the ideologues in China's ruling party and military who will now feel free to press for a harder policy line. Here's a commentary from my colleague in Shanghai, Duncan Hewitt, who's lived in China continuously for more than a decade (he first lived here as a student in 1986) and is author of "Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China":

What happened in Lhasa is a tragedy for all sides. It is a tragedy for the Han Chinese settlers, unwitting participants in the great political game of control over Tibet, who had moved there for economic reasons. Their government encouraged them to do so by opening up the railway and the economy and they can now be seen on Chinese state TV grieving for relatives killed and businesses destroyed in the riots.

It is a tragedy for the ordinary Tibetans, whose family members now face stiff punishment  after their frustrations with Chinese rule led them to take part in the violence, whatever its specific causes, or who were struck by the bullets which China now admits police fired in at least one ethnically Tibetan area in Sichuan province.  (China says 19 people were killed, while exile sources now say there are an estimated 140 deaths.) And a tragedy too for the broader population of Tibet who now face a reinvigorated hard line from Tibet's Chinese rulers, summed up by the region's Communist Party boss's denunciation of the Dalai Lama in the kind of undiplomatic language not heard publicly from Chinese officials for years:  'a wolf in monk's robes, a devil with a human face but the heart of a beast," was how Zhang Qingli described the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

It's also a tragedy for the Dalai Lama himself, whose decades of dedication to a non-violent and conciliatory approach to China seem to have fallen on deaf ears among some younger Tibetans inside and outside Tibet - and whose chances of progress in the dialogue with China on which he has long pinned his hopes now look more forlorn than ever.  And it may also look rather tragic from the point of view of China's leaders, who had believed that years of channeling economic growth and investing in infrastructure and 'modernization' in Tibet would dilute the power of religion and traditional culture, and help them put behind them the anti-Chinese anger dating from Beijing's full takeover of Tibet in 1959, and the anti-religious brutality which followed in the Cultural Revolution.

It could also be a tragedy for ethnic harmony in China. The pictures shown on state TV may fuel traditional Chinese suspicions that the Tibetans (and by implication others in remote western regions) are wild and primitive: when, as a student in China in the 1980s, I told people that I was planning to go to Tibet, many looked alarmed and said "don't go - it's very dangerous, they all have guns."   This month's events will reinforce such attitudes, and risk overriding the relative progress in recent years, which have seen growing interest in traditional Tibetan culture among Chinese intellectuals and reports that a few people within the Chinese regime have been willing to countenance a more tolerant approach to the Dalai Lama.  (This was hinted at by the exiled Tibetan leader in his Newsweek interview, when he spoke of Chinese officials sending him messages of support even in the past week.)  

Now more conservative forces are likely to have the upper hand: the military, for whom Tibet's main importance is as a protective buffer against India and other neighboring countries, and the ideologues, who seek to impose Chinese patriotism on the teaching of Tibetan Buddhism.

Ever wondered how Tibetans view the Han Chinese?  Domestic media has focused on Chinese views of Tibetans, highlighting recent tales of barbaric behavior. How rioters carved chunks of flesh from the buttocks of a young police officer in Lhasa is the story many Chinese repeat, a report carried by the state-run Xinhua news agency. Both international and domestic media meanwhile have published reams of copy on Beijing's official diatribes against the  exiled Dalai Lama and his "separatist clique".

Some ordinary Tibetans' perceptions of ethnic Chinese are equally emotional in tone -- but they paint a very different picture. Consider this burst of rage from an educated, multi-lingual Tibetan: "They are a disaster for the world because they destroy everything. They destroy all the forests in Tibet so there are big floods in China and big floods in Bangladesh...they are digging all the minerals, and that's why there are so many landslides. They are killing animals and they're destroying everything, and they still expect Tibetan people can feel grateful."

It's begun. The official Olympic torch-lighting ceremony in Greece was marred by protestors waving a banner showing Olympic rings transformed into handcuffs, and rushing behind Beijing Games Organizing committee head Liu Qi as he presided over the event. Three representatives of the press-freedom group Reporters Without Borders were hustled roughly off the scene by security personnel. RSF is calling on international VIP’s to boycott the Games opening ceremony to protest China’s imprisonment of more than 100 journalists, Netizens and cyber-dissidents.

The relay will become a gauntlet of anti-Beijing protests, as my colleague Mary Hennock and I blogged about earlier. The Olympic flame is slated to pass through 20 countries and 31 Chinese provinces before arriving in Beijing for the Aug. 8 Olympics opening ceremony. Monday Free Darfur activists announced they were mobilizing demonstrations urging China to “extinguish the flames of genocide” in Darfur in San Francisco on April 9, the day the flame passes through the city.

One of Thailand's six torchbearers has withdrawn in protest. Environmentalist Narisa Chakrabongse said she now declined to take part in the relay to "send a strong message to China that the world community could not accept its actions."

Tibetan and U.S. flags are waving everywhere in Dharamsala--and Beijing’s suspicions about the U.S. are just as obvious. The reasons for such distrust include a secret CIA operation in the Himalayas that brought American military support to anti-Chinese Tibetan rebels half a century ago. The effort ended tragically for Tibetans.

Such a bloodstained and shadowy history helps explain why this sleepy Indian hill station was a-twitter Friday. Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, came to town to call on the Dalai Lama, whose government-in-exile is based here. (The trip was scheduled before the Lhasa riots broke out March 10).

International reaction is much more pivotal now than it was in 1989, the last time PLA troops forcibly suppressed large numbers of Lhasa residents. If the global chorus of criticism grows, so will calls for a boycott of the Beijing Olympic Games due to be held Aug. 8-24-- something Beijing officials are desparate to prevent.

Of all the unforgettable Tibet images on the Web this week, the Tibetan horsemen twirling lassos and galloping on cobby little ponies to lay seige to a government building in some podunk corner of Gansu province keeps running through my mind.

Click here to see the video

Less than a week after Lhasa burned, the Beijing Olympics organising committee (BOCOG) is holding firm to its plans to take the Olympic flame to Tibet. Carrying the torch to the summit of Everest will be "the highlight" of the 2008 torch relay, top official Jiang Xiaoyu told reporters. The flame is due to start its journey on Monday at Olympia in Greece; the official slogan, settled long ago, is "Journey of Harmony". Tibetan activists and exiles who have rallied outside Chinese embassies this week seem unlikely to heed this message. After the last few days, however, BOCOG must long for the time when the sight of a 'Free Tibet' T-shirt on camera was its worst nightmare.

The ascent of Everest will be a "great feat in Olympic history", said BOCOG executive vice president Jiang Xiaoyu. As he described the logistics, it became clear that summiting Everest is set to be the grandest moment in the long pre-Olympic drumroll, short of the opening ceremony itself. The flame will be divided so that one torch can continue around China while the other is carried to Everest. Weather conditions cloud the timing, but on the day the torch ascends the peak BOCOG will suspend the other leg of the relay in line with International Olympic Committee (IOC) rules. The waiting and watching will create a perfect format for breathless media attention. The flame will then go to Lhasa to await its other half. Their reunion will be another media moment. There will be plentiful references to the torch relay's official "message of friendship, peace and harmony". It must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

 Courtesy Free Tibet Campaign

Uneasy Times: Riot police in Xiahe, Gansu province, on Saturday

Midnight raids. Relatives snitching on each other. Confessions on nationwide TV. Jittery Lhasa residents dread today’s imminent midnight deadline for rioters to turn themselves in. “Everybody’s expecting there’ll be some raids in certain parts of the city,” says one Lhasa resident. Such fears are based on memories of brutality after Chinese troops crushed similar protests in 1989. “In ’89 so many people disappeared, so many [were] arrested. It was terrible,” recalls another resident of Lhasa.

The ultimatum urging those who engaged in “social chaos” to surrender was issued Saturday by the Tibet Autonomous Region High People’s Court, and broadcast on Tibet TV.  Its not the only source of fear and loathing. Convoys of trucks carrying soldiers were sighted traveling by road from adjacent Sichuan province into the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR).  Up to now, security personnel involved in cracking down on Tibetan protestors appeared to be People’s Armed Police, not soldiers.

Meanwhile  at least two dozen foreign correspondents were stopped at checkpoints, detained, or otherwise had their journalistic work interfered with in recent days as they tried to cover the spreading Tibetan unrest. Today I spent hours communicating by phone or e-mail with colleagues who’d been stopped from reporting in Tibetan communities in Gansu and Qinghai provinces – or were locked in a furtive cat-and-mouse game trying to evade police. (As president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC), I also worked on an FCCC statement of concern about these incidents of detention and harassment).

Foreign media were still denied authorization to enter Tibet. So the scarcity of firsthand coverage of Lhasa – on top of the hamfisted police efforts to keep foreign correspondents away from other venues where violence had erupted, such as Xiahe – meant a lot of reporters found themselves writing the story of being prevented from reporting the story.

Today brought other hair-tearing frustrations, too. Internet access for many journalists became maddeningly slow or even nonexistent for large chunks of the day – apparently as a result of the Great Firewall of China on steroids. And don’t forget the pervasive black-outs of certain Tibet-related video footage on CNN and the BBC.

If this isn’t already a perfect storm of bad press that threatens to tarnish the Summer Olympics, consider this: tomorrow morning HIV/AIDS activist Hu Jia is slated to appear in a Beijing court hearing for the first time since he was detained Dec. 27 and charged with subversion.  In November the prominent activist had made critical remarks about the Olympics in a webcam conversation with EU parliamentarians – and now he’s seen as the dissident poster boy for critics who maintain that China’s patchy human-rights record and imprisonment of political prisoners justifies a boycott of the Games.

Oh, I forgot to mention that Hu and his wife Zeng Jinyan are devout converts to Tibetan Buddhism. (He embraced pacifism after the June 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, because “Buddhism is against killing,” he told me)  After their daughter was born last November, the couple had approached the Dalai Lama’s aides asking for him to bless their child by granting her a Buddhist name. Hu told me he planned to have his baby’s Tibetan name registered on her household registration document, alongside her Chinese name Qianci.  But a week later he was thrown into jail, and now his wife and Qianci are under house arrest. Cyber-dissidents have been blogging about their cloak-and-dagger attempts to smuggle baby milk powder to the mother and child. Whether its in ancient Lhasa or in Hu’s modern flat in Freedom City, the midnight knock on the door never seems very far away.

Name: Yang Wei (杨威)
Age: 27 (dob: Feb. 8, 1980)
Hometown: Xiantao, Hubei Province
Previous Olympic Medals Won: Gold in Men’s Gymnastics Team Competition and Silver in Men’s Individual All-Around Competition at Sydney ‘00

As a member of the inimitable Chinese Men’s Gymnastics Team at Sydney in 2000, Yang Wei medaled twice and demonstrated why the Middle Kingdom remains renowned for producing some of the best tumblers in the world. His agility was the subject of universal admiration, and what the then 20-year-old Yang lacked in grace and refinement he made up for with power and enthusiasm. But just when the international gymnastics community thought he would come into his own and seize individual all-around gold at Athens, Yang had a meltdown on the mats.

Losing control on the high bar, Yang dangled from one hand for several seconds and scored an abysmal 8.987. Had Yang successfully completed his routine without losing control, he would have almost assuredly taken the gold since rival Paul Hamm had fallen earlier on vault. By failing to complete his routine, Yang set into motion the Paul Hamm/Yang Tae Young gold medal controversy that divided men’s gymnastics for months after the Games. When interviewed by an AP reporter after the event, Yang, who ended up in seventh place, could only shake his head in disbelief and say, “What a pity. I really didn't think I would make a mistake on that event.''

But now Yang is back, and he’s determined to fulfill the promise he once showed. In 2006 he won gold with his team and in the individual all-around competition at the 15th Asian Games held in Doha, Qatar. In so doing, the 26-year-old, who made his Asian Games debut in the 1998 Bangkok Games, tied fellow countryman Li Ning as the most prolific male gymnast in the Asiad’s history with eight golds. Then he did it again at the 2006 World Championships, leaving with golds in the team and individual all-around competitions. Now Yang is poised to ascend to the rarefied air of first place in 2008 and sees only one obstacle in his path to the podium: “Japan is our target to beat in the 2008 Olympics,” Wang told a reporter from China’s official Xinhua News Agency in 2006.

Since then, he's avoided making similarly inflammatory statements -- but his magnanimity has its limits. When asked by a reporter earlier this year about his opinion of archrival Tomita Hiroyuki of Japan, Yang said it's still too early to talk about the fight for the individual all-round gold between Hiroyuki and him. “Although I defeated Tomita Hiroyuki at this year's world championships, the world championships are not the Olympic Games, after all.” No doubt he hopes the results will be the same.

Karl Marx and Adam Smith would have cheered avidly at the Diving World Cup two weeks ago in Beijing. Trailing China—which swept gold medals in seven of eight categories—were Russia, Canada, Great Britain, Ukraine and USA. In other words, the top six teams in the Men’s 3 Meter Synchronized event were evenly split between historically Communist and Free Market traditions.

How do the diving styles vary between these two systems? And how do they evoke the different training programs that got their divers to the Water Cube? I decided to take a closer look at the national training programs behind each set of divers.

Wang Feng and Qin Kai, the Chinese representatives, performed their dives with absolute precision: bodies angled like a geometric compass, legs glued together, feet pointed after years of ballet training. Their movements were synchronized from the moment they began to ascend the three-meter-high boards—which was even before the judges eyed them. Leon Taylor, of the Great Britain team, described the Chinese divers “as robots.” He wasn't the only one to find, as he put it, “something vaguely dehumanizing about their perfect symmetry. You’d think they were identical twins.”

Despite China’s achievements on that day, Zhou Jihong, director of the Chinese national diving team, afterwards told the official Xinhua News Agency that the World Cup was "just a training session.” Xinhua said that "Zhou makes it clear to China’s divers that their gold status is a temporary position." No surprise that Wang wasted no time basking in the limelight; he said he was already preparing to "get focused on [our] small errors and try to get rid of them.” 

China’s Olympic athletes are learning to live with the dual demands of both a regimented Soviet-styled system and the celebrity world of corporate endorsements, as described in an earlier post by Jonathan Ansfield. 

The Russian program, on the other hand, openly favors the “carrot”, and not the “stick,” approach these days. Moscow’s Olympic team members receive $500 worth of monthly allowances, described as“a good incentive to work hard” by Leonid Tyagachev, chairman of the Russian Olympic Committee, just prior to the Athens Games. At that point, the government had also promised tax-free bonuses—up to $50,000 for gold medalists.

This doesn’t mean Russian athletes are living off the fat of the land. The controlled, rigid take-offs and flips of Yuriy Kunakov and renowned careerist Dmitry Sautin evoked their severe, at times bare-bones, training approach.

In contrast, Canadians Arturo Miranda and Alexandre Despatie (a medaled soloist in his own right) are the product of a program which seems designed to keep the diver—no matter the level of skill—self-fulfilled and in pursuit of personal excellence. Divers training under this model come to the program of their own volition, and ideally decide to stay without governmental pressure or financial need (though commercial money no doubt helps). The Canadians performed the most graceful, carefree and lithe dives I’d seen that day.

After receiving their bronze medal, the duo seemed neither excited nor deflated. Miranda explained, “I am happy overall with our performance. We will do better next time." Despatie admitted that “we didn’t have the impression we dove so badly” even though they were in last place after the first two dives. Quite the lighthearted response from a team that just placed third globally after years of training.

Whereas China culls its 1.3 billion-strong population for ripe young talent to train throughout their youth, Great Britons Benjamin Swain and Nicholas Robinson-Baker began training together barely a year before ascending to their fourth place finish at the World Cup. Then again, the noticeably mature presence of the British duo made me feel that these were real people, with real pressures, sitting on their shoulders. The dives were a learned, cerebral precision. According to Swain, the pair’s relaxed, almost debonair, approach made all the difference. “We loved every minute of it, felt relaxed throughout and couldn’t wait for our next round of dives.”

Enjoyment seems an incentive for the U.S. team, as well. The home-page of the Indiana Diving program, where the States are now training their divers, opens with a letter to parents and divers declaring: “Let’s learn, train and most importantly have some fun!” It’s a contract between the program and the athlete, with the former telling the latter, “we appreciate your confidence in us.”

Unfortunately, the U.S. program has struggled recently: the American divers didn’t place in Athens, and in Beijing, Jevon Tarantino and Christopher Colwill yo-yo’d erratically in the clarity and coordination of their dives that day.

In fact, U.S. officials have considered shifting their strategy by taking a page or two from the Chinese approach. Increasingly, they've centralized their training in Indiana, where many hopefuls move to train full-time. And they’re starting to seek out promising girls and boys at a younger age.

As for the Ukrainian training program, there was no mention of their strategy. Their divers, Dmytrio Lysenko and Anton Zakharov, weren't interviewed in any news media I ran across. All I remember during their dives was being disturbed by spectators getting up to buy ice cream and pop corn before the Chinese took their turn on the boards again.