Chinese authorities and representatives of the exiled Dalai Lama will meet in "coming days," says the state-run Xinhua News Agency. This is a potential breakthrough. Chinese officials blame the "splittist Dalai clique" for violent riots that erupted in Lhasa March 14, followed by brushfire protests in other Tibetan communities, and have demonized the Tibetan spiritual leader as a "jackal wrapped in monk's robes," as one put it.  

But the Dalai Lama has denied Beijing's accusations, and has kept the door open to high-level negotiations. Contacts between the two sides have taken place sporadically for decades -- I remember making my first trip to Lhasa, in July 1980, and being startled to see dozens of emotional Tibetans crying and prostrating on the ground in a courtyard beside the guesthouse where I was staying as part of a government-organized media tour.  Turns out a visiting envoy of the Dalai Lama was over-nighting in the guesthouse right next door. Foreign correspondents on that trip got our story simply by interviewing people across the courtyard wall.

But institutionalized talks between the two sides, which began in 2002, broke down after the sixth round in the summer of 2007. When my colleague Sudip Mazumdar and I interviewed the Dalai Lama in Dharmsala in March,  less than a week after the Lhasa violence, he said he'd received private messages of sympathy from ordinary citizens, and even some officials, in China. And he expressed willingness to talk with President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, for whom he professed "great respect".

Just before our interview, we glimpsed the Dalai Lama through a window saying farewell to a delegation of Buddhist believers of Asian descent.  One of his aides said that they were from mainland China, and that if their identities were made public they "could be executed" simply for visiting Dharmsala. The Dalai Lama said that "hundreds if not thousands" of ordinary Buddhist devotees from China had requested audiences with him over the years (he fled from Lhasa into exile in 1959, after an abortive Tibetan uprising). Even some officials considered to be upright communist party loyalists had sent him private expressions of support.

Xinhua quoted an anonymous Chinese official saying that authorities had taken into account "requests repeatedly made by the Dalai side for resuming talks",  and that "the relevant department of the central government will have contact and consultation with Dalai's private representative in the coming days." Let's hope that both sides can get beyond "talking about talking" to make some real progress -- not just for the sake of the Olympics, but for the sake of healthier relations between Tibetans and Chinese.