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.