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."