Quotes of the Day

It is still nearly five months before the olympic torch is to be lit in Beijing, officially starting the 29th Summer Games. But diplomats in the Chinese capital believe that a high-level game of chicken has already begun — one that has now turned deadly in Lhasa, the capital of what China calls the Tibetan Autonomous Region, and in neighboring areas, according to Tibetan exiles and human-rights groups.

The protests and confrontations in and around Tibet are a nightmare for China's top leadership, but one, some diplomats believe, that could not have taken anyone in the central government completely by surprise. The leadership in Beijing is pitted against its domestic opponents, who include not only Tibetan dissidents but also separatist groups in the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang as well as human-rights and political activists throughout the country.

The government knew "from day one," says a senior Western diplomat, that "a successful bid for the Games would bring an unprecedented — and in some cases very harsh — spotlight" on China and how it is governed. On the other side, everyone from human-rights activists to independence-seeking dissidents in Tibet and Xinjiang — "splittists" in the vernacular of Chinese officialdom — knew that they would have an opportunity to push their agendas with the world watching. "Though the specific trigger for this in Tibet is still unclear, that it intensified so quickly is probably not just an accident," the Western diplomat says. According to this view, it was never hard to imagine a scenario in which some group — and maybe several — would push things and try "to probe and see whether they could test limits."

The critical issue now front and center is just how far angry Tibetan activists will push, and how harshly the Chinese government will push back. The leaders in Beijing face what's an unusual dilemma for them: maintain order, but in a gentler way than they are accustomed to doing. The reason for this is clear enough: the memory of Tiananmen Square hangs undeniably in the background as the crisis in Tibet unfolds in this, the year of China's grand coming-out party. The scale of the unrest in Tibet — as well as the threat it poses to the Communist Party — doesn't compare to the massive political demonstrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989, which were brutally put down by the Chinese military. But the issue, at bottom, is the same: How to respond?

Today's China may well understand that 1989 was a long time ago. In those days Beijing could literally pull the plug on CNN and Dan Rather. No longer. Security forces have been working overtime to limit the reporting of the scattered Tibetan protests — preventing foreign journalists from entering Lhasa and other protest-hit areas and even, according to one report, seizing the cameras of tourists. But the efforts have had only mixed success. While their authenticity could not be verified, gruesome photos of Tibetans apparently shot in Aba prefecture in Sichuan province were circulating on the Internet for all to see, even as Beijing was denying having used lethal force. Plainly, information is tougher to control now than it was in 1989, even from the remotest of regions. And though everyone was watching Tiananmen then, this is different. This year, the whole world is not only watching; it's coming to Beijing, less than five months from now. Thus, officials from Premier Wen Jiabao down have felt the need at least to try to make the case that the government response has been measured, and that any violence was the fault of the demonstrators. Before, they would have just thumbed their noses at the rest of the world.

China's leadership, the senior Western diplomat says, appreciates that the world is carefully gauging how it responds to the unrest. He notes that initial reports out of Lhasa had the People's Armed Police, an antiriot squad, responding to the demonstrations — not the potentially much more lethal People's Liberation Army. The government's dilemma is obvious: if Beijing insists publicly (and actually believes) it has been relatively restrained in its response to the unrest so far, what happens if the trouble in Tibet continues, or if something boils up somewhere else? A lot can happen between now and Aug. 8.

"Knowing full well that something like this — maybe not as intense, but something of this sort — was likely to come before the Olympics," says the Western diplomat, "is different than knowing exactly what to do when it comes. I'm not sure the leadership has a specific playbook for it." Let's hope it doesn't reach for the one it used in 1989.

• Bill Powell