China still has trouble reading Tibet's pulse

By Benjamin Kang Lim

BEIJING (Reuters) - When China allowed envoys of the exiled Dalai Lama to visit Tibet in the early 1980s as part of a cautious detente, Communist Party cadres told residents not to stone or spit at their one-time masters.

But the officials were dumbfounded, and disconcerted, by what they saw: residents in Tibet's capital Lhasa mobbed the envoys, kneeling, crying and clutching their clothing to air grievances.

The incident underlined the inability, or unwillingness, of the Party to comprehend Tibetans and their reverence for their god-king, which analysts say remains the Achilles' heel of China's Tibet policy.

This month, the Communist Party again showed that it was out of touch with popular sentiment in the pious Himalayan region when monk-led protests suddenly erupted in Lhasa and spilled over into Chinese provinces populated by Tibetans.

"The problem is that in the Party, they delude themselves by thinking that Tibetans don't have legitimate grievances," Tsering Shakya, a Tibet scholar at the University of British Columbia, said in a telephone interview.

China has sought to win the hearts and minds of Tibetans by investing heavily in infrastructure and sees Tibetans as "ungrateful natives", Tsering Shakya said.

A Chinese source familiar with the government's Tibet policy said: "The central government invests billions (of yuan) in Tibet each year hoping for stability in return."

"But money cannot buy stability," the source told Reuters, requesting anonymity.

OMEN

The recent unrest is perhaps an omen that the Tibet issue -- an emotive one for many Westerners from the U.S. Congress to Hollywood -- will overshadow the Beijing Olympics with protests likely to plague the international leg of the torch relay.

Many Tibetans complain their religious rights are clipped and that their culture is being slowly snuffed out. China's diatribes against the Dalai Lama also go down poorly.

The flare-up could be a turning point, as the region has a history of violent resistance against Chinese rule.

Tibetan guerrillas, funded and trained by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, ambushed and killed many Chinese soldiers in the 1960s. Fighting ending a decade later when the CIA pulled the plug after then president Richard Nixon's landmark 1972 visit to China.

Today, about 1,000 exiled Tibetans are serving in the Indian army, and there is no guarantee they would not return to guerrilla warfare if the Dalai Lama was to die without resolving remaining problems, analysts said.

China might eventually face a threat from radicalized Tibetans who reject the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner's peaceful "middle way", some say.