China’s Dangerous Game

It didn't take long after the outbreak of violent protests in Tibet two weeks ago before China's well-oiled propaganda machine roared into overdrive. Within days, the Web site of the state-run Xinhua news agency was offering neatly packaged facts and figures on the turmoil, while CCTV released a video of what it called "the March 14 beating, smashing, looting and burning incident." Domestic media painted a graphic picture of the Lhasa bloodshed—the blood shed by ethnic Chinese, that is. According to reports, rioters had killed an 8-month-old baby and severely beaten a woman before slicing off her ear. They'd attacked policemen and set fire to a clothing shop, fatally trapping five salesgirls inside. Chinese TV showed lingering shots of shopkeepers grieving for their dead co-workers. "We can't go to work normally," said one Chinese woman on CCTV. "This is destroying our prosperity."

With the 2008 Olympics just over four months away, Beijing is scrambling to repair its international image following the mayhem. To justify its crackdown, the government has portrayed the upheaval as a ruthless conspiracy spun by the exiled Dalai Lama, triggering bloody, racially motivated attacks by Tibetans against Han Chinese. So far, the tactic has worked: which is to say that it's prevented ordinary Chinese and most democracy advocates in China from questioning Beijing's behavior or taking up the Tibetans' cause. This media campaign has a dangerous downside, however. The demonization of Tibet has tapped a mother lode of chauvinism among the Han, China's main ethnic group. And as similar campaigns in the past—whether directed at Taiwan, Japan or the United States—have shown, the nationalist genie, once unstopped, can prove hard to force back into its bottle.

This could make life very awkward for Beijing if, as many assume, it decides between now and August that the only way to tamp down the Tibet issue is to agree to face-to-face talks with the Dalai Lama. The regime's dilemma, however, is entirely of its own making. By censoring media, imprisoning cyber-dissidents and employing sophisticated Web policing techniques, Chinese authorities have raised a generation of youth more or less accepting of the news that's spoon-fed to them. Most young Chinese know nothing about the Dalai Lama, who fled Lhasa in 1959 after a failed revolt—and thus have no trouble buying Beijing's portrayal of him as a nefarious "splittist." "A lot of people [in China] simply aren't aware of the complexities of the Tibet situation," says Rebecca MacKinnon, a Hong Kong-based expert on China's Internet.

This makes it hard for ordinary Chinese to evaluate official declarations. The government insists that security forces have used maximum restraint since the trouble began. A small government-selected group of foreign media brought to Tibet for two days last week were told that "lethal measures" were not employed in Lhasa, and that of the 22 deaths in the city, most were "innocents" killed by rioters. (Exiled Tibetan rights groups say more than 140 people died in the crackdown across a vast part of western China.) The yawning gap between the two estimates, and the restricted information accessible to most mainland Chinese—CNN and the BBC were blacked out in China when grisly photos of Tibetan shooting victims in Sichuan province were shown—has led many citizens to believe the Tibetans are simply fabricating the death toll.

The escalation of Tibetan-Chinese ethnic tension comes against "a backdrop of rising nationalism," says MacKinnon. But rallying citizens around the Chinese flag is not a new tactic for Beijing. The fever pitch of anti-Tibet, pro-Han sentiment now evident in the media, in ordinary conversation and on the Internet resembles eruptions of mass ire in the past, such as that following NATO's accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, China's downing of a U.S. spy plane on Hainan Island in 2001 and when Japanese officials refused to revise discussions of World War II in school textbooks in 2005. In all three cases, the Chinese government allowed angry youths to stage wild protests, letting them trash the U.S. and British embassies in 1999 and Japanese commercial establishments in 2005.

Stoking nationalism against purportedly internal targets, however, is a tricky business. Rabid demonstrations can spin out of control and turn on the government. In the case of Taiwan, moreover, the barrage of invective Chinese media and hackers directed at the island during the mid-1990s crisis backfired badly, ensuring the election of a defiant separatist (Chen Shui-bian) on the island.