BEIJING — As unrest has spread among China's ethnic Tibetan population, Beijing has found itself caught between its desire to appear reasonable to the outside world and its tendency to come down hard when feeling threatened.
In recent days, the government's propaganda has grown shriller and its security tighter: The London-based Free Tibet Campaign, an activist group, reported late Friday that police in Sichuan province had fired on hundreds of Buddhist monks and residents, resulting in eight deaths. The Chinese government acknowledged unrest in the area and said police had fired warning shots, but reported no deaths.
Yet too much has changed for the emerging world power and soon-to-be Olympic host to completely revert to the Communist Party playbook of old, analysts say.
"China is facing some traditional challenges and new types of conditions," said Shen Dingli, professor at Shanghai's Fudan University. "This is forcing it to deal with this mixture and adapt."
On the propaganda front, the crisis sparked by riots on March 14 in Lhasa that spread rapidly to the nearby provinces of Gansu, Qinghai and Sichuan provinces has spawned rhetoric reminiscent of the 1950s and 1960s.
In apportioning blame, the government has largely ignored the Tibetan people's underlying economic, religious and cultural grievances. Instead it has fallen back on a handful of timeworn narratives: that the vast majority of Tibetans were led astray by a few foreign agents; that the West is biased; that outsiders are trying to keep China down; and that the "splittist" Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, is intent on wrecking the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
"There's been such vitriol," said Michael Curtis Davis, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "They've accused the Dalai Lama of everything on Earth."
This is a harder sell than in bygone days, when Beijing could demand that the masses adhere to the party line and didn't have to worry much about the outside world. Pressure is building for some at least symbolic concession. Some world leaders are threatening to boycott the opening ceremony for the Aug. 8-24 Games.
China also faces an increasingly informed and skeptical citizenry.
"China really hasn't allowed much reporting on the underlying causes of all the unrest, so it's a bit hard to tell what's going on," said Wu Lisheng, 40, a Beijing salesman. "There are surely some bad people involved, but I really can't be sure if it's the Dalai Lama's fault."
