Growing domestic support of its policies gives the Chinese government political cover to restore order to the restive ethnically Tibetan areas of the Tibet Autonomous Region and Qinghai and Gansu provinces as it sees fit, knowing that accounts of heavy-handed tactics will inevitably surface in an increasingly porous society.
This is a different dynamic than in 1989 when many Chinese identified with the students rather than the government in Tiananmen Square.
Images of Tibetan rioting are also being employed to bolster the government's core message that foreign human rights groups and activists such as the Dalai Lama are bent on ruining the Olympics to keep China down. The Dalai Lama said Sunday that China deserves to host the Olympics and that the Games should not be boycotted.
Although China lacks the democratic institutions, vocal critics or opinion polls that would gauge the effectiveness of its strategy and public perception of its Tibet policies, one indicator may be its censorship of coverage by television networks BBC and CNN inside the country.
Instead of blacking out all such Tibet reports, leading to long and annoying instances of blank screens early in the week, the government allowed more of them to air as the week wore on. A BBC report that aired Sunday in Beijing ran 20 minutes, including a five-minute excerpt with the Dalai Lama.
"The government is showing more confidence and learning more about spin," said Michael Anti, a well-known Chinese blogger on a Nieman fellowship this year at Harvard. "They've learned more PR tactics from Western people. They see the way the White House and the Pentagon do it."
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mark.magnier@latimes.com
Gao Jing of The Times' Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.
