China faces long-term risks from tough Tibet stance

By Chris Buckley - Analysis

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's high-pitched response to unrest across Tibet has muffled questions at home about policy missteps but is entrenching hardline positions likely to cramp room for flexibility in the region long after the Olympics.

Chinese popular opinion has strongly backed the government's claims that followers of the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama, planned the bloodshed and unrest from mid-March to disrupt the Beijing Olympics in August.

Officials now brand the Dalai Lama a murderous criminal, a terrorist and worse, but Premier Wen Jiabao recently repeated his government's position that it is open to possible dialogue.

Communist Party security and propaganda chiefs seem to have grabbed hold of policy, says Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group critical of Chinese controls in Tibet.

Only months before the Beijing Games, China's leaders have appeared to the world angry and threatened, dressed metaphorically in army greens rather than the business suits they like to wear. Hardly what their Games PR advisers planned.

Tibet's Communist Party chief, Zhang Qingli, has emerged as the loudest advocate of state policy, vowing more of the same tough policies he pushed before the turbulence.

After the outbreak of protests, he rained comic-book insults on the Dalai Lama. A "jackal in Buddhist monk's robes" and a demonic "spirit with a human face and the heart of a beast" were among them.

But by applying a political bludgeon rather than a scalpel to the tense region, Beijing is risking longer-term hazards.