"The situation in Tibet has essentially stabilized, the Olympic torch relay will proceed as scheduled," Jiang Xiaoyu, executive vice president of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, told a news conference.
The crackdown in Tibet and nearby provinces, following riots that may have killed dozens of people, have sparked calls for a boycott of the August Beijing Games that China wants to turn into a celebration of its emergence as a world power.
But protests over Tibet are likely mar the torch relay as it travels through 19 cities outside China on its 97,000-km journey around the world in April.
The Chinese don't seem likely to accomodate the Tibetans to keep them quiet in order to have a lovely Olympics pageant to mark China's increasing power in the world:
Aides to the Dalai Lama said the Tibetan spiritual leader wanted to resume talks between his exiled government and China, but Beijing showed no signs of backing down in its campaign to crush opposition to its 57-year rule of Tibet.
"We are currently in an intensely bloody and fiery struggle with the Dalai Lama clique, a life or death struggle with the enemy," Tibet's Communist Party leader Zhang Qingli said in an editorial in the Tibet Daily on Wednesday.
The editorial also called for "a full victory in this intense battle against separatism."
A pageant would be nice. But iron-fisted control is essential. If I were the Chinese, I'd slap that torch runner in an MRAP for the leg through Tibet, just in case.
