Word: diplomatic
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...government knew "from day one," says a senior Western diplomat, that "a successful bid for the Games would bring an unprecedented - and in some cases very harsh - spotlight" on China and how it is governed. On the other side, everyone from human-rights activists to independence-seeking dissidents in Tibet and Xinjiang - "splittists" in the vernacular of Chinese officialdom - knew that they would have an opportunity to push their agendas with the world watching. "Though the specific trigger for this in Tibet is still unclear, that it intensified so quickly is probably not just an accident," the Western diplomat says...
...China's leadership, the senior Western diplomat says, appreciates that the world is carefully gauging how it responds to the unrest. He notes that initial reports out of Lhasa had the People's Armed Police, an antiriot squad, responding to the demonstrations - not the potentially much more lethal People's Liberation Army. The government's dilemma is obvious: if Beijing insists publicly (and actually believes) it has been relatively restrained in its response to the unrest so far, what happens if the trouble in Tibet continues, or if something boils up somewhere else? A lot can happen between...
...marchers, but the disturbances spread to other Tibetan cities, and their causes clearly remain unresolved. Working out how best to avoid further embarrassment as they prepare for the start of the Olympic-torch relay on March 25 will be a tricky challenge for China's rulers. As a diplomat told TIME, "They need to get this under control, but to do so without a lot of brutality...
Thus, the dilemma for the Chinese leadership is clear. "They need to get this under control, but to do so without a lot of brutality," the diplomat says. The reason for that is clear enough: the memory of Tiananmen Square, undeniably, now hangs in the background as the crisis in Tibet unfolds in this, the year of China's grand coming-out party. The scale of the unrest in the Tibet Autonomous Region - as well as the threat they pose to the Communist Party leadership - doesn't compare to the massive political demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, which were...
China understands well, this diplomat says, that the world is carefully gauging how it responds to the unrest. He notes that initial reports out of Lhasa had the People's Armed Police, an anti-riot squad, responding to the demonstrations - not the potentially much more lethal People's Liberation Army. The problem for China is that the unrest, while apparently contained for the moment in Lhasa, spread to other cities on Sunday. The government's dilemma is obvious: if Beijing insists publicly - and actually believes - it has been relatively restrained in its response to the unrest so far, what happens...