So far as is known, only one Chinese official has paid with his job for the debacle of the Tibet protests last month.
Danzeng Langjie, the director of Tibet's Ethnic Minority and Religious Affairs Commission, has been "removed" from his job, according to the official Tibet Daily newspaper. His sin is not specified, but failing to foresee the March 10 protest by Tibetan Buddhist monks against the dismantling of their culture by Chinese officials and settlers is likely high on the list.
But as the shock waves from the protest and the violent unrest by ordinary Tibetans that followed gather into the largest and most persistent international condemnation of Beijing's human rights practices since the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square demonstrators, other heads will fall. The question is how high recriminations will reach among the ruling elite when the Communist Party conducts its post-mortem after August's Olympic Games, as it inevitably will.
Chinese public anger, increasingly stimulated by what has been called "cybernationalism," is likely to get more intense before the end of the Games.
There are, remember, many groups with quarrels with the Beijing government that haven't been heard from yet.
Public opinion in the West may yet prod political leaders to make more overt gestures of disapproval of China's human rights record than simply not turning up for the opening ceremonies.
That would further infuriate Chinese opinion and perhaps make it necessary for the Communist Party to throw a high-level scapegoat to the crowd.
For example, will China's current leaders, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, emerge from the party examination with their powers and reputations intact?
More likely they will attempt to sustain their positions by catering to the outpourings of resentment and anger evident among Chinese people at international support for the Tibetans and the serial protests along the route of the Olympic torch relay.
Hu and Wen, whose only legitimacy in power is to cast themselves as the architects of Chinese achievements, face being victims of the nationalist steamroller unless they are seen to be its helmsmen.
So the harsh tone of the debate that is bleakly reminiscent of rhetoric and lies of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s is likely to continue.
It should also be remembered that at the time of the last serious outbreak of unrest in Tibet in 1989 Hu was the Communist Party secretary in Lhasa, Beijing's top official, and he unleashed an uncompromising crackdown on protesters.
He was also the first provincial party secretary to applaud the declaration of martial law to smash the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and sympathy protests around the country. Many analysts believe that act of loyalty is the reason Hu is now president.
So unrest in Tibet will continue to be blamed on that "wolf in monk's clothing," "slave-owner" and alleged Nazi sympathizer, the Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama.
Despite his denials and insistence that all he wants is Tibetan cultural and religious autonomy within China, Beijing will continue to allege the Dalai Lama is intent on "splitting the motherland" by backing a violent campaign to gain Tibetan independence.
For the rest, foreign protest campaigns are the result of ignorance of the true nature of the Dalai Lama as a would-be feudal lord intent on undermining Beijing's efforts to bring civilization and modernity to Tibet. This ignorance, goes the Beijing line, is fueled by the foreign media, which lie and distort the truth about Tibet as well as playing the willing accomplice to western governments' efforts to contain and diminish China's achievements. (Unfortunately, some bad journalism by western media in the early days of the Tibet unrest has given Chinese spin doctors plenty of ammunition to bolster this argument.)
So when this is over and the Olympic circus is packed up and moves on at the end of August, the world is going to be confronted with a different China.
The angry, uncompromising and assertive mood, the product of generations of nationalist indoctrination by the Communist Party, cannot be switched on and off at will.
The Olympic protests have unleashed powerful forces of ethnic pride in China that are hard to control and unpredictable in their effects.
© The Vancouver Sun 2008
