Learning to spin

China has been getting deservedly bad press on Tibet for decades, but the current uprising, the worst crisis in two decades, won’t easily be ignored in the run-up to this summer’s Olympics. While the Tibetans in exile in India are following the Dalai Lama’s call for nonviolence, reports of widespread clashes with police in Tibet and in the two Chinese provinces with large ethnic Tibetan populations indicate that Tibetans fed up with Chinese repression are increasingly radicalized and violent.

But Beijing is finally learning spin control. As Times staff writer Mark Magnier reported from Lanzhou, the Chinese authorities have been remarkably effective in turning their loss of control over events into a sympathy ploy, ensuring that the stories and images that reach the public are of rioting monks and angry Tibetans attacking ethnic Han Chinese. The government blocked access to and censored other popular websites that posted videos documenting Tibetan protests. (It has been embarrassed by YouTube before, including one instance when video of a massacre of Tibetan refugees by Chinese soldiers made a farce of the sanitized official version.) What’s notable is what Beijing isn’t censoring. According to Reporters Without Borders, racist posts about Tibetans, including calls for the murder of “separatists,” haven’t been deleted. Meanwhile, reports of protests at Chinese embassies abroad are being broadcast back home -- where the blame is being put on an international anti-Chinese conspiracy masterminded by the Dalai Lama.

This bifurcated media coverage all but guarantees that Chinese and foreigners will share neither the same facts nor the same views of the Tibet problem, just as some human rights groups have begun calling for a boycott of the Olympics, and France is suggesting that the European Union might Western governments can help breach the propaganda wall by urging China to resume negotiations with the Dalai Lama, by stepping up broadcasting about the crisis on the Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and the BBC, and by insisting that the U.N. Human Rights Council, which is now in session in Geneva, at least explore the situation in Tibet.

The U.N. Security Council, never one to discipline its own, on Monday declined even to discuss Tibet. After all, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon needs Chinese cooperation on Darfur, and the U.S. is equally desperate for Beijing’s good offices in pressuring North Korea to rid itself of nuclear weapons. Still, China must understand that it will be judged by the world at the Olympics not only by its smog control and its stance toward Sudan but on how it treats its citizens in Tibet.