The disruption by pro-Tibetan demonstrators of the Athens launch of the Olympic torch relay on Monday is just the first trickle of what will become a tidal wave of embarrassment for the colonial communist rulers of the ancient Buddhist kingdom of Tibet.

In fact, the Chinese Government will be fortunate if it is only the Tibetan independence movement which seeks to exploit the intense media focus on Beijing as the 29th Games draws near. A preview of the possibilities was provided at the ceremony three months ago which launched China Central Television's coverage of the 2008 Olympics. A popular Beijing newscaster, Hu Ziwei, grabbed the microphone and stunned the audience not to mention millions of viewers by shouting repeatedly, "If the Chinese have no humane values to present to the world, what is the purpose of the Olympics after all?"

Hu was jailed on charges of "damaging the name of China and the Olympic Games". We are told she will be released when the Games are safely over, but the difficulty for the rulers in Beijing is that there will be protesters who even their immense domestic intelligence services will not have been able to identify.

This problem is by no means peculiar to China in 2008. The Olympics have long been a focus for spectacular displays of political opposition. Forty years ago, the run-up to the Mexico City Games was characterised by rioting against the government of Gustavo Ordaz. Ten days before the Games began, hundreds of demonstrators were shot in Mexico City by the police and military. However, this was before the days of 24-hour news television and its impact was minimal. It's hard to imagine the effects if something similar happened in Beijing.

In 1972, West Germany would have had the highest hopes when Munich held the Games: it seemed a glorious chance to eradicate the memories of the only previous Games in which Germany was the host in 1936, under the rule of the Nazis. Instead, it had to endure the public horror of the "Munich Massacre", in which 12 Israeli athletes were slaughtered by Palestinian terrorists. This is the "event" for which the 1972 Olympics is most remembered.

Most terrifyingly for the occupants of Beijing's Zhong Nan Hai, it was probably the presence of the international media which lay behind the timing of the student protests of 1989. The Tiananmen Square massacre has rather obliterated the outside world's memories of what happened immediately beforehand: it was the occasion of the first visit of a Russian leader since the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s. The world's news media had flown in to Beijing to broadcast the encounters between reformist Mikhail Gorbachev and the gerontocrats of the Chinese Communist Party. The students saw it as an opportunity to show the world while demanding reforms in their own country. But the protest was suppressed with a brutality that only underlined the Chinese Communist Party's almost pathological inability to cope with any genuine form of political opposition.

A similar inability has disfigured China's handling of Tibet. The 72-year-old Dalai Lama long ago abandoned the idea of achieving independence for his people: his demands do not go much further than advocacy of some sort of cultural autonomy. Far from calling for a boycott of the Olympics, he has actually criticised those who have pressed for this. Yet the Chinese communists have continued to denounce the Dalai Lama with the vehemence and the language which they applied to such mortal enemies as Chiang Kai-Shek in earlier years.

Thus the Beijing-appointed Communist Party chief in Tibet, Zhang Qingli, has spent much of his three years in the job insulting the Dalai Lama. This month he described him as "a wolf in monk's robes, a devil with a human face, but the heart of a beast". He also said "we are now engaged in a fierce blood-and-fire battle with the Dalai clique, a life and death battle between us and the enemy".

Zhang does not just use this sort of language to inspire the necessary vigour among Communist Party officials. In an interview two years ago with the German magazine Spiegel, he denounced the Dalai Lama's followers by saying, "Those who do not love their country are not qualified to be human beings. This is a matter of common sense."

Zhang's inflammatory rhetoric is not, of course, the worst thing the Tibetan people have had to endure. While it is true that the Tibetans might well be materially better off under the communists than ruled by a god-king, the extirpation of an entire culture causes pain and anger that cannot be assuaged by the existence of a new railway line, or sports centre.

The Chinese Government has offered Han Chinese great incentives to settle in Tibet, including an exemption from the one-child policy for those who marry Tibetans. The result has been a resettlement which threatens to make Tibetans a minority in their own so-called "autonomous region".

This fear of cultural annihilation doubtless lies behind the ugly rioting in Lhasa and elsewhere, which has seen the trashing and burning of Han Chinese shops and, indeed, murders. It is pathetic and predictable that only physical violence on the part of the Tibetans has galvanised Western leaders (with the honourable exception of Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel) into some sort of rhetorical action.

This was summed up pretty well by a Tibetan exile in Dharamsala, who told a reporter how her 21-day hunger strike in front of the United Nations building in New York had achieved nothing. Well, have you ever heard of Dolma Choephel?

Choephel, of the Central Committee of Tibetan Youth, told Spiegel, "The world only reacts to violence when a bomb explodes or a house goes up in flames."

It was inevitable that China's refusal to deal with the peaceful demands of the Dalai Lama led to a situation in which his own people have begun to advocate violent resistance. Alas for those angry young Tibetans, the Chinese Government can utter the words made famous by the BBC's invented master-race, the Daleks: "Resistance is futile". The terrible truth is that this is probably right. No matter what demonstrations are mounted during the Beijing Olympics, no matter how much attention the outside world pays when the Games are over, the Tibetans will continue their state-sponsored slide into oblivion.

Independent