The monks who marched through Lhasa on March 10 to mark the anniversary of the Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule in 1959 did not want to wreck China's Olympic year, but they knew that Chinese troops would be less likely to shoot them this year than most.
And so it proved: the monks were arrested, but the crowds of Tibetans who gathered on the following days to demand their release were not harmed.
The dilemma facing the Chinese troops was that if they didn't shoot, the crowds would inevitably grow bigger, for most Tibetans dream of independence and fear that the mass immigration of Han Chinese to Tibet is a form of cultural genocide.
By Friday, March 14, the crowds had become so bold that it was they who turned to violence, attacking Chinese civilians in Lhasa and looting and burning Chinese-owned shops, banks and hotels.
The Chinese news agency Xinhua says that 10 people were killed in Lhasa on Friday. The Tibetan government-in-exile says that 80 were killed, and accounts by foreign tourists in Lhasa support the higher figure. But so far, by most accounts, the victims have mostly been Han Chinese settlers killed by angry Tibetans.
This doesn't fit the simple foreign narrative of peaceful protesters and wicked Chinese, but nationalism is not an inherently tolerant and peaceful phenomenon.
Foreign troops who hold their fire are still foreign occupiers, and innocent Chinese civilians who were encouraged by their own Government to come to set up businesses in Lhasa are still unwelcome foreign agents of cultural genocide.
All the players are sticking to their scripts. China insists "the recent sabotage in Lhasa was organised, premeditated and masterminded" by the clique of Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.
The puppet chairman of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, Qiangba Puncog, vows that "The plot of the separatists will fail."
They have to say that, as otherwise they would have to admit that Tibetans don't want to be ruled by China.
The Dalai Lama insists he is not seeking Tibetan independence from China, but only more autonomy for Tibet's culture and its Buddhist faith.
As the violence in Tibet intensified, however, the Dalai Lama had to harden his line, saying on the BBC that the Chinese Government is clinging on to policy, not looking at the reality, and feeling it can control by guns. "But they cannot control [the] human mind."
Foreign governments urge China to "exercise restraint", but they carefully avoid questioning its right to rule Tibet. And, with the unrest spreading to ethnically Tibetan regions of neighbouring Chinese provinces, the time may soon come when China decides it has to crush all dissent by force regardless of the Olympics.
Force will succeed, as it has before. The 1959 uprising was crushed, the 1989 demonstrations in Tibet were crushed, and the current unrest will be crushed as well.
Tibet's only chance to recover its independence will come if and when there is a change of regime in China.
China did not traditionally seek to expand beyond the boundaries of the Middle Kingdom, an agrarian society that lived in the north Chinese plain and the river valleys of southern China. The non-Chinese territories that now make up the western third of the country were not conquered by Chinese, but rather swept into the same Mongol empire that conquered China itself in the 13th century.
Since the Mongol (Yuan) dynasty ruled from Beijing, Tibet came to be seen as a Chinese possession, but the subsequent (ethnically Chinese) Ming dynasty took little interest in it. When another foreign nation of mounted nomads, the Manchus, conquered China in 1644, they too brought Tibet under rule and when the Manchu dynasty was finally overthrown in 1911, Tibet again slipped from China's control. For the next 40 years, Tibet was effectively independent.
The Chinese communists seized power in 1949, and invaded Tibet the following year on the argument that "what was once ours is ours forever".
So long as they hold power in China, they will also hold Tibet.
If there is ever a change of regime in Beijing, then a window of opportunity will open and Tibet will have a couple of years to establish its independence before a new government emerges in Beijing that feels compelled to hold on to it in deference to Chinese nationalist sentiment. But that window is not open now.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
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