China’s cup runneth over. The Olympics are a milestone in Chinese history, a celebration of the Middle Kingdom’s return to international greatness after nearly two centuries of torpor and humiliation.

Yet the Olympics could end up being the second-most-significant event in China this year.

The Chinese leadership and the Tibetan government in exile have delicately discussed a possible visit by the Dalai Lama to China, nominally to commemorate the victims of the earthquake in Sichuan Province in May. That would be the first meeting between the Dalai Lama and Chinese leaders in more than 50 years and would give enormous impetus to resolving the Tibet question.

The opportunity arises in part because of the Dalai Lama's public acknowledgement last week for the first time that he could accept Communist Party rule for Tibet. Previously, the Dalai Lama had seemed to demand something like the “one country, two systems” model of Hong Kong, and his concession was a courageous signal of his yearning to reach a deal with the Chinese government.

“The Dalai Lama has taken the kind of courageous step that great political leaders make at crucial turning points in history,” said Melvyn Goldstein, a prominent historian of modern Tibet and a professor at Case Western Reserve University. “After more than 20 years of stalemate, the Dalai Lama, at great risk to his standing in the West and among Tibetans in exile, has unilaterally sent Beijing a clear signal that he is now ready to accept the kind of difficult compromises that are needed to resolve the conflict.”

“For the first time in decades, reconciliation is now genuinely possible,” Professor Goldstein added.

Since then, the Dalai Lama has been scolded by many Tibetans who think that he has been too conciliatory toward China. President Bush and other leaders should praise his courage in taking such a difficult step toward reconciliation.

The big question now is whether China will respond with its own olive branch. At a Foreign Ministry press conference on Wednesday, a spokesman, Qin Gang, said only: “Our position and policy on the Tibet-related issue is clear and persistent. We should not only take into account what the Dalai Lama said, but what he has done. We need to see concrete action.”

That was less than an effusive welcome but better than another knee-jerk denunciation of the Dalai Lama. My sense is that Chinese government officials are waiting for direction from their own top leaders.

If President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao respond with approval, and especially if they pursue a visit by the Dalai Lama in November on the six-month anniversary of the earthquake in Sichuan Province — then they just might resolve the Tibet problem that has dogged all previous Communist leaders. As a first step, they should take over the Tibet portfolio from the United Front Work Department, so that top-level talks can proceed directly between the Dalai Lama and either Mr. Hu or Mr. Wen.

Some Chinese officials believe that the best strategy to deal with Tibet is to wait for the Dalai Lama to die. Without a leader, they think, Tibetans will be more compliant — but that is a catastrophic miscalculation.

On the contrary, the Dalai Lama, who is 73, is restraining Tibetans, and he speaks some Chinese and has roots in China in a way that younger Tibetan exiles do not. Once he is gone, more radical groups — including the Tibetan Youth Congress — will gain sway and many frustrated Tibetans, left on their own, are likely to turn to violence.

President Hu this year engaged in bold diplomacy to defuse tensions with Japan and Taiwan alike. China’s willingness to sound out the Dalai Lama about a visit to commemorate the earthquake victims is a ray of hope for similar outreach to Tibetans. The United States can’t do much to help — this has to be worked out between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese leadership — but we can do more to encourage the process and nudge it to a higher level.

Western leaders, including President Bush, have mostly engaged in the politics of symbolism regarding Tibet — choreographing photos with the Dalai Lama, issuing protests, or calling for China-Tibet talks that everyone knows will get nowhere. What we need is less symbolism and more diplomatic heavy-lifting aimed at a practical settlement of the Tibet question.

President Hu and Prime Minister Wen are basking in good will from their management of the Olympics, so far widely perceived as a triumph for China. If they can also bring the Dalai Lama back to China in November and engineer a deal to resolve Tibet’s future, that would be an even more monumental achievement.

It is in their hands.

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我们没有理由无条件接受一个流寇的所谓来访.组织煽动暴乱的罪犯早晚要受到惩罚.Difficult compromise就更可笑了.

Did you realize the Chinese Communist Party was that much into cute?

The world knows now that the adorable little girl we saw warbling “Ode to the Motherland” at the Olympics opening ceremony was not really singing. She was a Potemkin performer. A Trojan tyke. Lin Miaoke, 9, was fronting for Yang Peiyi, 7, the girl with the best voice but imperfect teeth.

“The child on camera should be flawless in image, internal feeling and expression,” said Chen Qigang, the music director, who went public with the news that the dual-little-girl strategy was concocted after a member of the party Politburo intervened at the last minute.

Now this is an Olympic crisis everybody can get into. While your heart goes out to the athletes suffering the agony of defeat, very few of us can internalize the trauma. Really, you have to be able to imagine yourself getting onto the balance beam before you can relate to the pain of falling off.

But having the whole world know that you’ve been deemed insufficiently attractive — now there’s Everywoman’s nightmare. When Peiyi told a Chinese TV station that just being able to sing was an honor, you could imagine her in 10 years insisting that she didn’t care about going to the school dance since she was having so much fun sewing carnations onto the homecoming float.

If she grows up to discover a cure for cancer, when they hand over the Nobel Prize, will everybody say that it was nice that she found a way to make up for those unfortunate front teeth?

The idea that appearance is valued more than performance is one of those painful facts of life that people always hate to be reminded of. But Andrew Nathan, an expert on Chinese politics and human rights at Columbia, seemed puzzled by why anybody would be surprised by this kind of switcheroo in a country where help-wanted ads make it clear that job candidates must be good-looking and the 380 hostesses to the Olympics were all required to be the same height and weight.

“This particular technique seems so standard. I’m a little puzzled about why everybody’s stuck on this example,” he said. “I really don’t know how a little girl in China might respond to being told your teeth are not good enough. But doesn’t that happen all the time in Hollywood?”

Cheng Li, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, saw the story more in terms of consumer fraud. “What she sings is a very moving nationalistic song,” he said. “The people were so emotionally involved. If you asked them what’s the most moving episode, I think the majority would tell you that moment, with the little girl in red clothes. Now the Chinese people feel they are fooled. The psychological hurt is enormous.”

One could certainly argue that American outrage over Peiyi’s situation is overkill, given the fact that families here gather together in front of the TV to watch reality shows in which unattractive people are permitted to audition for talent contests so that the judges can make fun of them. And in China, the fact that authorities were trying to put one over on the viewers was somewhat undercut when Chen, the music director, disclosed the switch in an interview on Beijing Radio.

“The little girl is a magnificent singer. She doesn’t deserve to be hidden,” he told AP Television News. How he felt about his moment of candor once it became an international story is yet to be determined.

Actually, the organizers had started with a completely different little girl, 10, who was fired at the last minute when the ceremony’s director, Zhang Yimou, decided she looked too old. We do not want to imagine the repercussions when this kid hits her 30th birthday.

Miaoke then got the part — until a senior Communist Party member, sitting in on one of the final rehearsals, announced that her voice “must change.”

It’s not actually clear whether it was the party boss who decided that while the voice had to change, the cute exterior needed to remain. But Zhang, a well-known movie director, seemed to start channeling “Singin’ in the Rain.” Peiyi (whose teacher described her as a well-behaved child who didn’t like to show off) got the Debbie Reynolds part — the nice girl singer doing all the work behind the curtain while the star mimed under the spotlight.

Meanwhile, Miaoke was apparently singing her 9-year-old heart out on stage under the illusion that the world was hearing her voice. According to Jim Yardley’s report in The Times, Miaoke’s father said he had to tell her that everybody was hearing Peiyi instead. “The only thing I care about is that my daughter will not get hurt by this. She’ll understand when she grows up,” he added.

You have to wonder. Miaoke may turn out to be the real victim in this story. It’s one thing to be thrust into the role of Debbie Reynolds. It’s a lot worse to go overnight from symbol of the Olympics to Ashlee Simpson.

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每天一专栏.怎么什么都跟党扯一起啊,关党什么事啊...外国人联想得也真厉害...