It's begun. The official Olympic torch-lighting ceremony in Greece was marred by protestors waving a banner showing Olympic rings transformed into handcuffs, and rushing behind Beijing Games Organizing committee head Liu Qi as he presided over the event. Three representatives of the press-freedom group Reporters Without Borders were hustled roughly off the scene by security personnel. RSF is calling on international VIP’s to boycott the Games opening ceremony to protest China’s imprisonment of more than 100 journalists, Netizens and cyber-dissidents.

The relay will become a gauntlet of anti-Beijing protests, as my colleague Mary Hennock and I blogged about earlier. The Olympic flame is slated to pass through 20 countries and 31 Chinese provinces before arriving in Beijing for the Aug. 8 Olympics opening ceremony. Monday Free Darfur activists announced they were mobilizing demonstrations urging China to “extinguish the flames of genocide” in Darfur in San Francisco on April 9, the day the flame passes through the city.

One of Thailand's six torchbearers has withdrawn in protest. Environmentalist Narisa Chakrabongse said she now declined to take part in the relay to "send a strong message to China that the world community could not accept its actions."

Meanwhile, Chinese officials are scrambling to work out details of foreign media access to Tibet, part of a bid to reassure the international community that stability has returned in advance of the flame’s ascent of Mt. Everest in early May and its passage through Lhasa in June.

At the same time Chinese media rhetoric is becoming more and more strident--and anti-Western--in tone. Since my last blog, the official Xinhua News Agency has denounced U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her meeting with the Dalai Lama Friday. That's when she visited Dharamsala and declared that if people don’t speak out against Beijing’s repression in Tibet “we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world.”

The senior Democratic politician's words were partly a dig at America’s Republican president George Bush, who’s remained tightlipped on Tibet. But her words were also taken very personally by Chinese authorities.

A Xinhua commentary Sunday accused Pelosi of ignoring the violence caused by Tibetan rioters. "'Human rights police' like Pelosi are habitually bad tempered and ungenerous when it comes to China, refusing to check their facts and find out the truth of the case," it said. "Her views are like so many other politicians and western media. Beneath the double standards lies their intention to serve the interest groups behind them, who want to contain or smear China.”

Beijing continued to denounce the exiled Dalai Lama as trying to “sabotage” the Games and “scheming to take the Beijing Olympics hostage to force the Chinese government to make concessions to Tibet independence,” as the party mouthpiece People's Daily put it. Chinese media also gave high-profile coverage to ethnic Chinese victims, and their gutted and torched businesses, in Lhasa. But reporting on Tibetan casualties remained sparse.

By demonizing Tibetan “separatist” rioters and their exiled spiritual leader, Beijing has played the nationalist card. It's succeeded in rallying domestic support. In doing so, though, it's also fanning the flames: anti-Tibetan sentiment is flaring among ethnic Chinese, and so are anti-Western diatribes. Chinese publications accused several Western media of “bias” against Beijing in their coverage – pinpointing several alleged examples in minute detail, such as CNN's cropping of a news photo. Now foreign media have become the target of vitriol. According to Western news reports, one foreign media organization had to move its Beijing bureau due to security threats.

The nastiness reminds me of the mood in Beijing after NATO's bopmbing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. In the aftermath, Chinese protestors trashed the American and British embassy grounds. More on that in a later blog.