Before tensions imploded in Tibetan areas, Chinese officials thought the chief domestic security threat to the 2008 Summer Games would come from Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang. Many officials still think that. My recent journey to one traditional redoubt of Uighur unrest revealed growing polarization of the religious and cultural landscape, as both the economy and Islam begin to flourish. Whether the situation might devolve into the extremism Beijing evokes is another question however. Herewith some field notes I made while reporting an earlier magazine piece:

Sunday’s “big bazaar” day in Khotan, on China’s northwest frontier, where the big money’s tied up in Khotanese jade. Prices for pure nephrite from the local “White Jade River” have shot up ten-fold in just two to three years, helping this desert junction on the storied Silk Road – in the late 1990’s, a poor, dusty seedbed of violent outbursts by Muslim Uighur separatists – recoup some of its ancient luster as a nexus of trade. On a recent Sunday in April, along an arcade lined by dozens of jade shops and a vast mosque, Uighur men in skullcaps shuffled about in scrums, palms extended like beggars. They held pebbles with black beauty marks, sunbursts of orange, and creme de mint-colored ripples. The precious stones fetched offers in the hundreds of dollars from Han Chinese collectors from as far east as Suzhou.

Just after the discombobulated San Francisco torch relay concluded, a new threat hit the headlines: Beijing said it had thwarted a Muslim terror plot in which terrorists planned to kidnap Olympic athletes, foreign journalists and other visitors during the August Games. And China's attempts to police its borders are getting media attention too; the visa clampdown that we'd blogged and written about earlier is really beginning to bite.

Today in a Beijing press conference Ministry of Public Security spokesman Wu Heping said 35 people had been arrested, and bomb-making materials discovered, between March 26 and April 6 in the far Western region of Xinjiang, home to some 8 million Uighur Muslims. Militant Uighurs have long been accused of "religious extremism, separatism and terrorism", by the government, though there's alot of disagreement over whether the intensity of the threat has been hyped.

Xinjiang was home to a brief-lived East Turkestan Republic in the 1930's and 40's. Today's East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) is recognized by both Beijing and Washington D.C. as a terrorist organization with links to Al Qaeda.  In an earlier plot revealed in March, Wu said, ETIM extremists had plotted to attack hotels, government offices and military targets in Shanghai, Beijing and other cities with poison, poison gas and remotely controlled bombs.

 
Mark Ralston / AFP-Getty Images
A Muslim Uighur woman walks with her son past security forces in the town of Kashgar, Xinjiang Province on April 2, 2008.

Even as Chinese officials warned of Tibetan "suicide squads" mobilizing for action, we hear reports of Muslim Uighurs clashing with police in remote Xinjiang. This is serious indeed, if true. It could represent a perfect storm of trouble in the run-up to the Beijing Games.

Uighur militants had trained in Taliban training camps in Afghanistan. I remember seeing yuan currency and Chinese passports with Uighur names in the debris of one of Osama bin Laden's farms in Jalalabad right after the Taliban fell. Moreover Uighurs captured by U.S.-led troops wound up behind bars in Guantanamo Bay. (However the question of whether the banned  East Turkestan Independence Movement is as an organization—as opposed to Uighur individuals—in thrall to bin Laden, as Beijing authorities allege, remains a topic of debate.)

Over the past decade, Uighurs are reported to have engaged in bombings, assassinations, and hijackings inside China to promote their separatist cause. As recently as last month, Chinese officials announced they'd foiled a terrorist plot to blow up an aircraft, an act that they said was part of a conspiracy to sabotage the Olympics. At the moment it's impossible to confirm independently the extent of reported unrest in Xinjiang. The two locations identified below are deep in Central Asia not far from the frontier with Pakistan and Afghanistan. So far the most detailed report is this dispatch from Radio Free Asia:

China's president greeted the Monday arrival of the Olympic flame in Beijing, at the start of what looks certain to be its most controversial journey ever. The risk of the torch relay being ambushed by demonstrators along its 130-day route through 21 cities on five continents has grown since Beijing's clampdown on violent protests in Tibet.

It wouldn't have been a Chinese state occasion without a secret and a rumor. The secret was why the timing of the welcoming ceremony was changed, and the rumor was that it must be for security reasons. China's Olympic organizers say otherwise. They pointed to the early arrival of the plane carrying the torch from Greece, and Beijing's weather forecast portending fog later in the day. While it's certainly true that the ceremony went off smoothly in brilliant sunshine, and the sky clouded later, the whole episode left me wondering.

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."

Tibetan and U.S. flags are waving everywhere in Dharamsala--and Beijing’s suspicions about the U.S. are just as obvious. The reasons for such distrust include a secret CIA operation in the Himalayas that brought American military support to anti-Chinese Tibetan rebels half a century ago. The effort ended tragically for Tibetans.

Such a bloodstained and shadowy history helps explain why this sleepy Indian hill station was a-twitter Friday. Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, came to town to call on the Dalai Lama, whose government-in-exile is based here. (The trip was scheduled before the Lhasa riots broke out March 10).

International reaction is much more pivotal now than it was in 1989, the last time PLA troops forcibly suppressed large numbers of Lhasa residents. If the global chorus of criticism grows, so will calls for a boycott of the Beijing Olympic Games due to be held Aug. 8-24-- something Beijing officials are desparate to prevent.

Of all the unforgettable Tibet images on the Web this week, the Tibetan horsemen twirling lassos and galloping on cobby little ponies to lay seige to a government building in some podunk corner of Gansu province keeps running through my mind.

Click here to see the video

Less than a week after Lhasa burned, the Beijing Olympics organising committee (BOCOG) is holding firm to its plans to take the Olympic flame to Tibet. Carrying the torch to the summit of Everest will be "the highlight" of the 2008 torch relay, top official Jiang Xiaoyu told reporters. The flame is due to start its journey on Monday at Olympia in Greece; the official slogan, settled long ago, is "Journey of Harmony". Tibetan activists and exiles who have rallied outside Chinese embassies this week seem unlikely to heed this message. After the last few days, however, BOCOG must long for the time when the sight of a 'Free Tibet' T-shirt on camera was its worst nightmare.

The ascent of Everest will be a "great feat in Olympic history", said BOCOG executive vice president Jiang Xiaoyu. As he described the logistics, it became clear that summiting Everest is set to be the grandest moment in the long pre-Olympic drumroll, short of the opening ceremony itself. The flame will be divided so that one torch can continue around China while the other is carried to Everest. Weather conditions cloud the timing, but on the day the torch ascends the peak BOCOG will suspend the other leg of the relay in line with International Olympic Committee (IOC) rules. The waiting and watching will create a perfect format for breathless media attention. The flame will then go to Lhasa to await its other half. Their reunion will be another media moment. There will be plentiful references to the torch relay's official "message of friendship, peace and harmony". It must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

 Courtesy Free Tibet Campaign

Uneasy Times: Riot police in Xiahe, Gansu province, on Saturday

Midnight raids. Relatives snitching on each other. Confessions on nationwide TV. Jittery Lhasa residents dread today’s imminent midnight deadline for rioters to turn themselves in. “Everybody’s expecting there’ll be some raids in certain parts of the city,” says one Lhasa resident. Such fears are based on memories of brutality after Chinese troops crushed similar protests in 1989. “In ’89 so many people disappeared, so many [were] arrested. It was terrible,” recalls another resident of Lhasa.

The ultimatum urging those who engaged in “social chaos” to surrender was issued Saturday by the Tibet Autonomous Region High People’s Court, and broadcast on Tibet TV.  Its not the only source of fear and loathing. Convoys of trucks carrying soldiers were sighted traveling by road from adjacent Sichuan province into the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR).  Up to now, security personnel involved in cracking down on Tibetan protestors appeared to be People’s Armed Police, not soldiers.

Meanwhile  at least two dozen foreign correspondents were stopped at checkpoints, detained, or otherwise had their journalistic work interfered with in recent days as they tried to cover the spreading Tibetan unrest. Today I spent hours communicating by phone or e-mail with colleagues who’d been stopped from reporting in Tibetan communities in Gansu and Qinghai provinces – or were locked in a furtive cat-and-mouse game trying to evade police. (As president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC), I also worked on an FCCC statement of concern about these incidents of detention and harassment).

Foreign media were still denied authorization to enter Tibet. So the scarcity of firsthand coverage of Lhasa – on top of the hamfisted police efforts to keep foreign correspondents away from other venues where violence had erupted, such as Xiahe – meant a lot of reporters found themselves writing the story of being prevented from reporting the story.

Today brought other hair-tearing frustrations, too. Internet access for many journalists became maddeningly slow or even nonexistent for large chunks of the day – apparently as a result of the Great Firewall of China on steroids. And don’t forget the pervasive black-outs of certain Tibet-related video footage on CNN and the BBC.

If this isn’t already a perfect storm of bad press that threatens to tarnish the Summer Olympics, consider this: tomorrow morning HIV/AIDS activist Hu Jia is slated to appear in a Beijing court hearing for the first time since he was detained Dec. 27 and charged with subversion.  In November the prominent activist had made critical remarks about the Olympics in a webcam conversation with EU parliamentarians – and now he’s seen as the dissident poster boy for critics who maintain that China’s patchy human-rights record and imprisonment of political prisoners justifies a boycott of the Games.

Oh, I forgot to mention that Hu and his wife Zeng Jinyan are devout converts to Tibetan Buddhism. (He embraced pacifism after the June 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, because “Buddhism is against killing,” he told me)  After their daughter was born last November, the couple had approached the Dalai Lama’s aides asking for him to bless their child by granting her a Buddhist name. Hu told me he planned to have his baby’s Tibetan name registered on her household registration document, alongside her Chinese name Qianci.  But a week later he was thrown into jail, and now his wife and Qianci are under house arrest. Cyber-dissidents have been blogging about their cloak-and-dagger attempts to smuggle baby milk powder to the mother and child. Whether its in ancient Lhasa or in Hu’s modern flat in Freedom City, the midnight knock on the door never seems very far away.