An Olympian test

China is facing a series of Olympian tests in the run-up to the Beijing games. First Steven Spielberg resigned as artistic consultant over China's unwillingness to pressure Sudan over Darfur. Then, according to Chinese state media, a 19-year-old woman from western China's Muslim Uighur minority tried to start a fire on a domestic flight last week. And now Tibet's monks are staging the region's biggest demonstrations in almost two decades. An event intended to restore China to the centre of the world stage is instead proving to be a powerful lever in the hands of Beijing's traditional foes - human rights activists, the Uighurs and the Tibetans.

The struggle for Tibet remains non-violent, 49 years after the failed uprising in 1959. On Monday monks from Sera, Drepung and Ganden, the three major monasteries around the capital Lhasa, took to the streets waving the banned flag and shouting slogans calling for the return of their exiled leader, the Dalai Lama. Events in one of the most tightly controlled regions in the world are difficult to confirm. But an eyewitness report posted on the internet by tourists in Jokhang Square, in the centre of Lhasa, said that hundreds of civilians formed a silent circle around police to protect a small group of monks shouting slogans. They failed.

Reinforcements soon arrived and the monks were arrested. Since then, monks demanding their release have gone on hunger strike. The monks are well aware of the risks they are taking. In September last year seven Tibetan schoolchildren were beaten and tortured in custody with electric cattle prods for writing slogans on a school wall.

China is not the first country in the world to use the construction of railways and settlement of non-indigenous people as instruments of suppression. There is another mechanism to regulate the conflict. Talks between envoys of the Dalai Lama and the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, have gone on for years but produced, in the Tibetan leader's words, "no concrete results". The monks are not just emboldened by Beijing's vulnerability to embarrassment in the run-up to the games. They are also fired with frustration. Their fear is that Beijing is dragging the talks out until the Dalai Lama, already 72, is too old to do anything about it.

The demands of the government-in-exile do not axiomatically challenge the Chinese social order. The Dalai Lama wants to return before he dies. He wants more autonomy for Tibet and protection for its language and culture. Autonomy is a long way from separatism, and it is negotiable. China should seize the opportunity that this process gives it to resolve a con