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In July 2001, China beat out its competitors for the right to host the 2008 Summer Olympics. The decision was somewhat controversial at the time, considering China’s lack of political freedoms and human rights record. The International Olympic Committee, however, considered the Olympics a way to encourage change in China’s internal situation. For Beijing, winning the games was seen as further proof of China’s rise among the big nations in the world, particularly as it came only a few months after an tense standoff with the United States over a collision between Chinese and U.S. military aircraft that left a U.S. E-P3 (and its crew) on Hainan Island in southern China.
U.S.-China tensions faded rapidly later in 2001 after the attacks in Washington and New York, but China continued to play the Olympics up as both a tool to rally nationalism among domestic and overseas Chinese, and as a public relations initiative to demonstrate China’s emergence among the major world powers. This was further reinforced (in Beijing’s eyes) by the rapid rise of China’s economy in the succeeding years, as China climbed the global gross domestic product ranking ladder to 4th place in 2007, passing most of the European nations and closing the gap with Japan.
As the Olympics drew nearer, Beijing grew concerned with a whole host of potential problems, seeing 2007 as the most critical year — a year that it anticipated would bring a confluence of political pressures from Taiwan and the United States amid growing concerns of economic problems at home and abroad. Beijing’s fears of a perfect storm for 2007 ultimately proved overblown. But just as the Chinese leadership was breathing a sigh of relief, 2008 brought about a whole host of problems ranging from domestic security threats to a hammering of China’s image overseas.
On March 5, a Chinese man carrying what he claimed was a bomb hijacked a bus full of Australians in Xian, raising concerns about transportation security in China, and Beijing’s ability to counter threats from common citizens (as opposed to the “separatist” or “extremist” groups Beijing had been focusing on up to that point). Just days later, on March 7, Chinese security forces thwarted an alleged attempt to bring down a Chinese airliner flying from Xinjiang to Beijing. According to Chinese authorities, the incident was perpetrated by Uighur militant separatists linked to al Qaeda and the international jihadist movement.
This was seen as further evidence of what Beijing had been warning about all along, namely, that Uighur terrorists were targeting the Olympic games. Many observers outside China saw this claim as fairly spurious, and more likely to be a convenient excuse to crack down on the ethnic Uighurs and tighten security overall rather than a response to serious and identifiable threat. But even as Beijing was warning about the threat the Uighurs posed to the Olympics, the annual March 10 demonstrations in Tibet marking Tibet’s failed 1959 uprising against Chinese forces suddenly grew violent, triggering several days of riots in Lhasa and other Tibetan cities until Chinese troops intervened.
Beijing saw this as instigation not only by the Dalai Lama, but by his foreign supporters, including the United States. This view as reinforced when it became known that members of CANVAS, a Serbian-based but U.S.-funded group that teaches nonviolent movements and helped train activists in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and Georgia’s Rose Revolution, among others, had held a session with members of the Central Tibetan Administration — Tibet’s “government in exile” — in India a week before the Lhasa demonstrations. And it didn’t help matters that the Dalai Lama was scheduled to visit the United States in March as well.
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