Even as the government maintains Lhasa is calm, arrests of Tibetans who took part in last week's protests are continuing in the city. -- PHOTO: AP

'It seemed almost strange that normal life had returned,' Mr Kenwood told reporters after arriving in neighboring Nepal.

Though four months and 2,400 kilometres apart, the turmoil in Tibet and the Aug 8-24 Olympics have become tied in the minds of many around the world. China is furiously working to undo the knot, hoping to show that calm has returned to Tibet while quickly suppressing anti-government unrest erupting across a broad stretch of territory.

In recent days the government has sent a slew of officials before the media, as well as cleanup crews into Lhasa's streets, to try to prove the trouble has quickly passed.

The strategy marks a turn from the past. Unlike 1989 - when China quelled another anti-Chinese uprising in Tibet that March and the democracy movement in Beijing's Tiananmen Square that summer by imposing months of martial law - the government resorted to undeclared curfews and said it used riot and armed police, instead of the army. 'No martial law was imposed,' state-run China Central Television's English channel declared.

Staying Beijing's hand in part is the Olympics - 'a dream of generations' of Chinese, as Premier Wen Jiabao told reporters this week, and an event the communist leadership hopes will bolster its credibility at home and abroad.

'They're surely feeling constrained by the Olympics. I think that's clear,' said Mr David Zweig of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. 'Tiananmen was in the heart of Beijing. This is far in the periphery, but it's in an area that's of high interest to the international community.'

The Olympic gambit on Tibet relies heavily on Beijing's gaining control speedily. Much remains unclear about the situation in Lhasa, where largely peaceful protests led by Buddhist monks descended into violence on March 14 as Tibetans attacked Chinese and set fires in a burst of pent-up anger against Chinese rule that drew Beijing's crackdown.

Arrests are continuing
Even as the government maintains Lhasa is calm, arrests of Tibetans who took part in last week's protests are continuing in the city. Xinhua, the official news agency, reported that 170 people had 'surrendered,' but gave no indication of arrests. Overseas Tibet support groups have put arrests in the hundreds, and they and witnesses have described rolling squads of police moving street by street.

The death toll from the rioting and the ensuing counteroffensive is in dispute. China says 16 died; 80 says the exile Tibetan government led by the Dalai Lama, the revered spiritual leader of Buddhist Tibetans.

And while Beijing reimposes order in Lhasa, outbursts of anti-China protests are erupting across Tibetan communities in 1,200-kilometre arc of territory that borders the Chinese heartland.

Failure to squelch the spreading if episodic unrest would likely encourage Tibetans' northern neighbours, Turkic Muslims who have waged a simmering battle for secession in Xinjiang, China's Central Asian buffer province.

Foreign journalists have been barred from Tibet and these other hotspots, contrary to regulations passed for the Olympics that were supposed to allow overseas media broad access. Parts of those Tibetan lands now look like occupied country, with truckloads of paramilitary police camped outside Buddhist monasteries.

In an edgy exchange at a news conference on Wednesday, journalists asked Beijing's Olympic organisers how they could conduct the torch relay through these areas now closed off, ostensibly because they are unsafe.

Torch relay to go on as scheduled
A senior official with the Beijing Olympics Organising Committee said the torch relay would go on as scheduled, although he said contingencies were in place should the 'weather or anything else unexpected' arise.

With tensions far from over, international tolerance limited and the torch relay due to start this month, Beijing needs to speedily manage the unrest and its public message.

'Beijing is smart enough to solve the Tibet unrest issue as soon and as peaceful as possible,' said Mr Xu Guoqi, a China-born historian at Kalamazoo College in the US state of Michigan.

In some parts of the country, authorities seem to be setting a timetable to resolve the crisis. Police at a roadway checkpoint in Sichuan said foreigners are being barred from the province's Tibetan areas for 10 days, as of March 17.

No governments calling for boycott
So far, no governments or major Olympic committees are calling for a boycott, although that could change should Beijing's crackdown grow too apparently heavy-handed.

Beijing has learned a lot about controlling unrest since 1989. While China contained the fallout from crushing Tibet protests that year, its bloody quelling of the democracy demonstrators in central Beijing stigmatised the government and set back the economy for several years.

The government has since poured resources into building up police and paramilitary riot squads. Protests have become commonplace in China in the past decade, by workers laid off due to restructuring, by bankrupt state industries and by farmers displaced from their land by development. Police have developed a play book for dealing with these incidents - keep the protesters in a confined area, defuse the situation with payoffs or promises, and settle scores later.

Beijing has tried to stanch unrest and buy Tibetans' loyalty in recent years by investing billions of dollars in the region, lavishing spending on infrastructure projects.

Yet the flood of Chinese migrants that money brought and ever tightening restrictions on Buddhist observances left Tibetans feeling marginalized in their homelands. The riot-control plans that have proved so effective elsewhere in China also seemed to fail on March 14, as Tibetans briefly seized parts of Lhasa.

With foreign governments holding off calls for a real boycott and independent media given little access to Tibet, there are worries that China will resort to quick and harsh measures, leaving Tibetans more angry and alienated.

'Window of opportunity'
'There's a number of people outside in the free world who also believe China's hopes for the Olympics is a window of opportunity. I believe it's a window of opportunity,' said Mr Lodi Gyari, an aide to the Dalai Lama who conducted a fitful dialogue with Chinese officials that broke off in 2006.

'The Chinese themselves have created this global image. Tibet is precisely the image they wanted to avoid.' -- AP