At last – and perhaps only temporarily – I've emerged from deadline fever. At the same time as staggering towards deadline day, I've been travelling and speaking at book festivals first in Beijing, where I live, then in Hong Kong, and then in Shanghai. Of course, because of the censorship of China's writers, these festivals are basically run by expatriates and attended by expatriates. That was what I was going to blog about, and about the delight of meeting two writers I greatly admire, Qiu Xiaolong and Yan Gelin, and about the people I bumped into along the way.
But then, on Tuesday, my husband James went into Lhasa on an officially-sanctioned trip. He flew as far as Qinghai, and then travelled for about 24 hours on the train, watching antelope and (he insists) a wolf, out of the train window. He said the landscape was breathtaking. Even before he left Beijing, he was intrigued by the fact that the authorities were allowing him to go into Tibet at a point when news reports were beginning to leak out of protests at Tibetan monasteries.
On his first evening he was banqueted by his Chinese hosts, and ethnic dances were staged for his benefit. By the next day, much of Lhasa was in flames. He is staying in a small hotel in the heart of the Tibetan area, and he has spend the past 24 hours out in the maze of streets observing the riots and the response of the security forces. This morning, when I took my daughters for a walk in the park, I spoke to him on my mobile, only to discover that he was trapped near the Jokhang, his way out blocked by rioters and an armoured personnel carrier. Later, when I spoke to him, he had managed to return to his hotel.
We have tried to keep in touch, but frequently there is no mobile signal, or the hotel loses electricity and he can't recharge his phone. He told me today there is no longer any internet access. Luckily, supplies of food are still available, although the yak cheese omelette is no longer on offer in the hotel coffee shop. At one point his interpreter, who is in another hotel in a different part of the city, asked me to pass on the message to James that he should not drink the tap water because it was poisoned – I suggested to her that this was probably a rumour, but she felt she didn't want to test it out. She is Han Chinese, and would like to leave as soon as possible, but is not being allowed to leave her hotel, and has been told that the airport is also closed for fear that rioters will flee by air. How much of this is true is impossible to know. When I spoke to James earlier this evening, he said the armed police had moved into the city and there is the sound of sporadic shooting.
Of course, as everyone has pointed out, these riots come at a terrible time for the Chinese authorities (that of course will have been the point). Not only is the parliament meeting being held in Beijing, an event which the leadership goes to great lengths to stage free of expressions of dissent. But the Olympics are just months away, and an overly aggressive response will lead inevitably to calls for a boycott.
Nevertheless, Tibetan calls for independence bring out a fierce response in many of China's leaders. They have oppressed and cracked down hard in the region for decades, resisting international pressure to allow more freedom. I suspect there has been a heated argument in the leadership between those desperate to preserve the Olympics, and those who may be prepared to sacrifice the Olympics if necessary in order to quell what might grow into a Tibetan rebellion. We will see, in the next few hours and days who has won.