Privately, Bush Presses China Over Crackdown on Tibet.

Michael J. Green, the top Asia expert at the National Security Council until 2006, said that Tibet is a much tougher issue to discuss with the Chinese leadership than other topics that have captured the attention of Olympic activists, such as China's support of the governments in Burma and Sudan. He noted that Hu was the Communist Party chief of Tibet in the late 1980s, organizing a tough crackdown in 1989 as a steppingstone in his path to power.

Green said that Rice and her predecessor, Colin L. Powell, would always bring up Tibet "in ways that are not threatening" in order to press Beijing to start a substantive dialogue with the Dalai Lama. Hu would not respond, he said, while Yang's predecessor, Li Zhaoxing, would erupt in a tirade about how China liberated the Tibetans from a feudal Buddhist tyranny. "You would either get silence or a strong negative reaction," said Green, now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Read the article