The Globe and Mail's Geoffrey York explains how the whole torch relay mess has played out in China. Essentially, while China might be coming under fire internationally, domestically, support for the government has never been higher.
The story opens with a description of Jin Jing, a one-legged Paralympic fencing champion who shielded the torch in Paris this week from a protester. She's being described as the "smiling angel in a wheelchair."
China in 2008 has become a story with two dramatically contrasting narratives, each isolated in its own solitude, almost unaware of the other. While the West sees the Chinese government as the violent oppressors of Tibetans and other dissidents, the Chinese see their country as the victim of external attacks, and the "wheelchair angel" is their ultimate symbol.
After initially censoring the televised reports on the torch protests in London and Paris, the Chinese government soon found it better to encourage the reports, which were carefully edited to portray China as the victim.
Last month, the state media gave huge publicity to another iconic image of the Tibet crisis: the five young Chinese saleswomen who were killed in their clothing shop in Lhasa when it was set ablaze by Tibetan protesters. Again, the Chinese saw their women as innocent victims of Western-supported attackers.
With images such as those to mould the national mood, it has been surprisingly easy for China's autocratic rulers to rally their country to support them. And here is the unexpected reality of the Chinese Communist Party in 2008: Its international image might be bruised and battered, but its internal grip on power is stronger than ever.
There is mounting evidence — in Internet chat rooms, on the streets and everywhere else where public opinion can be measured — that the Chinese Communist Party has gained popularity and strength as a result of the violence and chaos of the past month.
It might be facing an Olympic opening ceremony boycott and mounting criticism from abroad, but the government has largely succeeded in mobilizing its 1.3 -billion people into a unified force, giving it the domestic legitimacy it craves for its survival.
"Thanks to the protests, the Chinese Communists may have consolidated support by its citizens for years to come," says Roland Soong, a shrewd observer of Chinese politics who runs a blog analyzing the Chinese media.
"For the Chinese Communists, the responses from Western governments, media and citizens are immaterial," he wrote in his blog. "The paramount goal of the Chinese Communists is to retain control of China, and therefore it is the response from the Chinese citizens that matter."