As the Olympic torch has made its way around the world, its journey has become more and more sensational. This is no ordinary torch run: This has become the center of a much politicized and heavily controversial Beijing Olympics.

Major news networks like CBS, CNN and NBC, as well as ESPN, have all mentioned the troubles of the Olympic torch. Never before have stunned viewers seen it placed on a bus for transport.

The center of all the controversy has been the Tibetan riots that first broke out about a month ago in Tibet. Protestors of China’s authoritarian rule of Tibet have become globally unified in an attempt to shake China’s grip of the Tibetans.

Tibet’s problems with China date back to the 1950s when the Chinese Communist Party occupied and ruled Tibet. The region is located in Southwest China, bordered by Nepal, Bhutan and India. The Tibetans are a separate ethnic group than the majority Han Chinese. China has more than 50 designated ethnic minority groups within its modern borders, of which Tibet is only one. Historically, Tibet first fell under Chinese influence during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) when then-Emperor Tang Taizong sent his daughter to marry into the Tibetan ruling family in an attempt to expand a powerful imperial China.

In the 1950s, China’s military forces faced off with Tibetan guerillas resentful of the Chinese presence in Tibet. Violence escalated around the provincial capital, Lhasa, and the Dalai Lama fled in 1959. The Dalai Lama is the powerful political leader of Tibet, followed by the Panchen Lama. During the 1959 uprising, however, many other religious and political leaders, such as the Panchen Lama, did not support resistance to Chinese rule.

The United States gave its support in the 1959 uprising to the Tibetans through CIA training and other forms of military aid. It continued to aid the Tibetan struggle until the 1970s, when Sino-American relations were stabilized during the era of the Open Door policy and the thawing of the Cold War. However, although the United States continuously tried covert actions to aid the Tibetans, they were not well received in Tibet, and these efforts in the 1960s and 1970s were not successful.

Today, Tibet is ruled as an autonomous region in China. It has the political standing and equivalency as any other province or national municipality. However, there have been disputes and arguments over the exact meaning of “autonomous” and how free the Tibetans actually are to rule themselves. China has continually invested in Tibet as a tourist region, including the recently completed construction of a fast railway to the capital of Lhasa from the Sichuan Province capital of Chengdu.

Until recently, the Dalai Lama has softened his stance on Tibetan independence against China. He has endorsed the protests, so long as they are peaceful, and has even emphasized that people deserve the freedom to express their discontent. But he has not gone so far as saying the Tibetans should be free and independent from China. On April 11th, The New York Times quoted the Dalai Lama as saying, “We are not anti-Chinese.” And the Dalai Lama still endorses the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

But for whatever reason, in the past month, Tibetan riots have exploded on an international scale and Tibet has once again become the darling of the West. There is nothing wrong with the West’s endorsement of a certain group crying for independence, but this does create two perplexing issues that deserve attention.

First, hundreds of independence movements and cries for separation from a current regime exist across the world. But instead of coming to a clear platform about which of these separatist movements to endorse and dismiss, the American public and Western critics, including out governments, have openly chosen who to back on a rather arbitrary basis. Yes, we will endorse Tibet and Kosovo because our emotions have been intimately tied to these two places and peoples, but no, we will ignore the countless other cries for independence, such as those in Palestine and the Basque region. This creates an extremely dangerous precedent in a world where new boundaries and countries are difficult to carve out. Not only is this a dangerous precedent, this inconsistent support can easily undermine the legitimacy of recognized nation-state boundaries.

And secondly, instead of using the Olympics to call on China for reform and change in its policy toward Sudan, where the Darfur genocide is occurring, the attention of China’s actions and international moral responsibility has shifted away from Sudan and onto Tibet. The United States and other Western countries have little leverage on China. It is a lost opportunity that may never be recovered to overshadow China’s policies toward Sudan with the Tibetan conflict.

China is ruled by an authoritarian regime that has a history of human rights violations. The Olympics season is a good time to pressure China to make reforms in those areas as it attempts to step onto the international stage. But to openly humiliate China about Tibet may be more costly than anticipated, when weighed against the possibilities this timeframe of the Olympics may offer, or when weighed against what other separatist groups are thinking of Western sentiment.

[Reach columnist Sandley Chou at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.]