There are few enough laughs coming out of Tibet at the moment, but Beijing's mouthpieces still manage to raise the odd, rueful smile. As the quibbling over casualty figures from Lhasa went on the other day, one such was drawing hard on the oxygen of news-channel publicity. It was, no doubt, his patriotic duty.

Violence, this one said sternly, is intolerable in any democracy. I almost choked. Either it was a crumb of cold toast or my ability to remember the sketchiest outlines of twentieth-century history. I stand to be corrected but, even in their least optimistic moments, Pericles, Voltaire, Jefferson, Tom Paine and the rest probably did not have the People's Republic in mind when they were going on about representation and liberty.

Granted, you can come up with any number of arguments to demonstrate why a one-party communist state should be sublimely democratic. In China, the Mao cult called a halt to that daydream before the ink was dry on the chairman's little poems. In his aftermath, the government of the Middle Kingdom has become an apparatus lacking even the pretence of ideology, unless you count paranoia, paramilitaries and sovereign wealth funds as indicators.

The bespectacled men in bad suits deplore Tibetan violence? Of course they do. In their democracy, censorship, labour camps, firing squads and a top-notch Olympic Games answer all questions of political legitimacy. The world looks on, meanwhile, and says nothing whatsoever of consequence.

Our own David Miliband, Foreign Secretary, leads the charge with rubber sword and plastic shield. With Tibet under martial law, he subscribes, it seems, to the "faults on both sides" school of diplomacy, and calls for restraint. The reported dead - 16 according to Beijing, up to 99 at the time of writing according to Tibetans - are very restrained.

If you have been paying even cursory attention, you might wonder why Mr Miliband's boss, Gordon Brown, was quite so agitated over the fate of Burmese monks when he is outwardly calm, and certainly quiet, while Tibetan monks are in difficulties. And wasn't China supposed to exert its influence over the Burmese junta? That was before Beijing's influence in the Darfur catastrophe was also held to be crucial. Perhaps there are nuances to the idea of democracy that autocrats miss.

Certainly, they miss them in their own, arcane terms. According to the retrospective justification for the seizing of Tibet in 1950, the country is an "autonomous region" of China. According to the terms of his own delicate game, meanwhile, the Dalai Lama has no desire to restore his country's independence. The monk asks only - but you saw this one coming - for autonomy. Beijing prefers repression and waves of Han Chinese immigration to keep the theocrats in check and in exile.

Bizarrely enough, China's rulers have a point, of sorts. Mao may have defined religion as "poison" for the Dalai Lama's benefit, and to justify his invasion, but the west has acquired lazy notions about Tibet and its spiritual leader in exile. It is hard to sift through the propaganda, but it appears that ordinary Tibetans are not entirely ungrateful for the material improvements Beijing has provided. They merely retain the belief that prosperity would be sweeter without the Chinese.

Whether they also want a return to the priest-ridden feudalism that produced the fourteenth incarnation of the Buddha's body is another matter. The west sees a gentle, giggling holy man. In his own tongue - this from a Times correspondent - "he can be severe, even prescriptive, about behaviour and beliefs". In his Indian enclave at Dharamsala his word is law, unimpeded by any democratic nonsense. Blink and you might mistake the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner for a smiling autocrat.

He is respected and revered by his people: that much is not in question. Whether these days unquestioning deference follows is another matter. Among the Tibetan disapora, particularly among the young Tibetans who have never seen their country, the Dalai Lama is questioned increasingly. The violence in Lhasa could even be interpreted as a rebuff to his passive "middle way". His threat to resign as head of the Tibetan government-in-exile may be a sop to Beijing, but it is also a response to the Tibetan Youth Congress.

"Radical" they may be - though in whose terms? - but some of their web traffic, at least in English, suggests they are out of patience with the western belief that the Dalai Lama's spiritual authority strikes real fear within the Chinese government. The self-styled communists have coped comfortably with the threat since the smiling monk fled his country 49 years ago. For the young, that eternity points to a failed strategy.

Besides, they have an Olympic party to ruin, if they can. Thus far, the Dalai Lama has refused to call for a boycott of the Games, and western governments, Britain's not least, have failed to discourage his restraint. The International Olympic Committee, the politicians, the corporate sponsors, the TV companies and the professional athletes for whom hurdles are rarely moral echo the view. What are a few dozen dead, international law spurned, and a nation denied the right of self-determination when the Olympic ideal is at stake?

After all, this is not Moscow in 1980. No-one has suggested calling an evil empire to account because it has sent invading armies into plucky, unwelcoming, freedom-fighting Afghanistan. These days, that's Nato's job. China is merely an emerging economic titan with key holdings in every western economy and a seat on the UN Security Council. Remind me, in any case: who gets the games after Beijing? Why make life unpleasant for Mayor Boris Johnson?

A cynical approach to geopolitics will never let you down, one finds. A cynical attitude, now and then, towards the Dalai Lama, Olympic fellow-feeling and other warm, fuzzy constructs does not go amiss either.

This isn't complicated, particularly. Tibet's right to independence has been asserted for more than 1000 years, and was confirmed internationally in 1911 when the last Chinese dynasty collapsed under the weight of its own stupidity. The Olympics, meanwhile, are grotesque at the best of times. A performance-enhancing drug for international political morality need not be too debilitating. We need not dress it up as liberal interventionism, or even as a threat to Chinese self-esteem.

We could just say - the athletes, ideally, could say - that running, jumping, swimming, boxing and throwing things is a little nauseating when corpses are being discussed. It would not free Tibet, of course: China has stacked those odds high. It might even impede fumbling efforts to achieve decency in Darfur or Burma if Beijing takes a serious huff. Efforts to stabilise relationships between currencies, of some importance just at the moment, might also suffer.

But be serious. As the fifth anniversary of the Iraq escapade becomes a ubiquitous topic, Tibet provides the occasion for an appropriate, if slightly pathetic, gesture by what remains of the international community. This is not the time for fun, or for games. Beijing may worry occasionally about the Dalai Lama's authority. Absurd as it sounds, the shameless inheritors of the legacy of the Long March, the empty husks of a revolution, take their multi-billion- dollar Olympic marketing effort much more seriously.

So why not stay home?