The Dalai Lama Looks Home.

The Dalai Lama landed in America to the usual swirl of praise and protest. After receiving an honorary degree from UC San Francisco last Friday, he is scheduled to meet with George Bush, attend a reception on Capitol Hill and deliver an open-air speech in Central Park to a crowd expected to number in the tens of thousands. Even before the whirlwind began, the government of Beijing's new President Hu Jintao was protesting his planned visit to the White House and scrutinizing the Dalai Lama's every word and deed for "separatist tendencies." It's a ritual that attends every one of the Buddhist leader's visits to America, but an especially important one this year because of changes underway back in Tibet.

The Tibetan capital of Lhasa has metamorphosed into a brash Chinese city with a few pockets of traditional architecture. The 358-year-old home of the Dalai Lama, the Potala, now overlooks a glitzy five-star hotel, pulsating nightclubs and numerous brothels, most of them run by ethnic Chinese. His former bedroom window faces the future site of Lhasa's train station, the end of the line for a new railway connecting Tibet and the rest of China. Today the Dalai Lama would hardly recognize the home he last saw 44 years ago. Even as Beijing protests his visit to America, it is sure enough of its hold on Tibet to have begun talks aimed at negotiating its exiled leader's return. These are just talks about talks, but last week in India the Dalai Lama expressed hopes of being allowed to visit Tibet "without preconditions." Beijing has never been more confident in its dealings with the Dalai Lama.

Now 68, the Dalai Lama fled to India after an abortive uprising in 1959. China has vacillated in its attitude toward him, from loathing to accommodating and back again, ever since. Last year, for the first time since 1983, China allowed the Dalai Lama's official representative to visit Tibet; after two trips he came away "encouraged," hopeful that talks on the Dalai Lama's return will start soon. In other ways, too, China has been easing up on the brutal repression of the 1980s and '90s, and releasing prominent Tibetan political prisoners. "Tactics have changed," says John Ackerly, of the International Campaign for Tibet, a Washington lobby. "Now they're more subtle and more economic in nature."

The shift predates the rise of Hu Jintao, who became China's new president in March, and is no stranger to Lhasa. He was Communist Party secretary in Tibet from 1988 to 1992, a period marked by pro- independence riots and a 1989 crackdown that left more than 40 Tibetans dead. Hu's role in the repression remains murky. The civil unrest had begun before he arrived, and subsequently he spent much of his time in Beijing pleading "altitude sickness." The Dalai Lama himself suggests the new president may be different from his predecessors. Among China's top leaders, "Hu's the only one who knows Tibet more thoroughly. That's an advantage," the Dalai Lama has said. Regarding the 1989 repression, "Hu didn't express his personal views... so let's see."

The religious leader is waiting to see whether Hu's emerging image as a populist makes him more sympathetic to Tibet's population of 2.7 million, most of them farmers and herders. When Hu visited Lhasa in 2001, he complained about uneven cobblestones and lack of adequate plumbing in Lhasa's traditional Tibetan quarter, the Barkhor, and ordered a $200,000 renovation project. A relative neophyte in foreign affairs, Hu could use a diplomatic achievement or two to help him emerge from the shadow of his extroverted predecessor Jiang Zemin.

The gap between Beijing and the Dalai Lama isn't as insurmountable as it once seemed. The Tibetan governor of Tibet, Jampa Phuntsog, says that the Dalai Lama is "welcome" to return home as a citizen of the ...