The unrest spread outside China's borders, turning a global Olympic torch relay into a contest between pro-Chinese and pro-Tibet exile groups, obligating police to blanket relay stops in heavy security cordons. Many Chinese grew angry over the trouble-plagued relay — and what they viewed as anti-Chinese bias in Western media — and they launched a boycott of Carrefour, a major French retailer.

Washington and European capitals have been leaning on Beijing to negotiate directly with the Dalai Lama, the 1989 Nobel Peace laureate who fled his homeland in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule.

Between 2002 and the summer of 2007, envoys of the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government held six rounds of discussions about the possibility of full-fledged negotiations. A formal dialogue never got off the ground, though, before the talks broke down last year.

The Dalai Lama has insisted that he seeks only greater autonomy and religious freedom for 6 million Tibetans in China, not independence. But China claims that he's lying and that he hopes to sever Tibet from China and ruin the Summer Games.

The head of the modern Tibetan studies program at Columbia University, Robert Barnett, said the mood of new talks is likely to be sour due to the vilification of the Dalai Lama by Chinese officials in recent weeks.

"It's unlikely that there'd be anybody else in the world who would still be open to negotiate given the amount of abuse he's had to take," Barnett said.

Barnett described previous talks as "pre-negotiations" that never got around to substantive issues and lacked confidence-building measures to build momentum.