By PATRICK FRENCH

Last updated at 21:27 12 April 2008

The Chinese men in blue tracksuits were horribly familiar. Although they were dressed like athletes, their robotic movements, blank faces, swivel eyes and rough, menacing style reminded me of the secret policemen I had to avoid when I was in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, some years ago.

Last Sunday, they surrounded Konnie Huq as she ran with the Olympic flame through the streets of London, ordering her to hold the torch higher and shoving protesters and British policemen out of the way.

Lord Coe, the London Olympics chief, was overheard describing the so-called "torch attendants" as "thugs".

He said: "They tried to push me out of the way three times. They are horrible."

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Feeling the heat: Konnie Huq is surrounded by 'thugs' as she carries the Olympic torch in London last week

It turns out that the gang of men in blue tracksuits were members of an elite Chinese paramilitary police force, known as the Olympic Games Sacred Flame Protection Unit, which was formed from members of the People's Armed Police (PAP).

As the flame continues its uneasy journey around the world, dogged each step of the way by colourful Free Tibet protesters, these men have become the living symbol of all that is most chilling about the Beijing regime.

But who are these Chinese secret policemen?

I spent three months in Tibet researching a book about the country's recent political and social history, and found them to be both effective and ruthless.

Tasked with protecting the integrity of the Chinese communist state against separatism, dissent or subversion, they rely on a network of informants.

Near the sports stadium at Drabchi on the outskirts of Lhasa is Tibet Autonomous Region Prison Number One, the most feared detention centre in Tibet.

A year before I made my trip, a report on political imprisonment by the American researcher Steve Marshall revealed that five young nuns had died there.

A European Union delegation had been touring the prison, which coincided with a demonstration by inmates.

Instead of singing the required patriotic songs, the nuns and some others had shouted pro-independence slogans.

The PAP were called in and beat the prisoners so severely that in the words of one survivor: "It looked like an abattoir. They beat us with their belts, until their belts broke. Then they used electric batons."

After several days of beating, and further tortures involving sand-filled hoses, stripping, electric shocks and sexual humiliation, the five nuns were dead, possibly after committing suicide by suffocating themselves with prayer scarves.

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Holy alliance: Monks watch the arrival of journalists in Tibet last week

For many centuries, the practice of Tibetan Buddhism has remained at the centre of Tibetan life.

Under their system of government, the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama was the spiritual and political leader, and about one fifth of the population were monks and nuns.

After the communist victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949, Tibet was brought under the authority of Beijing - until then it had effectively been independent.

Ten years later, at the age of 24, the Dalai Lama fled into exile in India.

During Chairman Mao's crazy "Great Leap Forward" and the Cultural Revolution in the Sixties, Tibet's unique political and social structures - and most of its Buddhist temples - were destroyed.

The Great Leap Forward was China's attempt to reform agricultural practices, in Tibet's case by replacing the traditional staple diet of barley with wheat.

But the crop was unable to grow at high altitude, causing hundreds of thousands of Tibetans to starve to death.

Across China, around 30 million people died.

Many Tibetans still have little loyalty to the Chinese "motherland", more than half a century after the communists seized control.

Religious and cultural traditions were preserved in secret, and are still followed today.

The majority of people in China belong to the ethnic group Han, and they often look down on minority groups such as the Tibetans.

Tibetans tend to be easy-going and superstitious, and not particularly ambitious in material terms.

Respecting the tenets of Buddhism is ingrained into most Tibetans at an early age.

But the Han Chinese are often fiercely ambitious, regardless of the consequences.

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Cry freedom: Tibetans protesting in Kathmandu last month

In eastern Tibet, the ancient forests have been destroyed by loggers, leaving silted rivers and a bleak, devastated natural environment.

At times it can feel as if the two communities come from different worlds, and have nothing in common.

At an everyday level, there is little communication.

Few Han in Tibet have learned more than basic words of the Tibetan language. They almost never intermarry.

Tibetans enjoy food based around barley flour and yak meat, while the Han cook the Chinese food from their home province.

One Han Chinese civil servant told me he found the Tibetans boisterous and prone to drink too much.

The Tibetans, in turn, ridiculed the Han habit of eating animals such as cats and snakes.

A Tibetan tent manufacturer I got to know in Shigatse said he found it almost impossible to do business with the Han: he claimed they would change the terms of the deal midstream, and he would invariably make a loss.

Much of China's remarkable recent development has taken place in a relentlessly short-term way.

Workers have been forced to travel vast distances to look for employment, and peasants have been thrown off their land.

There is corruption at the highest levels. Many mines and factories pollute the environment in a way that would not be tolerated in the West.

Behind this lies the Chinese determination to succeed and the conviction that the 21st Century will be the Asian century.

For Tibetans, the importance of spiritual life remains strong.

The Tibetan plateau - at 1.5 million square miles, about the size of Western Europe - is one of the most scarcely populated places on Earth.

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Insight: Writer Patrick French with academics in Tibet, where he spent three months researching a book on the country's recent history

There are vast mountain ranges, rolling grasslands that stretch as far as the eye can see and high-altitude plains where nomads live with their livestock and the lack of physical comfort drives people towards the spiritual.

Monks and nuns are revered by Tibetans, who believe the clergy are helping to safeguard society.

Some monks and nuns - who are obliged to be celibate - believe they can take risks others with families might not take.

In Xining, a city in a neighbouring Chinese province with a large Tibetan population, I met a woman named Nyima.

At the age of 17, she decided to become a nun in a nunnery east of the old city of Lhasa, and resolved to oppose the government.

These choices had potentially fatal implications. Several of her friends had been carted off to Gutsa detention centre, and one had died from renal failure after a severe beating.

Nyima told me: "I get up each day at around six o'clock, do the cleaning, put out the water offerings on the altars, check the butter lamps and prepare breakfast.

"In the afternoons I say prayers, study or do jobs. We are part of a community, looking out for each other.

"Every lunar month we do seven religious ceremonies for the deities, organised by a senior nun.

"People come to us if they want prayers said for a member of their family who is sick, or if someone has died. That's one of the ways we get funds.

"I became a nun because I wished to make a religious commitment and to study, but also because I love Tibet and thought that, as a single person, I would be able to take risks for the good of Tibet."

I asked Nyima why she felt so strongly, since she was too young to have witnessed the worst cruelties of Chinese communist rule in Tibet.

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East meets west: The Dalai Lama with Arnold Schwarzenegger

She replied: "From my earliest years I had heard stories about what the communists had done to our country. It soaked into me from childhood.

"The Chinese would say we were beggars or that we were dirty.

"I also felt resentful about what happened to my cousin. He put up 20 posters in Nagchu town, and was given a two-year sentence, and was beaten by the soldiers who guarded the compound.

"His health got worse. He was unable to urinate. He started to cough up blood. He was eventually returned to his family."

One of the things that made Nyima most angry was the way women in her nunnery had to learn propaganda against the Dalai Lama and be tested on it by the communist authorities.

The nuns had to say ludicrous things such as: "We will resolutely oppose the scheming activities of the tiny number of Tibetan pro-independence elements!" or "We will safeguard the four basic principles and oppose bourgeois liberalisation!"

Nyima told me these phrases made her head spin.

"You know the saying, 'If you stand up, you bump your head, if you sit down, you bang your a**e, it's really awful.' That's what it's like.

"Day after day, the Committee makes us repeat slogans, and they stop us from doing important religious ceremonies."

With such an unhappy relationship, it is little wonder that the Chinese secret police are a constant presence in Tibet.

As in East Germany during the time of the Stasi, Tibetans are obliged to spy on their friends and neighbours for the authorities.

When I was staying with nomads in the grasslands of northern and eastern Tibet, people seemed to have substantial freedom.

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Daring: An injured monk during last month's upheavals in Lhasa. Protesters know they face imprisonment and torture

They lived in felt tents, kept horses, yaks and sheep, and apart from owning a few motorbikes and the odd solar panel to power light-bulbs or a radio, lived in much the same way as their ancestors would have done.

In the cities, it was different. Lhasa is a mass of ugly concrete and blue glass modern buildings, much like any other Chinese city, and the old Tibetan city is a small ghetto where the indigenous people look worse off than the Han Chinese migrants.

Since the recent construction of a railway line from Beijing to Lhasa, this disparity has become worse, and some of the protests last month were as much economic as nationalist.

Tibetans feel uneasy about doing business with Chinese, whom they both admire and dislike for their business skills. There is little social interchange between the different communities.

During the protests in Lhasa, it was not surprising to see Chinese shops being smashed and burned, and their owners being beaten. The Tibetan reaction was a combination of anger and envy.

In Tibet, I travelled as a tourist while conducting undercover interviews, and knew I would be put under surveillance.

The places I went to and the people I met prevented me from seeming quite the person I claimed to be - a schoolteacher on holiday.

So, Han Chinese policemen in double-breasted suits would come to my hotel and examine my room when I was not there.

A sallow-faced man with a wide-brimmed hat sat in the window of the shop opposite the hotel lobby watching people.

I would make a point of leaving my coded notebooks in my room whenever I went out - designed to look like a typical traveller's journal - and every few days I would find they had been examined, and probably photocopied.

I could accept it, although it made me sick with tension.

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Outside pressure: Archbishop Desmond Tutu at a pro-Tibet rally in San Francisco this week. But some Tibetans say activism abroad only makes their lives harsher

What shocked me was the discovery, after more than two months, that Tsering, the smiling, rosy-faced Tibetan hotel receptionist, with whom I chatted most days, was an agent for the Public Security Bureau, or PSB.

She did not want to do this badly paid job, but her father had been compromised by the PSB over a minor irregularity; she had no choice.

To Tibetans in Lhasa, none of this seemed strange. People were obliged to go against the philosophical underpinnings of Tibetan Buddhism and betray each other out of fear of imprisonment or unemployment.

The longer I spent in Tibet, the more I began to comprehend this repressed society.

One Tibetan man described it to me this way: anyone in uniform was a moron, and the threat came from those in plain clothes and their informants.

Any hotel or travel company in the Tibet Autonomous Region that interacted with foreign tourists would be obliged to keep at least one informant on its staff, who might be working for money or for favours.

Often, they had themselves been caught transgressing - there were so many things you could do wrong in Tibet - and had been turned.

One evening when I got back late to my hotel in Lhasa, a plain-clothes PSB officer was waiting for me in the lobby.

The receptionist was nervous. The hotel had been under surveillance for some time, and there had been an inspection of the guest register a few days before.

I didn't know if I was the target or not; what I did know was that I had been exceptionally careful not to be followed when I went to do interviews.

"Do you have a camera?" "No." I had thought it safer not to bring one to Tibet.

"You have an electronic brain?" "A what?" "Electronic brain. Computer laptop." His fingers tapped an imaginary keyboard.

"No. No laptop." "You have audio equipment in the hotel?"

I knew his colleagues had been in my room a few days before, and would have seen whatever was there. I had no audio equipment.

He eventually went away. The next morning I departed for western Tibet, and when I returned to Lhasa two weeks later I tried harder to blend in with the travellers and backpackers.

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Monks take part in rare street protests in Tibet a month ago. A brutal crackdown followed

The city's oppressive atmosphere came, in part, from the strong physical presence of the security forces.

The most frightening face of the security system came in three different forms.

The officers of the PSB could be found either in uniform or in plain clothes.

The PAP, whose elite members are now guarding the Olympic flame, were a grander, paramilitary outfit, and rode around in 4x4s and trucks, flashing automatic weapons, whenever a dignitary was in town or a Buddhist festival was taking place.

Worst of all was the State Security Bureau (SSB) China's feared security and intelligence agency.

I had only heard about the SSB, and never knowingly came across one of its members.

On returning to Britain, I met an MI5 officer who worked in counter-intelligence relating to the Chinese in Britain. He told me that only in Shanghai were there more SSB officers than in Lhasa.

When I was staying with a nomad family in the grasslands of Amdo, I asked Namdrub, a man who had fought in the anti-communist resistance in the Fifties, what he thought about the foreign activists and exiled Tibetans who campaigned for his country's freedom.

"It may make them feel good, but for us, it makes life worse," was his reply.

"It makes the Chinese create more controls. Tibet is too important to the communists for them even to discuss independence."

Many Tibetans would disagree with Namdrub, and some are willing to risk their lives to protest against communist rule.

The most remarkable feature of the present protests inside Tibet is that they have been so wide-ranging, and have taken place in areas that were previously regarded as politically stable. The protesters know they face imprisonment and torture.

An important spark for the demonstrations was the award by President George W. Bush at the end of last year of the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama, an event that was broadcast over the internet and on the radio by Voice Of America.

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Defiant: Tibetan protesters arrested in Kathmandu, Nepal, last month are driven away

It became widely known inside Tibet, and monks celebrated by setting off fireworks and throwing barley flour - and were quickly arrested.

Demonstrators turned out on March 10 at great personal risk to call for their release.

This morphed into a protest by Tibetans in Lhasa who were angry that the financial advantages of the past decade have gone mainly to Han Chinese and Hui Muslims, who run certain trades such as selling livestock and butchery businesses.

In London recently, I spoke to a young Tibetan refugee who lives in Britain.

"People believed the American government was genuinely considering the Tibet issue as a priority," he said.

In fact, the award was a symbolic gesture, arranged mostly to make American statesmen feel good.

A similar misunderstanding occurred in 1987 when the Dalai Lama put forward a Five Point Peace Proposal on Capitol Hill and was denounced by the Chinese state media.

To Tibetans brought up within the communist system - where a politician's physical proximity to the leadership on the evening news indicates to the public that he is in favour - it appeared that the world's most powerful government was offering substantive political backing to the Dalai Lama.

Protests began in Lhasa at that time which lasted on and off until March 1989, when martial law was declared.

The brutal suppression that followed was orchestrated by Tibet's Party Secretary, Hu Jintao, who is today China's president and paramount leader. His response to the current unrest is likely to be equally uncompromising.

China is today more powerful than it has been for hundreds of years. It is not a Third World country that can be pushed around.

It helped to finance the debt that underpins the American economy and the war in Iraq, and its manufactured goods are found in every European home.

But it remains communist, and resentful of anything that looks like foreign interference.

For Western politicians, Tibet remains a risk-free cause. Although Beijing may complain when Prime Minister Gordon Brown meets the Dalai Lama next month, the meeting will do Brown no harm at all with the British public.

Whether it will bring any benefit to the Tibetans is another matter.

At the end of the Eighties, when China liberalised, the Dalai Lama joined forces with Hollywood stars and generated popular support for the Tibetan cause in America and western Europe.

But the campaign outraged the xenophobic Chinese leadership.

Tragically, it has been clear since the mid-Nineties that the popular internationalisation of the Tibet issue has had no positive impact on the Beijing government.

They are not amenable to political guidance from Westerners, over the Olympics or anything else.

I first visited Tibet in 1986. The economic plight of ordinary people is slightly better now, but they have as little political freedom as they did then.

Tibet lacks any meaningful autonomy, and ethnic Tibetans are excluded from positions of power within the bureaucracy or the army.

This is why so many Tibetans are now risking their lives by protesting, believing it is their last chance before the Dalai Lama passes away, and that foreign countries might help them.

I dearly hope I am wrong and the protesters turn out to be right, but so far there is no sign that President Hu Jintao is listening - or that he has the slightest inclination to change his government's policy in Tibet.

• Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History Of A Lost Land, by Patrick French, is published by Harper Perennial, price £8.99. To order your copy with free p&p call The Review Bookstore