"Officially," Tibet is part of China, no matter how loudly the Tibetan independence folks screech to the contrary (interesting fact: the Dalai Lama hasn't supported Tibetan independence for several years now).

Further, your quip about the Chinese simply being "a billion or so sheep" goes to show just how ignorant you are about what China is really like. Care to look up a few simple statistics about the daily rate of political protest in China? It would make the Vietnam War protests over here look like little more than a weekend picket session.

As for a massive grassroots political protest that overthrows the central gov't, you do know that that very succinctly describes how the Communist Party came to power, right? For someone so confident in his political commentary, I sure hope you did.