Watching him as dusk falls in his small village is a 28-year-old visitor who just a generation ago had to escape China through the perilous mountain passes of Nepal in order to get the Tibetan education Tashi now has of right.

Much has changed for the better for Tibetans since Mao Zedong ordered the People's Liberation Army to "liberate" Tibet from the theocracy that had ruled there for centuries. Tashi has free education and, though the family still have to cart water from a spring, their courtyard home is clean and dry and there is a television and DVD player in the guest room.

We are in the grasslands of Gansu province in western China, travelling as inconspicuously as we can because foreigners, especially media, are still banned from Tibetan areas.

More than three months after the biggest protests against Chinese rule in half a century, with the Olympic torch due in Lhasa today on a shortened one-day relay and with less than 50 days until the Olympic Games begin in Beijing, thousands of armed police scour Tibetan areas, fuelling widespread fear, suspicion and frustration.

In Tongren, a trading city in eastern Qinghai, more than a dozen monks and locals near the town's 700-year-old Rongwo monastery refuse to talk about the "troubles", shaking their heads and turning away. The Rongwo monastery, which has about 500 resident monks, is almost deserted — and this is the first week of a month-long religious holiday when it would normally be thronged with tourists.

In the past week the remaining monks have had three days of continuous "re-education", which involves pledging loyalty to the nation and the Communist Party and is usually led by a senior monk (either coerced but also sometimes for advancement). Party officials, often from outside the town, attend to ensure monks' compliance.

Inside a small village in Gansu, a 72-year-old former monk with five grandchildren tells us how, during the Cultural Revolution, the Communists forced monks such as himself to leave the monasteries and marry.

He says, in a refrain we hear repeated by young monks, that anything good the Chinese Government has done for Tibetans is compensation for the devastation of that era, when thousands were killed and whole monasteries razed. He is waiting for the Dalai Lama to return: "I have been waiting 50 years."

In a meadow of blue and white irises in Gansu, three young monks have secretly left the Labrang monastery in the town of Xiahe, the biggest outside of Lhasa, to meet The Age. A Labrang monk we met in March was later arrested and has not been seen since.

"We will never regret what we have done, even if we die, because what we are doing is for the sake of the Tibetan people," a 30-year-old monk says.

Surprisingly, the monks are unaware of how crucial a role the violence of the March 14 Lhasa riots and the dozens of people killed is playing in the Chinese Government's narrative of what has happened. They seldom watch Chinese television and mistrust everything the Government tells them. "We don't believe innocent people were killed in Lhasa … that's what they have to say," one of the monks said.

The Chinese Government continues to denounce the Dalai Lama, who left Australia yesterday after a week in Sydney leading meditations, as a "splittist" intent on an independent Tibet, even though privately they have conceded he wants only greater autonomy.

"We hate the Government because its leaders, like Hu Jintao and the police and the army, are killing Tibetan people, taking things away from Tibetans by force," the monks say.

In the countryside on the hike to another small monastery, we meet a family from the Tibetan autonomous county of Maqu, where there were also violent riots against Chinese rule. The family of four, on a pilgrimage, tell us that after the initial protests about 1000 monks and other locals were arrested at different times.