Strife in Tibet has raised pressure on the Dalai Lama's many admirers worldwide to translate moral support into helpful action, but the trick is finding ways to exert more than marginal influence on China.
The Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, called on Sunday for an international investigation as Tibetan rioting against Chinese rule spread to provinces outside the Himalayan region. Tibetan exiles said 80 people had been killed.
China's crackdown on the fiercest display of Tibetan resistance to Chinese rule in 20 years has drawn calls for restraint from the US and other governments.
So far, moral support is all that has been offered to the Dalai Lama, who has won the Nobel Peace Prize, the US Congressional Gold Medal and the admiration of millions around the world, including major political, religious and entertainment figures.
"China is a permanent member of the UN Security Council and they are an economic powerhouse. There are only a couple of ways we can exert pressure," said T. Kumar, Asia advocacy director for Amnesty International USA.
"The person who can make a difference at this moment is President Bush."
Mr Kumar noted that, as of Sunday, the White House had issued statements but the US president had not spoken publicly about the bloodshed in Tibet. He said Washington should "take the lead" and call for an outside fact-finding mission to Tibet to assess the problem.
Mr Bush plans to attend the Beijing Olympics in August but has resisted calls to raise in public issues such as China's support for Sudan, despite what Washington says is genocide in the Darfur region, saying he can talk privately with Chinese President Hu Jintao.
Talk of a boycott of the Beijing Olympics has surfaced in some circles but it is not an official policy of any government or major human rights organisation.
A frustrated Richard Gere told Reuters that he had not previously supported a boycott but believed the world should stay away if China mishandles the unrest. He urged US leaders to act on past gestures of support for Tibetans.
"It's really up to us to be leaders of this, and if we are to take the president at his word, if we are to take our Congress at its word, these are meaningful things," said the actor, a close follower of the Dalai Lama and chairman of the International Campaign for Tibet. The Dalai Lama says China deserves to host the Olympic Games. Analysts say the Western boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics - a boycott China joined - did not moderate the behaviour of the Soviet Union.
"I just don't think a boycott - for any reason, be it Tibet or Darfur - will have any of the effect that people who support those issues want," said Joshua Kurlantzick, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has written widely about China's growing international influence.
China is now such a huge factor on the world stage - courted for everything from fighting global warming to trying to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of dangerous regimes - that snubbing Beijing would spark anger and nationalism that the West would regret for a long time, some analysts say.
Days before the eruption of violence in Lhasa, the conservative Heritage Foundation gathered experts for a panel discussion on Tibet's Future: Does It Have One?
Tibetan Buddhism scholar Robert Thurman told the seminar China was "hypersensitive" about outside criticism of its Tibet policies because "they have about the same level of legitimacy as our occupation of Iraq, which is none."
The metaphor of China as an "anaconda in the chandelier" - coined by a US scholar to describe how the Communist Party silences Chinese people merely with unspoken threats - can be extended to China's dealings with the outside world, he said.
"The reason that it's very hard to raise the issue of Tibet in any place anywhere in the world is that China works very hard to suppress any mention of Tibet," said Mr Thurman.
Mr Kumar said doing nothing now could impose a high cost on Tibetans or others later.
"If the Chinese feel comfortable using this brutal force only five months before the Olympics, you can imagine how its going to happen later," he said.