To Tibetans, China and the ruling Communist Party seem to have offered them a clear choice -- you are either with us or against us.
After the extreme policies of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution when temples were dynamited, Buddhist statues melted down for metal and monks and nuns jailed, Beijing sought reconciliation by allowing Tibet a degree of religious tolerance.
However, that freedom does not apply to all in the deeply Buddhist Himalayan region known as the Roof of the World. Recent indications are that party leaders may be trying to limit the numbers further.
"Without Communist Party control Tibet would still be poor. We Tibetans have religious freedom," said Nyima Tsering, mayor of the village of Gongzhong near the eastern town of Nyingchi.
"My wife and my parents can believe in whoever they want, they can believe in Buddha," he said. "But I believe in the Communist Party. I can only have one religion."
It has long been a rule that party officials must also be atheist, although in Tibet that regulation had appeared to be more honored in the breach than in the observance. Many have quietly told visitors in recent years that they visit the temple to offer prayers when they can.
MARX OR BUDDHA?
Beijing may have decided now to enforce the rule, however, with officials eager to stress their loyalty to Marx rather than to Buddha.
"I am not a Buddhist myself. I think that I can get a better life through the path of government policy, and with Buddhism I can't," said Tsedan Dorje, administration director of Gongzhong village -- said to be the first in Tibet to boast a telephone.
It was a common refrain from both officials and ordinary Tibetans and possible evidence of a shift in a policy that had turned a blind eye for years to officials practicing Buddhism.
Fears of anti-Chinese unrest may be re-emerging as memories fade of the imposition of martial law following riots in 1989 and the harsh political re-education of monks and nuns in Tibet's hundreds of monasteries.
"Ordinary Tibetan people are free to go to the temple and worship if they want to, as long as they don't belong to a work unit," said 21-year-old Migma Tsering as he chatted in a corner shop selling canned drinks, snacks and biscuits in the capital, Lhasa.
"Those that belong to a work unit are not permitted to go," he said, using the Chinese term for a government organization. "Our family doesn't belong to a work unit so we can go whenever we want."
Other factors may be at work in weakening the religious resolve of at least some Tibetans.
THE LURE OF MONEY
Long braids woven with coral beads hanging down their backs, traditional robes knotted at the waists and a rosary around their necks, pilgrims shuffle through temples aromatic with smoke from yak butter candles.
Outside, girls in stretch jeans and bright blouses teeter on high heels down dusty streets, picking their way amid dung, discarded fruit peel and plastic bags on their way to the office or perhaps a rendezvous with one of the many young men who try to stand above the crowd by donning Cuban heels.
After decades of persecution by the Communist Party, followed by several years of relative tolerance, Tibetan Buddhism is facing a new threat -- money.
"I joined the Communist Party in 1978, because the party had led peasants on the prosperous road to wealth. So that is why, at the time, I wanted to join," said Tsedan Dorje of Gongzhong village.
"Actually, it wasn't just so I could get rich myself, but also to help the local people all get rich together. I wanted to help the people here."
It is Beijing's stock line on Tibet policy: to bring wealth and thus, the leadership hopes, stability to one of the poorest, most backward and most restive regions in all of China.
In cities and towns, Tibetans are as eager as anyone else in China to cash in on economic policies that have transformed China's economy into the seventh-largest on Earth.
"Marxism believes in materialism," said Gongzhong Mayor Nyima Tsering. "A Buddhist believes in rebirth but a communist believes in this life.
Whether the Tibetans are making as much money as Chinese immigrants, however, is far from clear but city dwellers at least are joining in the gold rush even if nomads converge on towns mainly to sell their sheep and goats to pay for a pilgrimage.
Outside the Jokhang temple, the holiest shrine in the heart of Lhasa, Tibetan and ethnic Chinese peddlers vie for business with stalls set up around the pilgrims' circumambulation route around the holy building.
Dolma, 22, said she was so keen to make a profit that she had chosen not to attend the annual Yoghurt Festival ceremony -- the unfurling of a giant picture of the Buddha on a hillside at a temple on Lhasa's outskirts -- so that she could nurture her two-year-old stall selling trinkets and artifacts.
"This is the first time in seven years I have not been to watch the unfurling," she said. "I have to do business.
"But everyone else is free to go."