Witnesses to Tibet violence describe scenes of horror

Protesters in Lhasa randomly beat and killed ethnic Chinese, and troops fired live ammunition into mostly defenseless crowds.

By Barbara Demick
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 22, 2008

BEIJING — On a cloudless day near the top of the world, Swiss tourist Claude Balsiger had just finished a late-morning cup of tea and stepped out onto the streets of Tibet's capital. Buddhist monks had been marching against Chinese rule all week, but today seemed calmer.

Suddenly, Tibetan youths started hurling paving stones at police, who tried to protect themselves with their riot shields.

Over the next few hours, the odor of tear gas and fires replaced the scent of incense wafting from backpacker cafes. The intense Himalayan light was blacked out by smoke. And in the days that followed, violence would spread beyond Lhasa to ethnic Tibetan villages deep inside China and to Chinese embassies worldwide.

China has barred Western journalists from entering Tibet and ethnic Tibetan areas. But interviews with foreign witnesses and Chinese residents, as well as blog postings by Tibetans too frightened to be interviewed, show that during three crucial hours on March 14, woefully unprepared police fled, allowing rioters to burn and smash much of Lhasa's commercial center.

Tibetans randomly beat and killed Chinese solely on the basis of their ethnicity: a young motorcyclist bludgeoned in the head with paving stones and probably killed; a teenage boy in school uniform being dragged by a mob. When authorities did regroup, paramilitary troops fired live ammunition into the crowds. Witnesses did not see protesters armed with anything other than stones, bottles of gasoline or a few traditional Tibetan knives.

Despite a massive deployment of Chinese forces, the protests show no signs of abating. In New Delhi on Friday, Tibetan exiles stormed the Chinese Embassy. And China posted a "most wanted" list of 21 alleged rioters, featuring grainy photographs taken from video shot by a hidden camera.

The death toll of Tibetans had risen to 99 as of Friday, with a 16-year-old girl being shot by police in China's Sichuan County, the Tibetan government in exile said.

Chinese authorities say 19 Chinese have been killed in Lhasa: one police officer and the rest civilians.

Since their homeland was invaded by Chinese communists in 1951, Tibetans have risen up periodically against Beijing's rule. Led by the Dalai Lama, a Buddhist monk and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, their movement has been largely nonviolent. There hadn't been a substantial uprising in Lhasa since the late 1980s, giving the city a reputation as a laid-back Shangri-La.

"Tibetans usually are so calm and friendly, but suddenly they were insane," said Balsiger, 25, a teacher. "They were howling like wolves. . . . It was so brutal, so violent."

March 10, Monday

Everybody is girded for demonstrations today. It is the 49th anniversary of the failed Tibetan revolt in which their leader, the Dalai Lama, fled into exile in India. This year the protests are expected to be bigger because activists hope to use the upcoming Summer Olympics in Beijing to press their case.

Tibetan demonstrations are well-choreographed: Monks, who ran Tibet in pre-communist times, usually take the lead while laypeople try to protect them.

At 6 p.m., a parade of about 300 red-robed monks leaves the 15th century Drepung Monastery, five miles west of downtown Lhasa. Blocked by police from reaching the city, the monks sit for several hours at a checkpoint before dispersing.

At dusk, students and monks stage a second demonstration in the center of Lhasa, making a circle around Barkhor Square and joining hands. The square is filled with uniformed and plainclothes security officials. A young Dutch couple watch police take away six or seven demonstrators.

"Everybody is afraid to speak," the Dutch tourists, Steve Dubois and Ulrike Lakiere, write later on a blog. "Even us, free-born people, not for our sake, but for that of the Tibetans who can get in trouble just by speaking with us."

Balsiger recalls meeting a young Tibetan brother and sister at a cafe. Although he and they have no common language, he understands that they live in fear of Chinese undercover police. They nervously show him that they wear images of the Dalai Lama, which are banned, on strings around their necks, hidden under their clothes.

March 11, Tuesday

Nine monks emerge from the Sera Monastery north of Lhasa carrying a banned Tibetan flag and are almost immediately dragged away by police.

Several hundred more monks come out to demand their release. The paramilitary Chinese People's Liberation Army police disperses the crowd with tear gas.

March 12, Wednesday

Many stores in Lhasa are closed. Tsering Woeser, a Tibetan poet who writes a blog, says two monks at Drepung Monastery slit their wrists in suicide attempts, and monks at Sera Monastery start a hunger strike. Water supplies are cut to many of the monasteries.

A foreign tourist wanders into Sera Monastery at 3 p.m., just as hundreds of monks are rushing out, their hands in the air and in obvious distress. Police surround them.

"They were grabbing monks, kicking and beating them. One monk was kicked in the stomach right in front of us and then beaten on the ground," the tourist later tells BBC.

Paramilitary forces block roads leading out of the remote Ganden Monastery. The Chutsang Nunnery is also surrounded.

March 13, Thursday

Roadblocks are in place around Lhasa. Thousands of paramilitary forces are reported to be searching houses for photographs of the Dalai Lama.

March 14, Friday

Stores reopen. The trouble appears to have passed. But about 11:30 a.m., as the morning prayer finishes at Ramoche Temple, a small Buddhist shrine up a pedestrian street from the main square, police block monks from marching. This time, onlookers start throwing stones at police.

Trucks carrying reinforcements speed down Beijing East Street, the main drag. As soon as police climb out, the stones start flying again. About 20 protesters in their teens and 20s are cheered on by several hundred older Tibetans.

Rioters use their bare hands to pry paving stones loose and hurl them with such ferocity that they crack police shields. The police officers, some of them teenagers themselves, hurry into an alley for cover. The enraged crowd begins to vent its anger on ethnic Chinese passersby.

"At first it was sort of a game. You throw the rocks and you run away," Susan Witmore, a Canadian business consultant who had given herself a trip to Tibet as a 60th birthday present, later recalls. "But then the scene turned incredibly ugly."

A young Chinese motorcyclist is struck by stones. Witmore utters a silent scream to the man, "Keep moving!" but the motorcyclist stops, as if to reason with the mob. Soon his flashy gold helmet is off and the mob is pounding his head with stones and pipes. Witmore, who was watching from the lobby of her hotel, retreats into the courtyard in horror. Other tourists say later that they believe the man was killed.

Balsiger sees the crowd pull a Chinese-looking man off a bicycle. A teenage boy is bludgeoned on the head, but as he staggers, bleeding on the pavement, barely conscious, a tall foreign man steps in and pulls him to safety.

Police flee, and by early afternoon the mobs have the run of the city. They go after Chinese shopkeepers, who these days dominate the commercial life of Lhasa.

"They thought we Han Chinese people were coming to steal from their rice bowls," says the manager of Top of the World Hotel on Ramoche Street, near the temple. She cowers in her courtyard as the crowd sets fire to many of her neighbors' businesses.

The mob is more interested in destroying than looting. Witnesses see cellphones, bicycles, clothing, food and furniture smashed along Beijing East Street. Cars are overturned and set on fire, often topped with burning Chinese flags.

Riots spread to the Muslim quarter, targeting the Hui, Chinese Muslims who have been opening businesses in Tibet. Rioters smash holes through metal shop gates and pour in gasoline. A Muslim family later describes to Chinese journalists how they hid in a bathroom as flames spread around them. The main gate of the mosque is set on fire, but the mob doesn't get inside.

It is not until 4 p.m. that Chinese authorities venture back into the center of Lhasa. What happens next is unclear, because by this time the city is under a strict curfew. According to Tibetan sources, the Public Security Bureau lifts an order restricting the use of live ammunition by the paramilitary forces.

Tibetans say many people are killed in front of the main temple, the Jokhang, and that families come to collect the bodies late at night, offering prayers and strewing traditional white prayer scarves.

"Many of those killed were young Tibetans, both boys and girls," a rioter tells Radio Free Asia. "Those who are dead sacrificed their lives for 6 million Tibetans. My disappointment is that we were not armed."

Amid the raging violence, some Tibetans do step in to help the beleaguered ethnic Chinese.

A 24-year-old Chinese assistant at an optometry shop recalls how a teenage neighbor escorted her home, only to be chastised by a Tibetan security guard who asked, "How can you come back with a Han Chinese?"

The Tibetan girl "was horrified," recalled her Chinese friend. "In her eyes were confusion, perplexion, sorrow and mostly astonishment."

March 15, Saturday

Overnight, soldiers move into the center of Lhasa. By the end of the day, they have the city under control. But protests break out elsewhere. At Labrang Monastery in Xiahe, 750 miles to the northeast, more than 1,000 Tibetans march against the Chinese.

March 16, Sunday

Protesters carrying photos of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan flag stage protests in Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai provinces. In remote Aba County in Sichuan, Tibetans attack a police station and set fire to a market, firetrucks and police cars. Police reportedly fire into the crowd, killing at least eight.

March 17, Monday

Protesters try to storm Chinese embassies and consulates around the world.

"Chinese people have to realize we can't bear any more," says Tenzin Lama, 25, a Tibetan student demonstrating in London. "We will give up our lives to fight for our beliefs. Tibetans won't stop."

barbara.demick@latimes.com

Jia Han, Cathy Gao and Eliot Gao of The Times' Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.

China plays victim for its audience

Government media images of Tibetans as the aggressors stoke support at home.

By Mark Magnier
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 17, 2008

LANZHOU, CHINA — Even as China faces global criticism for its crackdown on Tibetan Buddhists, it's winning the battle that it most cares about: support for its policies among Chinese back home.

One key factor is a media strategy that, while still blunt and heavily reliant on censorship and propaganda, shows more nuance than usual for the lumbering Communist Party.

This last week the government has used something it traditionally viewed as a big negative, any suggestion that it's not in total control, to its advantage by going large with print, still and video coverage of Tibetans attacking Han Chinese in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, and destroying their property.

Not only does this rather ironically paint the Chinese state and its massive police force as something of a victim, analysts said, but it also stirs up feelings of fear and anger among many Han, the nation's majority population, that add a personal dimension to the riots.

At a political level, the coverage has also bolstered the government's assertion that its archenemy, the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, is masterminding the protests from abroad and the atheist government's long-standing contention that Tibetan monks are anything but neutral, nonpolitical and peace-loving.

Many of the videos of the riots on the state-run CCTV website have been shot and edited to point up crimson-robed monks bashing and burning with the best of the mob. And to the extent the Dalai Lama has stopped short of outright condemning the monks and the protest, China gains points.

"In this crisis, their strategy has been pretty effective," said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at UC Berkeley. "They've been able to portray it as 'we Chinese' versus 'they Tibetans' and seen public opinion go their way."

This policy is a case of making a virtue of necessity given that absolute control of information has become increasingly difficult.

The state's information guardians have also picked up a few other tricks. They're using more individual stories of Han families who were victimized in Tibet, aware that a personal narrative is far more powerful than vague propaganda language. And they've sprinkled their official dispatches with such terminology as "bloggers," "netizens" and "blogosphere" to look more current and inclusive.

At the same time, the approach is more of a paint job than a renovation as China's propaganda ministry continues to use many traditional tactics honed in dusty Soviet offices decades ago.

Unrest is blamed on "outside" elements, Tibetans are urged to report on other "troublemakers" and there are hints, although no guarantees, of leniency for those who turn themselves in.

On other fronts, the "Great Firewall," China's Internet filtering and monitoring system, has been in overdrive during the last week, deleting comments furiously and blocking Internet searches of such terms as "Tibet," "Lhasa," "demonstration" and "March 14" -- the day of protests in which at least 10 people were killed.

Some pro-government comments have found their way onto the Internet, though many are anonymous and there is no fast way to determine their origin.

"I strongly condemn the Dalai clique trying to undermine China's prosperity," said an anonymous posting from the southern city of Guangzhou on the popular Sohu portal.

Independent views opposing the government are strongly discouraged. The government has banned travel by foreigners to Tibet.

"The control strategy comes from the very top and it's well orchestrated," Xiao said. "It's more intense than I've ever seen."

Although international opinion is important, particularly as Beijing prepares to hold the Olympics in August, all politics are local, even in China. And for the party, maintaining its monopoly political grip on its far-flung empire is central to its strategy and continued existence, underscoring its vow that Tibet will never be allowed independence.

The strategy has been well received among members of the country's often strongly nationalist Chinese-language community. The government "should send more auxiliary police and arm each one with a rubber stick" against protesters, said a post on the Internet bulletin board Douban.

The themes of national unity and respect for the integrity of the motherland have also struck a chord with many in the more sophisticated overseas Chinese Internet community.

"The government has done well," said Robert Liu, a blogger who has been studying economics in the U.S. for the last six months. "They're doing better and have a more mature approach, although they still have a long way to go."

Growing domestic support of its policies gives the Chinese government political cover to restore order to the restive ethnically Tibetan areas of the Tibet Autonomous Region and Qinghai and Gansu provinces as it sees fit, knowing that accounts of heavy-handed tactics will inevitably surface in an increasingly porous society.

This is a different dynamic than in 1989 when many Chinese identified with the students rather than the government in Tiananmen Square.

Images of Tibetan rioting are also being employed to bolster the government's core message that foreign human rights groups and activists such as the Dalai Lama are bent on ruining the Olympics to keep China down. The Dalai Lama said Sunday that China deserves to host the Olympics and that the Games should not be boycotted.

Although China lacks the democratic institutions, vocal critics or opinion polls that would gauge the effectiveness of its strategy and public perception of its Tibet policies, one indicator may be its censorship of coverage by television networks BBC and CNN inside the country.

Instead of blacking out all such Tibet reports, leading to long and annoying instances of blank screens early in the week, the government allowed more of them to air as the week wore on. A BBC report that aired Sunday in Beijing ran 20 minutes, including a five-minute excerpt with the Dalai Lama.

"The government is showing more confidence and learning more about spin," said Michael Anti, a well-known Chinese blogger on a Nieman fellowship this year at Harvard. "They've learned more PR tactics from Western people. They see the way the White House and the Pentagon do it."

mark.magnier@latimes.com

Gao Jing of The Times' Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.

Chinese Forces Say They’ve Secured Tibet’s Capital

By JIM YARDLEY

BEIJING — Thousands of Buddhist monks and other Tibetans clashed with the riot police in a second Chinese city on Saturday, while the authorities said they had regained control of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, a day after a rampaging mob ransacked shops and set fire to cars and storefronts in a deadly riot.

Conflicting reports emerged about the violence in Lhasa on Friday. The Chinese authorities denied that they had fired on protesters there, but Tibetan leaders in India told news agencies on Saturday that they had confirmed that 30 Tibetans had died and that they had unconfirmed reports that put the number at more than 100.

Demonstrations erupted for the second consecutive day in the city of Xiahe in Gansu Province, where an estimated 4,000 Tibetans gathered near the Labrang Monastery. Local monks had held a smaller protest on Friday, but the confrontation escalated Saturday afternoon, according to witnesses and Tibetans in India who spoke with protesters by telephone.

Residents in Xiahe, reached by telephone, heard loud noises similar to gunshots or explosions. A waitress described the scene as “chaos” and said many injured people had been sent to a local hospital. Large numbers of military police and security officers fired tear gas while Tibetans hurled rocks, according to the Tibetans in India.

“Their slogans were, ‘The Dalai Lama must return to Tibet’ and ‘Tibetans need to have human rights in Tibet,’ ” said Jamyang, a Tibetan in Dharamsala, India, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, who spoke to protesters.

The violence in Lhasa and Xiahe has created a major political and public relations challenge for the ruling Communist Party as Beijing prepares to play host to the Olympic Games in August. The demonstrations are the largest in Tibet since 1989, when Chinese troops used lethal force to crush an uprising by thousands of Tibetan protesters.

China’s response to this week’s demonstrations is being watched carefully by the outside world. The European Union and the United States have both called on China to act with restraint. The White House called on China to “respect Tibetan culture” and issued a renewed call for dialogue between Beijing and the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism.

The tumult also undercuts a theme regularly promoted by China’s propaganda officials — that Tibetans are a happy minority group, smoothly integrated into the country’s broader ethnic fabric.

“What we see right now, what is happening in Tibet, blows the whole propaganda strategy in Tibet wide open,” said Lhadon Tethong, an official with the advocacy group Students for a Free Tibet.

On Saturday the Chinese authorities defended their response to the violence in Lhasa. “We fired no gunshots,” said Qiangba Puncog, chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Regional Government, according to state media.

But Tibetan advocacy groups and witnesses in Lhasa offered contradictory accounts. The Tibetan government in exile said at least 30 Tibetans died in the protests, according to Agence France-Presse. Witnesses told Radio Free Asia, the nonprofit news agency financed by the United States government, that numerous Tibetans were dead. A 13-year-old Tibetan boy, reached by telephone, said he watched the violence from his apartment and saw four or five Tibetans fall to the ground after military police officers fired upon them.

Foreign journalists are being restricted from traveling to Lhasa, and the precise death toll remains unknown. State media reported 10 deaths and characterized most of them as shopkeepers. The government’s official news agency, Xinhua, reported that the victims had been “burned to death.”

The demonstrations in Lhasa began Monday and continued through Wednesday as peaceful protests by Buddhist monks from three different monasteries. Some monks protested against religious restrictions while others demanded an end to Chinese rule and even waved the Tibetan flag. The police arrested scores of monks and then reportedly tightened security around the three monasteries so that monks could not leave.

Initially, the protests were largely ignored in the Chinese media, which was providing blanket coverage of the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, the Communist Party-controlled national legislature. When reports of violent riots began trickling out of Lhasa on Friday afternoon, the Chinese media was silent.

But with growing international concern about the protests, and reports that Chinese security forces had attacked monks, the Xinhua news agency issued a short statement blaming rioters for the violence. By Saturday morning, China’s state television network, CCTV, was broadcasting video of Tibetans burning buildings as anchors read directly from a Xinhua report that blamed the Dalai Lama for the violence.

Chinese officials demanded the surrender of the “lawbreakers” in Lhasa and offered leniency to people who turned themselves into the authorities by midnight Monday. Senior officials described the unrest as “sabotage” orchestrated by the Dalai Lama and credited the military police for rescuing 580 people from banks, schools and hospitals that were set afire by rioters.

Gen. Yang Deqing of the People’s Liberation Army said Chinese soldiers would not be deployed and the protests were being handled by local police officers and the country’s paramilitary force, the People’s Armed Police.

“We’ll let the police and the military police handle the disturbance,” General Yang said at the National People’s Congress, where he was a delegate. “We won’t be involved.”

Witnesses in Lhasa on Saturday reported seeing large numbers of military police, armored vehicles and, according to a few reports, tanks.

Several residents, reached by telephone, said that an uneasy calm had settled over the city. Tibetans living in the suburbs said officers were blocking people from entering the city center. Local television broadcast instructions. Power and telephone service, suspended in some neighborhoods on Friday, were being restored on Saturday. Traffic was light on city streets, while most shops were closed.

“It is all under control now,” said one resident, who identified himself as Mr. Liu and who lives near the old part of the city where the violence started. “We were notified to stay at home last night.”

It is still uncertain what set off Friday’s unrest. Tibetan advocates say ordinary Tibetans began rioting after military police officers attacked monks trying to protest outside a monastery in the center of the city.

The extent of the violence was evident in photographs and video shown on the Internet: fires raging from rooftops and from charred vehicles, shattered storefronts and huge crowds trolling city streets.

News agencies reported that foreign tourists are now being prohibited from entering Tibet. The United States Embassy in Beijing issued a new warning on Saturday advising American citizens about danger in Lhasa and other regions.

Huang Yuanxi and Zhang Jing contributed research from Beijing.

Violence in Tibet as Monks Clash With the Police

By JIM YARDLEY

BEIJING — Violence erupted Friday morning in a busy market area of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, as Buddhist monks and other ethnic Tibetans brawled with Chinese security forces in bloody clashes. Witnesses said angry Tibetan crowds burned shops, cars, military vehicles and at least one tourist bus. State media said at least 10 people died.

The chaotic scene was the latest, and most violent, confrontation in a series of protests that began on Monday and now represent a major challenge to the ruling Communist Party as it prepares to play host to the Olympic Games in August. By Saturday morning, Chinese armored vehicles were reportedly patrolling the center of the city.

Beijing is facing the most serious and prolonged demonstrations in Tibet since the late 1980s, when it suppressed a rebellion there with lethal force that left scores, and possibly hundreds, of ethnic Tibetans dead. The leadership is clearly alarmed that a wave of negative publicity could disrupt its elaborate plans for the Olympics and its hopes that the games will showcase its rising influence and prosperity rather than domestic turmoil.

Thousands of Buddhists in neighboring India and Nepal took to the streets Friday in solidarity. Concerned that the protests might spread elsewhere in China, the authorities appeared to be moving the military police into other regions with large Tibetan populations.

Roughly 1,000 special police officers were deployed in the town of Bamei, in Sichuan Province, the site of a temple sacred to Tibetans, witnesses said by telephone on Friday. Residents in Lhasa, reached by telephone, said the authorities had placed much of the city under a curfew by Friday night while military police officers were blocking many city streets. One resident reported seeing armored vehicles in the center of the city.

The United States Embassy in Beijing warned American citizens on Friday not to travel to Lhasa. The embassy said it had “received firsthand reports from American citizens in the city who report gunfire and other indications of violence.”

In a meeting in Beijing on Friday, the United States ambassador to China, Clark Randt, urged Chinese officials to act with restraint, “and not resort to use of force in dealing with the protesters,” the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, told reporters.

The Chinese authorities blamed the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, for the violence and said the government would maintain stability in Lhasa. “The government of Tibet Autonomous Region said Friday there had been enough evidence to prove that the recent sabotage was ‘organized, premeditated and masterminded’ by the Dalai clique,” reported Xinhua, the Chinese government’s official news agency.

The Dalai Lama released a statement on Friday calling on both sides to avoid violence and appealing to China’s leaders to “address the long simmering resentment of the Tibetan people through dialogue with the Tibetan people.” A spokesman for the Dalai Lama called China’s accusations “absolutely baseless.”

The situation in Lhasa represents a complicated predicament for the Communist Party, which is now holding its annual meeting of the National People’s Congress in Beijing. Party leaders are already grappling with growing criticism of China’s domestic human rights record and its ties to Sudan, which the United States has accused of waging a genocidal campaign in its Darfur region.

In the past China has not hesitated to crush major protests in Tibet or to jail disobedient monks. President Hu Jintao, who is also the general secretary of the Communist Party, served as party boss in Tibet during a violent crackdown in 1989. His support for the bloody suppression of unrest that year earned him the good will of Deng Xiaoping, then the paramount leader, and led directly to his elevation to the Politburo Standing Committee and eventually to China’s top leadership posts.

But Chinese leaders may be more reluctant to order such heavy-handed tactics as Beijing prepares for the Olympics. On Friday, different accounts emerged about how the Chinese military police in Lhasa handled the demonstrations.

Radio Free Asia, a nonprofit news agency financed by the United States government, quoted Tibetan witnesses who described police officers firing into crowds of protesters and killing at least two people in the city’s ancient Barkhor area. On Saturday morning, Radio Free Asia quoted witnesses who described seeing dead bodies around Lhasa.

Later on Saturday Xinhua reported 10 deaths had been confirmed.

A Chinese resident in Lhasa, reached by telephone, said stories were circulating among local Chinese that soldiers had been wounded and had not been allowed to fight back against Tibetans throwing rocks. Another Chinese man living near the Barkhor area said family members had told him that two soldiers died and that Tibetans were beating Chinese residents with iron rods.

Friday’s sharp escalation in violence, and the sense of dread described by several residents, came a day after China’s Foreign Ministry told reporters that the situation in Lhasa had stabilized. The protest started Monday when Buddhist monks began peaceful protests against religious restrictions by Chinese authorities. The police arrested 50 or 60 monks, but other protests followed Tuesday and Wednesday as monks in two different monasteries took to the streets.

The apparent epicenter of Friday’s protests was the Tromsikhang Market, a large, concrete structure built in the Barkhor area by the Chinese authorities in the early 1990s. “It’s chaos in the streets,” said a person who answered the telephone at a bread shop near the market.

What actually set off the violence is unclear, as accounts differed between Chinese and Tibetan residents. Monks from the Ramoche Temple, a short walk from the market, reportedly began to march in the Barkhor area. The Ramoche monks intended to protest the rough treatment of monks who had marched earlier in the week, according to a Tibetan rights advocate in the United States who has communicated with people in Lhasa.

When police officers began beating the monks, Tibetans rioted in the Barkhor area, the advocate said. Angry mobs set fire to a police car and a store owned by a Chinese shopkeeper, said the advocate, who refused to be publicly identified for fear of reprisals.

But a Chinese travel agent in Lhasa, reached by telephone, said Tibetans had instigated the violence and set fire to an empty tour bus parked outside the Ramoche Temple. Another Chinese resident described 50 or 60 young Tibetans burning stores owned by Chinese merchants as well as two fire trucks and two police cars.

“I saw someone who was dead and covered in a sheet,” the Chinese resident said in a telephone interview. “The Tromsikhang market was destroyed, except for the shops owned by Tibetans. I heard a soldier shouting, ‘Please go home and stop fighting!’ ”

News agencies also reported clashes between monks from Ramoche Temple and military police officers. “The monks are still protesting,” one witness told The Associated Press. “Police and army cars were burned. There are people crying. Hundreds of people, including monks and civilians, are in the protests.”

Radio Free Asia reported that Tibetan protesters were waving traditional white scarves and shouting, “Free Tibet.” The agency said the riots began about 10 a.m. and had largely quieted down by 3:30 p.m., after the paramilitary police were mobilized.

Meanwhile, anxious tourists stranded in Lhasa posted worried comments on online forums for travelers. “The situation seems to be very nervous and paranoid up here,” wrote one person in broken and misspelled English in a chat room sponsored by the Lonely Planet tour guide. “There is police and military everwher. Suddenly you would see policeman running and rushig somewhere”

The ethnic friction evident in Friday’s violence has long simmered just below the surface in Lhasa. For more than two decades, a steady influx of Chinese migrants has transformed and stratified the city. A newer, Chinese section of Lhasa is focused along Beijing Road and is lined with shops and concrete buildings.

But the older Tibetan neighborhoods emanate from the Jokhang, the most sacred temple in Tibet, and the Potala Palace, the former residence of the Dalai Lama. Tibetans also have complained that Chinese merchants now control most of the tourist shops in the Barkhor area.

The protests in Lhasa coincided with the anniversary of a failed 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule that forced the Dalai Lama to flee to India. Groups that promote Tibetan independence have marked the anniversary with demonstrations around the world, including in India, where a group of advocates tried to march to Tibet.

But the unexpected demonstrations in Lhasa are the largest Tibetan protests against Chinese rule since 1989. Military police officers and soldiers are now reportedly surrounding the three monasteries that were at the center of the protests earlier this week. Two monks have reportedly tried to kill themselves, while pro-Tibetan groups say others have started a hunger strike.

In its travel warning, the United States Embassy in Beijing advised American tourists in Lhasa to “seek safe havens in hotels and other buildings and remain indoors.”

“All care should be taken to avoid unnecessary movement within the city until the situation is under control,” it said.

On Friday night, the Chinese resident living in the Barkhor area said his family was huddled at home with the lights turned off. He said he could hear shouting on the streets outside and feared for the safety of his family.

Huang Yuanxi, Zhang Jing and Jake Hooker contributed research from Beijing, and Steven Lee Myers and Graham Bowley contributed reporting from New York. Somini Sengupta contributed reporting from New Delhi.