BEIJING — Defying a massive deployment of Chinese security forces, ethnic Tibetan protesters unfurled their forbidden national flag and torched a police station as the violence that by some reports has claimed 80 lives spread into Sichuan province and other parts of western China.
The Dalai Lama decried what he called the “cultural genocide” taking place in his homeland.
The exiled Tibetan spiritual leader met Sunday with reporters in the mountain town of Dharamsala, India, and told them he was powerless to stop the protests.
“It’s a people’s movement, so it’s up to them. Whatever they do, I have to act accordingly,” he said.
Demonstrations widened to Tibetan communities in Sichuan, Qinghai and Gansu provinces, forcing authorities to mobilize security forces across a broad expanse of western China.
The protests began a week ago with a peaceful procession of monks in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, and have quickly evolved into the largest outpouring of Tibetan rage against Chinese rule in 20 years.
Chinese troops seized control of Tibet in 1950 and suppressed a rebellion in 1959. Since then, the Dalai Lama has led a self-proclaimed government in exile. The current unrest in Tibet began March 10 on the anniversary of the rebellion.
The Chinese have deployed thousands of troops in the last week, both from the People’s Armed Police, as the paramilitary forces are called, and the People’s Liberation Army. But just as soon as the troops stamp out one protest, another pops up.
One Chinese government official in Tibet said the Dalai Lama’s claim of genocide was “downright nonsense.” The state-controlled New China News Agency reported that police exercised “great restraint” on Friday while mobs stoned, stabbed and clubbed them and other residents, using a “shocking degree of cruelty” that the Chinese blame on the Dalai Lama.
The government news service also reported Sunday that some shops had reopened and cars were back on the streets in Lhasa. But residents contacted by phone said that dozens of armed police officers and military vehicles were patrolling the streets and that they were too afraid to go outside.
Tibet’s governor Champa Phuntsok said Monday that 13 civilians were killed and dozens were wounded in violence that broke out in Lhasa on Friday.
The most serious reported clash took place Sunday at the Aba Monastery, perched in Sichuan province. At the end of morning prayers, thousands of monks erupted into cheers of “Free Tibet” and “Return the Dalai Lama,” according to a report by the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy.
The witness said a police officer had been killed and three or four police vans had been set on fire. Eight bodies were brought to a nearby monastery while others reported that up to 30 protesters had been shot.
In Qinghai province, riot police sent to prevent protests set off tensions when they took up positions outside a monastery in Tongren. Dozens of monks, defying a directive not to gather in groups, marched to a hill where they set off fireworks and burned incense in what one monk said was a protest.
Information about the clashes was difficult to verify.
For example, the road to Labrang Monastery in Gansu province was blocked to foreigners Sunday, the day after police reportedly fired tear gas into a crowd of 1,000 monks and other Tibetans marching in protest. Police at a toll plaza checkpoint checked identity cards and took down details of a taxi driver carrying foreigners to Xiahe. The police told the taxi driver to take his passengers back and then return to explain why he was driving foreigners in the area.
The spreading protests fall two weeks before China’s celebrations for the Beijing Olympics kick off with the start of the torch relay, which will pass through Tibet.
“You have a decade of pent-up resentment. It had been lurking all this time just beneath the surface,” said Ronald Schwartz, a Canadian scholar who wrote a book about the last serious protests inside Tibet, which were in the late 1980s. “There are many Tibetan youth out there with a lot of frustration and bitterness.”
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