Ethnic Unrest Continues in China

SHANGHAI — Fresh ethnic violence has erupted in a Tibetan region of southwestern China, with disputed reports of eight people shot dead by the police, and the Chinese government on Friday vowed swift and severe punishment of Tibetans accused of rioting and taking part in last month’s antigovernment protests. Police officers fired Thursday evening on a crowd of protesters outside government offices in the Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province along the border with Tibet. A Tibet activist group said the shooting left eight protesters dead, according to The Associated Press. Signs of ethnic unrest in another area, in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, have also begun to emerge in recent days, with details of protests and rumored plotting by Muslim separatists in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and of police crackdowns in several areas of the region. China’s official Xinhua news agency confirmed the latest incidence of Tibetan unrest in Sichuan Province, saying that a riot had broken out and that the “police were forced to fire warning shots to put down the violence,” citing a local official. It said a government official was attacked and seriously injured in the protest, but gave no details of other injuries or deaths. The pro-Tibet activist group, the London-based Free Tibet Campaign, said hundreds of Buddhist monks and lay people had marched on the government offices to demand that two monks detained for possessing photographs of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, be released, The A.P. reported. Quoting Tibet’s highest law enforcement official, The Tibet Daily, an official newspaper, said that courts would “use the weapon of the law to attack enemies, punish crime, protect the people and maintain stability,” in what it called a drive to “shock criminality and root out the base of the separatists.” Tibet was shaken by protests last month by Buddhist monks demanding religious freedoms. Riots followed in Lhasa, the capital, on March 14, in which shops owned by the country’s ethnic Han majority were attacked. China says 19 people were killed in the rioting and ensuing crackdown, while Tibetan exile groups say they have reports of 140 deaths. The events in Lhasa quickly brought a wave of sympathy protests in parts of several neighboring provinces where Tibetans live in large numbers, in the biggest outbreak of unrest in the region in at least two decades. Like Tibetans, Uighurs, who are the predominant ethnic group in Xinjiang, harbor memories of political independence and deep resentment of Chinese control, particularly over the practice of their Islamic faith. Residents of townships and villages near Gulja, a city in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, said that about 25 Uighur Muslims were arrested last week on a tip that people in the area were making bombs. Residents said the police search had turned up three bombs in a cow shed, but the authorities were still looking for more devices that they believed were hidden in the area. A resident of Yengiyer, a township near Gulja, speaking by telephone on Friday of the uncovering of a bomb plot, said that the police tip had come after the recent arrest of an Uighur in the provincial capital , Urumqi. The police contacted in the area declined to discuss the tip or provide details of the plot. But local residents with connections to the government said that the bombs were part of a conspiracy to undermine Communist rule. “Their goal is pretty simple: They want to overthrow the rule of the Communist Party,” said Hong Xiuhua, 50, a retired local party official who said her husband had been briefed on the arrests by the local party secretary. “They claim that Xinjiang belongs to them and want to drive all the Han people out.” Ms. Hong said that the police were holding two couples, as well as a local baker, but they had released some of the other initial suspects. She said that unauthorized gatherings in the region had been banned, including weddings, as a precaution, and that people had been warned “not to talk about inappropriate things, such as complaining about socialism.” A police official reached by telephone declined to provide details about the arrests. “It is related to matters of stability, and we have the right not to give you a reply,” the official said.