These immigrants are offered state incentives and preferential treatment to set up businesses in Tibet, advantages which the indigenous population are refused.

Resistance to Chinese sovereignty or support for the Dalai Lama, who leads a government-in-exile from northern India, is routinely punished by severe jail sentences or torture. Much of the most brutal dismantling of the Tibetan way of life occurred during the 1950s, or later in the Cultural Revolution, when almost all monasteries -- Tibet once had over 6,000 -- were destroyed. Tibet, which had been able to feed itself,suffered horrific privations during the Great Leap Forward when Mao's determination to collectivise Tibetan agriculture resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Exiles believe 1.2 million Tibetans died as a result of China's occupation: 87,000 were killed in Lhasa alone after the 1959 uprising that led to the Dalai Lama's flight. In 1979, during a brief thaw in China's attitude to Tibet, officials acknowledged that the country was poorer than it had been in 1959, despite two decades of complete Chinese control. Economic development has since forged ahead in Tibet, but the brief period of religious tolerance ended in the late 1980s when the pro-independence movement was brutally repressed and martial law declared.

Throughout the 1990s, without needing to return to the dehumanising savagery of the 1950s and 1960s, China has kept a vice-like grip on security in Tibet. The numbers and appointment of monks and nuns is controlled by the Religious Affairs Bureau, allowing China to gain at least some controlof Tibetan Buddhism. China acted swiftly when the Dalai Lama recognised the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, detaining the then seven-year-old boy and announcing its own candidate.

The monasteries and nunneries remain the focus for much pro-independence activity, but Kate Saunders of the Tibet Information Network in London says that resistance to the Chinese occupation has almost been obliterated.

There are, according to conservative assessments, around 1,600 political prisoners in Tibet, with more than 60 per cent being monks and nuns.

-- The Observer News Service