BEIJING — If it had happened elsewhere, it might have been dismissed as a teenage prank.
A couple of 15-year-olds last year hung a Tibetan banner on the wall of their classroom next to portraits of Mao Tse-tung and Deng Xiaoping. They drew Xs over the faces of the former Chinese leaders and scrawled "Long Live the Dalai Lama" on the wall.
But in China, the incident was taken dead seriously. Three boys who attend a Tibetan school in Sichuan province were arrested, and one of them, who confessed to being the ringleader, was held and interrogated for a month.
This year, the 50th anniversary of the Dalai Lama's exile to India, the boy is under virtual house arrest -- by his own parents.
"They want to make sure he doesn't do anything like that again. They don't want him to get arrested again or hurt," said a relative, who asked not to be quoted by name.
As the traditional season for protests against Chinese rule begins, many of China's 2.8 million Tibetans are in a similar quandary. As sure as the melting of the snow on the Tibetan plateau, protests erupt about this time of year as Tibetans mark the anniversary of a failed uprising that began March 10, 1959, and led to their spiritual leader's exile. But with the special anniversary this year, the Chinese have taken extraordinary security measures, hoping to prevent a recurrence of last year's protests, the most violent in decades.
Exact numbers are difficult to come by in China, but residents of the Tibetan areas say that tens of thousands of paramilitary troops have been deployed. Telephones are tapped; cellphones and Internet connections disrupted.
Foreigners are barred from entering not only the Tibetan autonomous region, but heavily Tibetan areas in Qinghai, Sichuan and Gansu provinces.
The mountain roads leading into Tibetan villages are clogged with armored personnel carriers and buses filled with riot police.
The security forces make their presence felt by cruising up and down main streets, or conducting training in as public a way as possible.
"They made a picture of a man and are using it for target practice. They do it to scare us," said Tashi, a 20-year-old student from Ganzi (known to Tibetans as Kardze), in Sichuan province.
Like many Tibetans, Tashi refuses to be identified by anything other than a first name for fear of retaliation for speaking out.
In Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, security cameras are ubiquitous.
