China launched another broadside Sunday against Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, while state media said Tibetan areas rattled by lethal unrest were slowly returning to normal.
A lengthy opinion piece carried by the Liberation Army Daily, the People's Daily and most other major newspapers, warned the "Dalai Lama clique" would inevitably see defeat for its alleged project of Tibetan independence.
"It doesn't matter if the Dalai Lama and his followers disguise themselves under the pretence of 'peace' and 'non-violence', their splittist sabotage activities are doomed to fail," said the article.
The article described a series of alleged violent incidents over the past nearly 50 years in an attempt to convince its readers that vows by the Dalai Lama of non-violence were "a lie from beginning to end".
Meanwhile, the state-controlled Xinhua news agency said peace was gradually being restored in areas that had been hit by fierce protests as unrest in Tibet's capital Lhasa spread to other parts of China.
Reporting from the county seat of Ngawa, a Tibetan-populated area in southwest China's Sichuan province shaken by protests a week ago, Xinhua said more than half of the shops were reopened for business on Saturday.
It quoted the county's Communist Party chief Kang Qingwei as saying high and elementary schools would reopen Monday, implying they had been forced to close down for an entire week.
Activist groups have said eight people were killed by security forces in protests in Ngawa. China has admitted its police used lethal force, but said only four were wounded by bullets.
A similar dispute reigns over the death toll from the protests in Lhasa on March 14.
On Saturday, China said 18 civilians and one police officer were killed in rioting in Lhasa, raising its official death toll from 13.
Tibet's government-in-exile in the Indian hill town of Dharamshala has put the toll from a week of unrest across the Himalayan region and neighbouring provinces at 99.
Verifying reports from Tibet and surrounding areas is extremely difficult, as the Chinese authorities have severely restricted foreign journalists' access.
At the same time, state-controlled media on Sunday carried criticism of western media, blaming them for biased accounts of what had happened over the past 10 days.
Tens of thousand of Chinese Internet users had vented their anger online over what they considered unfair reporting, according to Xinhua.
"The netizens say that CNN and some western media organisations have intentionally neglected cruelties of the mobsters, revealing the hypocrisy of 'objectivity and fairness' they had flaunted," Xinhua said.
China has responded to the protests with a massive clampdown on the affected areas, and on Friday released a most-wanted list of 19 people caught on film taking part in the Lhasa riots, amid warnings by activist groups of harsh reprisals.
Outside China, demonstrations against the crackdown in Tibet took place on Saturday in Tokyo, where 600 people took to the streets.
In London hundreds of demonstrators paused outside the Chinese embassy to sing Tibetan songs and chant "Chinese out" and "Long live the Dalai Lama."
The protests come less than five months before the Beijing Olympics, which is becoming a magnet for more protests over Tibet and other issues.
