Hundreds of Tibetan residents have been protesting since Monday over attempts by the local government to remove them from their land.They gathered outside government offices in Yushu's Gyegu township with banners after the government made public reconstruction plans in which people would be relocated."The important thing is that in the quake-hit area, a lot of the local people bought land here on which to build their houses," a monk from a local monastery, Tsering Gyatso, said.

"After the earthquake, the government wanted to move them all out to another place to rebuild their houses, and [the Tibetans] said no, they would build them themselves, and that they didn't want the [government's] land either."

He said the government has allocated 80 square meters (860 square feet) of living space per household, in spite of the fact that some families' existing plots were much larger, as much as 1,000 square meters (11,000 square feet).

"For some of them, their life savings were invested in that land," Tsering Gyatso said.

A Tibetan protester said the people to be displaced are also unhappy with the location of the land being offered.

"It's definitely much farther away than the place we were in before the earthquake struck," he said.

Local protesters said they are still waiting for a definite response from the government to their demands for compensation.

One local Tibetan named Phuntsok said the township government had called in armed police from Sichuan and other provinces to patrol the area in an attempt to intimidate protesters.