Beijing  - While the Chinese government on Saturday hailed the 50 years of Communist rule in Tibet as transformative and progressive, Tibetan exiles called the observance of the anniversary "offensive and provocative."

The anniversary was marked by China by its first Serfs Emancipation Day holiday as President Hu Jintao called the changes over the past half-century "the most extensive, profound and progressive social transformation in the history of Tibet."

In Tibet itself, more than 13,000 people attended observances in the square in Lhasa before Potala Palace, which had been the home of the Dalai Lama, the highest leader of Tibetan Buddhism, before he fled to exile in 1959.

The Chinese government sees the date in 1959 as the day it ended feudalism in Tibet, but the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India, said the communists brought repression and the deaths of more than 1.2 million Tibetans since their army marched into the Himalayan region in 1950.

"This day will be observed as the day when the Tibetans as a people lost all vestiges of their basic individual and collective freedoms," it said.

As for Serfs Emancipation Day, "Tibetans consider this observance offensive and provocative," it added.

Tenzin Choedon of Students for a Free Tibet called Serfs Emancipation Day "a blatant propoganda ploy by the Chinese government to convince the world that Tibetans are happy under Chinese rule."

Hu, on the other hand, said Friday while viewing a Tibet exhibition in Beijing that Tibet would only continue to develop and grow under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

For the month preceding Saturday's anniversary, paramilitary police sealed off almost all Tibetan areas of China to foreign journalists and tourists and cut off some text messaging and other mobile telephone services.

The crackdown came amid reports of several small protests and a civil disobedience campaign by Tibetans around the 50th anniversary of a failed uprising against Chinese rule that began March 10, 1959. (dpa)