While he has long said that he wants the exile government to take on some of his powers, Thursday’s announcement appeared to mark the beginning of a countdown. The Dalai Lama said he would propose amendments to the exile constitution during the parliament’s next session, which begins March 14 in this Indian hill town where the exiles are based.

A new prime minister will be elected a few days later, and the timing indicates the Dalai Lama may want that premier to take up his political duties. Any Tibetan who has registered with the government-in-exile is allowed to cast a ballot; most of the electorate is made up of exiles.

The Dalai Lama is believed to be in fairly good health, but China’s continued heavy-handed rule over Tibet has made the succession question all important within the Tibetan community.

Beijing vilifies the Dalai Lama as a political schemer, has negotiated only fleetingly with his representatives and made clear that it intends to have the final say in naming his successor when he dies.

Not surprisingly, Thursday’s announcement was met with derision in Beijing.

Talk of retirement “are his tricks to deceive the international community,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu, who called him “a political exile under a religious cloak now engaged in activities aimed at splitting China.”

In Dharmsala, the Dalai Lama said he had been repeatedly urged by followers to retain his political powers, which range from approving legislation to giving oaths of office, but said the community needed a leader “elected freely by the Tibetan people.”

The shift in power will “benefit Tibetans in the long run. It is not because I feel disheartened,” he said.

But the Dalai Lama’s power and influence go far beyond the exile constitution, and it was not clear what change amendments would bring.

Despite more than a half-century in exile, the Dalai Lama is still revered by most Tibetans as their traditional king and spiritual leader. Many worship him as a near deity. He is the 14th person to hold the title in a tradition stretching back 500 years, with each Dalai Lama chosen as a child by senior monks through a series of mystical signs. Each is believed to be the reincarnation of his predecessor.

The current Dalai Lama has indicated his successor would come from the exile community. Beijing, though, insists the reincarnation must be found in China’s Tibetan areas, giving the Communist authorities immense power over who is chosen.

Many observers believe there eventually will be rival Dalai Lamas — one appointed by Beijing, and one by senior monks loyal to the current Dalai Lama.

The reverence for the Dalai Lama was apparent just after his speech, when exile Prime Minister Samdhong Rinpoche met with reporters.

“Despite His Holiness’ request, the people and the government do not feel competent to lead ourselves,” he said, calling the transition “a long and difficult process.”

In the past, the parliament-in-exile has officially asked the Dalai Lama not to give up any of his powers.

Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor of Chinese studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, said it was clear that succession worries were behind the announcement. The Dalai Lama, he said, wants to create a stable political system that can hold the Tibetan community together on its own.

The Dalai Lama “has been making some efforts at democratization for a long time, to forestall any anarchic situation in the aftermath of his death.”

Speaking to The Associated Press in 2010, the Dalai Lama said he and his senior advisers regularly discussed his death and its affect on the Tibetan movement.

“When I pass away, when I die, of course (there will be) a setback. Very serious setback. … But then, this younger generation will carry this on. There is no question.”

While Beijing claims Tibet has been part of Chinese territory for centuries, Tibet was a deeply isolated and feudal theocracy until 1951, when Chinese troops occupied its capital city, Lhasa.

Beijing’s rule has brought immense changes to Tibet, ranging from high-speed trains to modern universities, but Tibetans in exile say their unique culture and religion are on the verge of extinction under Chinese rule that has seen a massive influx of ethnic Han Chinese migrants.

China regards the Dalai Lama as a militant separatist intent on overthrowing Beijing’s control. The Dalai Lama insists he simply wants more autonomy for Tibet within China.

On Thursday, he once again called on Beijing to ease its rule.

“The ongoing oppression of the Tibetan people has provoked widespread, deep resentment against current official policies,” he said. “Tibetans live in constant fear and anxiety.”

Security appeared to have been ramped up Wednesday in Lhasa, with hotel staffers saying police were doing more street patrols. The anniversary of the uprising is a sensitive time in Tibet. In 2008, unrest erupted in Lhasa and other Tibetan areas when monks tried to commemorate the 1959 revolt.

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Sullivan reported from New Delhi. Tini Tran, Isolda Morillo and Gillian Wong in Beijing contributed to this report.

Of all these idiosyncratic observations, the “Tibet Spring” bottle provoked the strongest reaction. The fetishization of bottled water combined with the cultural appropriation of Tibet is a strange thing; a bizarre juxtaposition of consumer capitalist mastery and imperial Chinese control. I thought Fiji Water was an environmental atrocity. But here I was, staring at a slickly packaged bottle of water mined from a glacier in the Himalayas and transported by the Beijing-Lhasa railroad, one of the modern travel infrastructure marvels of the world, to a point where ultimately it could be consumed by passengers rocketing high above the Pacific. And on that bottle, a script that dates back to the earliest roots of civilization and language. The whole shebang struck me as simultaneously essentially human — a representation of everything we’ve been doing on this planet since we first started climbing down from trees and striking out across the savannah, and fundamentally unsustainable. What, I wonder, does the Dalai Lama think about Tibet Spring?

Paramilitary police used shovels to dig through the rubble in the town, footage on state television showed. Officials said excavators were not available and with most of the roads leading to the nearest airport damaged, equipment and rescuers would have a hard time reaching the area. Hospitals were overwhelmed, many lacking even the most basic supplies, and doctors were in short supply.

Downed phone lines, strong winds and frequent aftershocks also hindered rescue efforts, said Wu Yong, commander of the local army garrison, who said the death toll “may rise further as lots of houses collapsed.”

With many people forced outside, the provincial government said it was rushing 5,000 tents and 100,000 coats and blankets to the mountainous region, at around 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) -high and where night time temperatures plunge below freezing.

Workers were racing to release water from a reservoir in the disaster area where a crack had formed after the quake to prevent a flood, according to the China Earthquake Administration.

The Wednesday quake, which struck at 7:49 a.m. local time (2349 GMT, 7:49 p.m. EDT), was centered on Yushu county, in the southern part of Qinghai, near Tibet, with a population of about 100,000, mostly herders and farmers.

The USGS recorded six temblors in less than three hours, all but one registering 5.0 or higher. The China Earthquake Networks Center measured the largest quake’s magnitude at 7.1. Qinghai averages more than five earthquakes a year of at least magnitude 5.0, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. They normally do not cause much damage in the sparsely populated province.

Residents fled as the ground shook, toppling houses made of mud and wood, as well as temples, gas stations, electric poles and the top of a Buddhist pagoda in a park, witnesses and state media said. The quake also triggered landslides, Xinhua said.

“Nearly all the houses made of mud and wood collapsed. There was so much dust in the air, we couldn’t see anything,” said Ren Yu, general manager of Yushu Hotel in Jiegu, the county’s main town. “There was a lot of panic. People were crying on the streets. Some of our staff, who were reunited with their parents, were also in tears.”

More than 100 guests of the hotel, which was relatively undamaged, were evacuated to open spaces such as public squares, Ren told The Associated Press by phone. After transporting guests to safety, hotel staff then helped in rescue efforts in other buildings, Ren said.

“We pulled out 70 people, but some of them died on the way to the hospital,” Ren said, adding other survivors were put in tents in the hotel yard while they awaited assistance.

The death toll rose to about 400 by afternoon, according to China Central Television. Emergency official Pubucairen, who goes by only one name, was quoted as saying that the number of injured has risen to more than 10,000. The official said rescuers were treating the injured at hospitals, race tracks and sports stadiums.

President Hu Jintao sent a vice premier to supervise rescue efforts and more than 5,000 soldiers, medical workers and other rescuers were mobilized, joining 700 soldiers already on the ground, Xinhua said. A message of sympathy also came from the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of the often fervently Buddhist Tibetans who is reviled by Chinese leaders.

Yushu and its environs are among the Tibetan areas caught up in the anti-government protests that swept the region in March 2008. Tensions have simmered since, and the region has been closed to foreigners off and on.

CCTV reported that soon after the quake, troops secured banks, oil depots and caches of explosives.

Yushu was for centuries home to important Buddhist monasteries and a trading hub and gateway to central Tibet. In recent years, the government has poured investment into Yushu, opening an airport last year and building a highway to the provincial capital of Xining.

The seismically active region saw a magnitude-7.9 quake two years ago that left almost 90,000 people dead or missing in neighboring Sichuan province 400 miles (650 kilometers) away. Poor design, shoddy construction and the lax enforcement of building codes were found to be rampant.

In Jiegu, about 20 miles (30 kilometers) from the epicenter, the local fire brigade was trying to rescue 20 students stuck inside a school, Kang Zifu, head of the rescue team, told state television. It did not say what type of school it was.

Five students were killed and others trapped in a primary school, a teacher told Xinhua, saying morning classes had not yet started when the quake struck. Another official said students were buried at several primary schools.

More than 85 percent of houses had collapsed in Jiegu, which Tibetans call Gyegu, while large cracks have appeared on buildings still standing, the official Xinhua News Agency cited Zhuohuaxia, a local publicity official, as saying.

“The streets in Jiegu are thronged with panic and full of injured people, with many of them bleeding from their injuries,” said Zhuohuaxia, who goes by one name.

A monk named Luo Song from a monastery in Yushu county said his sister who worked at a local orphanage told him three children were sent to a hospital but the facilities lacked equipment.

“She said the hospitals are facing a lot of difficulty right now because there are no doctors, they have only bandages, they can’t give injections, they can’t put people on intravenous drips,” the monk said by phone while on a visit to the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. Rural hospitals typically are not well equipped.

A local military official, Shi Huajie, told CCTV rescuers were working with limited equipment.

“The difficulty we face is that we don’t have any excavators. Many of the people have been buried and our soldiers are trying to pull them out with human labor,” Shi said. “It is very difficult to save people with our bare hands.”

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Associated Press writer Charles Hutzler and researchers Zhao Liang and Yu Bing contributed to this report.

This film also became the centerpiece of an altercation last year between famously prickly Chinese film authorities and the Western movie marketplace. After “The Sun Behind the Clouds” was booked at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, the Chinese government — demonstrating both intolerance and a tin ear for P.R. — pulled two much-anticipated films from the festival. For mysterious reasons, one of those Chinese movies, “City of Life and Death,” a fictional story about the notorious Rape of Nanking in 1937, was then yanked from its American theatrical premiere at New York’s Film Forum — whose programmers replaced it with the film that had caused the ruckus in the first place.

Of course, the Chinese have long been completely unwilling to discuss the Tibet question — which, when you think about it, reduces the question of what strategy the Tibetan movement should adopt to an arid philosophical point. There are reasons why the Beijing regime is so thin-skinned, as we see in “The Sun Behind the Clouds.” The explosive Tibetan uprising of early 2008 put the lie to Chinese claims that their campaign of economic development and cultural assimilation had quelled both nationalism and discontent, and it left government spokespeople, in the weeks before the Beijing Olympics, uttering the worst kinds of warmed-over Mao Zedong talking points about the “Dalai clique” and its tradition of “theocratic serfdom.”

As Sarin and Tenzing also make clear, there’s a germ of truth behind the Chinese propaganda. The Dalai Lama himself has often decried Tibet’s backward, feudal tradition — but then, he’s both a product and a symbol of that tradition. As in the Palestinian case, younger Tibetans who’ve lived their whole lives in exile are increasingly radicalized, while the Chinese continue to torture and imprison dissidents inside Tibet and the Dalai Lama’s reasonable, enlightened middle-ground position is supported by international political leaders but almost no real people. Nobody thinks this issue is going away, and the Dalai Lama has already prepared Tibetans for the likelihood that his reincarnate successor will be born outside Tibet. The Chinese seem prepared to outwait this Dalai Lama, the next one and the one after that.

“The Sun Behind the Clouds: Tibet’s Struggle for Freedom” is now playing at Film Forum in New York, with wider release to follow.