BEIJING: As President Hu Jintao set in motion the leadership change in China on Thursday, four Tibetans in faraway Sichuan and Qinghai provinces set themselves on fire, bringing alive to the Great Hall of People the country's long-festering problem of separatism and religion. Two of the Tibetans died and other two were in hospital with serious burns.

President Hu warned about internal unrest and corruption in perhaps the strongest terms ever by a top leader, saying, "If we fail to handle corruption well, it could prove fatal to the party, and cause its collapse and the fall of the state."

The news of the death of the Tibetan monks, who burnt themselves in protest against the Communist Party , came as Hu was making the inaugural speech at the party's National Congress. Observers said it would give China's critics another issue to badger it on its human rights record.

The dead monks are young boys aged 15 and 16, according to the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy. Both belonged to the same monastery in Ngaba county, in Sichuan. The third person to commit self-immolation in a separate incident was a 23-year-old woman in the Qinghai. A separate Tibetan rights group, Free Tibet , said there was an additional self-immolation by a Tibetan in Qinghai but gave no details.

In fact, protest flared up at Tinananmen Square as well, beside the Great Hall, with a woman throwing paper clippings into the air shouting "bandits and robbers" – words often used to describe corrupt officials. She was bundled away by security men who have sanitized the entire city to ward off the possibility of any agitation in the course of the seven-day party congress.