U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell is making a brief trip to Asia including a stopover in China, where he is expected to seek cooperation on North Korea and Iraq and raise human rights issues.
Secretary Powell will be in Beijing on February 23 and 24 and is expected to meet with China’s Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan. This will be Powell’s fourth meeting with Tang in the past month.
In earlier meetings, Secretary Powell raised concerns about Tibetan political prisoners and the cases of popular Buddhist leader Tenzin Delek Rinpoche and Lobsang Dhondup, who were sentenced to death following an April 2002 bomb blast in Chengdu, Sichuan.
Lobsang Holdup was executed on January 26.
The State Department is preparing its annual Country Report on Human Rights Practices and planning its course of action at the upcoming session of the UN Commission on Human Rights.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said on Wednesday, February 19, that, “With China, obviously the issues of human rights and some broader questions of international cooperation always arise.”
