News and Views on Tibet

Dalai Lama says talks between Tibet, China going well

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By JAN M. OLSEN

COPENHAGEN, Denmark, June 4 – Talks between the Chinese government and representatives of the Tibetan government in exile are advancing, the Dalai Lama said Wednesday, adding that the main thrust was to build confidence between the two sides.

The four-member delegation, led by Lodi Gyaltsen Gyari, the Dalai Lama’s representative in Washington, is the second to visit China since Beijing and the exiled government re-established contact in September 2002 after nine years. The delegation left for Beijing May 25.

“It looks like a good start,” the Tibetan Buddhist leader said. “The Chinese government has a more and more positive attitudes toward us.”

The Dalai Lama arrived Wednesday in Copenhagen as part of a European tour. His five-day stay includes a meeting with Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen on Friday.

After a 45-minute meeting with Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller, the Dalai Lama said again that his exiled government is “not seeking independence.”

“We’re following the one-China line,” he stressed.

China has characterized the visit as a private one, part of its refusal to officially acknowledge the Tibetan government in exile.

The Tibetan envoys were expected to stay two or three weeks in China to lay the groundwork for negotiations over the issue of Tibet, which was occupied by Chinese troops in 1951.

The northern Indian town of Dharmsala, 265 miles northwest of New Delhi, has served as the exiled Tibetan government’s headquarters since the Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising against the Chinese.

There was a brief thaw in relations between the exiled government and Beijing in the 1980s, but those deteriorated after China imposed martial law on Tibet in 1989 and official dialogue broke down in 1993.

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