Tsethang, Tibet, August 21 – Tibetans are hoping Chinese President Hu Jintao may relax Beijing’s hardline policy on Tibet as the government launched a media campaign Thursday to promote its position on the region.
As Beijing-based foreign correspondents arrived in Tibet for a rare conducted tour, Tibetan officials said recent visits by envoys of the Dalai Lama to China have offered hopeful signs that Hu, who used to be China’s top official in Tibet, would usher in more favorable policies.
“Our hope is that Hu Jintao will fashion a policy more sensitive to the reasonable aspirations of the Tibetan people,” Thubten Samphel, spokesman for the exiled Tibetan government told AFP from Dharamsala, India where the Dalai Lama is based.
“It is critical for the Chinese government to understand the majority views of the Tibetan people.”
Western journalists are prohibited from independently travelling in the region China has occupied since 1951, but Beijing periodically allows strictly controlled group access to officials and carefully selected Tibetans when it wants to get its side of the story across.
Forty-four correspondents arrived in Tsethang, a historic town in the Yarlung Tsangpo valley where the earliest Tibetan kings reigned some 1,300 years ago.
Talks that began last year under former president Jiang Zemin between Chinese officials and Lodi Gyari, an envoy of the Dalai Lama, took on momentum when Gyari was again welcomed by China after Hu took office in March.
“There is now an urgent need for the two sides to raise the level of this contact and start substantive dialogue on the political status of Tibet,” said Samphel.
At the crux is whether the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, will be allowed to return to Tibet where he continues to be revered, and whether China will accept his “middle way” of seeking greater autonomy for the region under overall Chinese rule and turning Tibet into a “zone of peace.”
A Chinese official Thursday acknowledged dialogue channels were open but insisted the Dali Lama was a “splittist.”
“The Dalai Lama is a splittist, that is for sure, the channels of dialogue are now open, but that hasn’t changed the way we view him,” the Lhasa-based official told AFP, adding that any decision on his status would “come from the top.”
Although Hu instituted martial law in Lhasa — brutally quelling widespread anti-Chinese and pro-independence protests — when he was Tibet’s highest political leader in 1989, Tibetans still hope they can work with him.
China maintains it “peacefully liberated” Tibet in 1951. It has ruled the Himalayan region with an iron fist since.
In 1959, Beijing quelled a bloody uprising that led to the Dalai Lama’s exile and smashed Tibet’s feudal tradition of serfdom during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976.
After recognizing the harm done to Tibet during the Cultural Revolution, Beijing experimented with more lenient policies in the 1980s, but after the 1989 democracy protests it returned to the brutal policies of oppression.
“Now the Chinese policy on Tibet is becoming more sophisticated,” Samphel said.
The inroads, however, were set back Thursday when a group of prominent exiled Tibetans were denied permission to visit China.
The trip was first proposed a year ago and hoped to promote understanding, Radio Free Asia reported, adding that China had been widely expected to approve the visit.
Sources told RFA’s Tibetan service that Beijing rejected the idea on the grounds that some of the delegates had engaged in “splittist” activities.
The delegation included several former Tibetan exile government ministers; the former head of the Tibet Fund in New York Rinchen Dharlo; the former head of the Office of Tibet in Tokyo Pema Gyalpo; and officials from Nepal, Australia and India.
Sustained international pressure has been widely credited with pushing Beijing toward a more restrained policy, while the Dalai Lama’s repeated acknowledgement of Chinese rule in Tibet is also seen to have helped.
