China yesterday accused the Dalai Lama of being deceitful after he reportedly alleged that Chinese agents trained Tibetan women to assassinate him by planting poison in their hair for him to touch during blessings.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the Tibetan spiritual leader’s allegations, reported in the London-based Sunday Telegraph newspaper, were not worth refuting, but added that he generally spreads false information.
“The Dalai always wears religious clothes while carrying out anti-China separatist activities in the global community, spreading false information and deceiving the public,” ministry spokesman Hong Lei (洪磊) said at a routine daily news briefing.
The nationalistic tabloid the Global Times scorned the allegations in a commentary, saying that if China had wanted to kill the Dalai Lama it could have done so any time without waiting until he was 76 years old.
The Tibetan Buddhist leader told the Telegraph he had been warned that the Chinese government was training female Tibetan agents to put poison in their hair or scarves and to seek his blessings or touch his hand.
Hundreds of thousands of people take pilgrimages each year to the northern Indian town of Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama lives under tight security.
Huge crowds also surround him during his travels abroad.
The Tibetan leader usually places his hand over the heads of devotees seeking his blessing.
He told the newspaper he may end up being the last Dalai Lama because of Chinese interference in finding his reincarnation after his death.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
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