A senior Chinese official said in comments broadcast on Friday that Beijing is open to further talks with Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.
Zhu Weiqun (朱維群) told the BBC: “China has done everything it can to talk to the Dalai Lama. The door is still open.”
Tibetan representatives and Chinese officials have held several rounds of talks on the disputed territory, with little apparent progress.
Earlier this week, Zhu, a vice minister of the United Front Work Department, blamed the Dalai Lama and his envoys for the talks’ failure. In an apparent hardening of Beijing’s stance, he said the Tibetan spiritual leader’s calls for greater autonomy masked his desire for the Himalayan region’s independence.
Zhu welcomed an Oct. 29 statement by British Foreign Secretary David Miliband that said: “Like every other EU member state, and the United States, we regard Tibet as part of the People’s Republic of China.”
Miliband told lawmakers that Britain supported greater autonomy, rather than independence, for Tibet and called for the region’s “distinct culture, language, traditions and religions” to be respected.
Zhu said the statement “brought the UK into line with the universal position in today’s world.”
Meanwhile, a special six-day meeting of Tibetan exiles that starts tomorrow in Dharamsala has no set agenda, the Dalai Lama said, though the gathering is widely expected to determine the direction of the movement.
The 73-year-old Tibetan Buddhist leader urged his followers on Friday to take responsibility for their future when they meet in northern India next week after the repeated failure of talks with China to preserve the Himalayan territory’s culture and language.
“It must be clear to all that this special meeting does not have any agenda for reaching a particular predetermined outcome,” the Dalai Lama said. “We can be proud at this moment when the Tibetan people themselves are ready and able to take responsibility for Tibet.”
China has dismissed the meeting as meaningless, saying the participants do not represent the views of most Tibetans.
The Dalai Lama voiced impatience with China last month and appeared to give up hope of achieving a form of autonomy from Beijing that would allow Tibetans to freely practice their culture, language and religion.
“As far as I’m concerned I have given up,” he said.
China insists Tibet has been part of its territory for 700 years, though many Tibetans say they were independent for most of that time. Chinese forces invaded shortly after the 1949 Communist revolution and the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959 during an unsuccessful uprising against Chinese rule.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing