The Tibetan government-in-exile has appointed Kelsang Gyaltsen Bawa as its representative to Taiwan, it said on Thursday.
On Jan. 4, Gyaltsen, who is the Chinese liaison officer of the Tibet Information Office in Canberra, would replace Dawa Tsering as chairman of the Tibet Religious Foundation of His Holiness the Dalai Lama — the de facto embassy of the exiled Tibetan government in Taiwan, it said in a statement.
Officials from the Tibetan side said that it is a regular personnel change and that Dawa would be assigned new duties after having served six years in the post.
Born in Batang Zong in western Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in China’s Sichuan Province in 1966, Gyaltsen worked at the local United Front Work Department in Garze after graduating from the Sichuan Institute of Socialism, where he majored in Chinese communist united front theory.
Inspired by the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959 and later won the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, he left China with five other Tibetans to India in 1999.
He then joined the Dharamsala, India-based Central Tibetan Administration, working for its Ministry of Security, where he was in charge of foreign relations and news information affairs.
Gyaltsen said that he fled China after witnessing the Tibetan revolt against the Chinese Communist Party in Lhasa in 1988 and 1989.
The vast amount of twisted and fabricated reporting by China’s media made him realize that he must fight against the rule of the Chinese communists, he said.
Gyaltsen was elected to the 14th and 15th Tibetan parliaments and moved to Australia in 2016. He was appointed Chinese liaison officer of the Tibet Information Office in Canberra in 2017.
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