China hopes Dalai Lama can ‘return to right path’, his team rejects preconditions

(Reuters)

BEIJING/NEW DELHI, Feb 10 – China hopes the Dalai Lama can “return to the right path,” and is open to discussions about his future as long as certain conditions are met, Beijing said on Monday, a proposal rejected by the Tibetan parliament-in-exile in India.

The exiled leader of Tibetan Buddhism, who turns 90 in July, fled Tibet in 1959 for India after a failed uprising against Chinese rule but has expressed a desire to return before he dies.

China is open to talks about the future of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate as long as he abandons his position of splitting the “motherland,” a foreign ministry spokesperson, Guo Jiakun, told a regular press conference.

Guo was responding to a request for comment on the death of the spiritual leader’s elder brother Gyalo Thondup, who had previously acted as his unofficial envoy in talks with Chinese officials.

Gyalo Thondup died on Saturday, aged 97, in his home in the Indian town of Kalimpong.

The Dalai Lama needs to openly recognise that Tibet and Taiwan are inalienable parts of China, whose sole legal government is that of the People’s Republic of China, Guo said, using the country’s official name.

But the deputy speaker of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile, Dolma Tsering Teykhang, rejected the preconditions.

“It is not feasible for His Holiness to tell lies, that’s not going to happen,” she said from the Indian Himalayan town of Dharamshala, where the Dalai Lama also lives.

“If they dictate that His Holiness should speak about Tibet being an inalienable part, that is a distortion of history. By distorting history, you cannot have a peaceful and amicable solution.”

The Dalai Lama stepped down in 2011 as the political leader of the Tibetan government-in-exile, which Beijing does not recognise. Official talks with his representatives have stalled since, but Teykhang said back-channel discussions were ongoing, declining to give details.