BEIJING, July 26, 1995 (CND) -- China bluntly dismissed charges made by some human-rights groups and Tibet's exiled spirit leader Dalai Lama that it is Beijing's policy to flood the Tibet region with Han Chinese immigrants to overwhelm its local Tibetan population, Reuter reported on Sunday citing Xinhua. In a meeting with a visiting British official, vice-chairman of the Xizang Autonomous Region, Cering Samzhub said that 96% of Xizang Autonomous Region's two million people are either Tibetans or other local ethnic minorities and that less than 30% of government employees are Han Chinese. Official figures show that there are 18,000 Han working in Tibet. It appears that Chinese volunteers are reluctant to work in Tibet. China's effort to hire inland farmers to open up Tibet's barren land achieved very little. "They (Han) simply could not survive the harsh living conditions," said Samzhub, while Samzhub admitting that there are "a very small number of Han Chinese settlers in Tibet. (Ray ZHANG, Jian LIU)

Forwarded by: DEBRA@OLN.comlink.apc.org (Debra Guzman)