Published by: World Tibet Network News, Monday, October 28, 1996

John Gittings

The Guardian - London, 26 October 1996

CHINA has launched a fierce campaign to teach atheism to Tibetan Buddhists, while rejecting the Dalal Lama's latest offer of negotiations as a "plot against the motherland".

Education in atheism, the official Tibet Daily newspaper says, is urgently needed so that Tibetans can "break free of the bewitchment [of religion] ... and expose the Dalai's tricks".

The campaign is in bizarre contrast to a "religious fever" elsewhere in China which has won many converts, including Communist Party members, to Buddhism and Christianity.

Beijing insists that the Dalai is seeking independence from China. But speaking on Thursday to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, he again proposed an agenda for talks which would exclude independence.

Reiterating his "middle way approach" (which upsets more radical Tibetan campaigners abroad), he said his goal was genuine self-government for Tibet. He even suggested that Tibetans "could benefit from joining the 1 billion Chinese of their own free will".

The Dalai also pointed out that the Chinese democracy movement, which previously ignored Tibet, is beginning to support Tibetan demands. Beijing has protested at the European Parliament's award of the 1996 Sakharov prize to Wei Jingsheng. Mr Wei, serving his second long jail sentence for political protest, has argued that Tibetans should have the right to self-determination.

On Thursday a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman denounced the European Union for "injuring the feelings of the Chinese people".

In another sign of a tightening up in Lhasa, China has formally charged Ngawang Choephel, a Tibetan Fulbright scholar who disappeared while travelling in Tibet a year ago.

Mr Choephel, says the New York organisation Human Rights in China, is an ethnomusicologist who went to Tibet to make a film about traditional music. China has accused him of gathering "sensitive intelligence".

Tibetans abroad have become more wary of visits home as the Chinese crackdown has got under way. Communist Party documents published in Lhasa now call for struggle against the "class enemies" a Maoist concept long abandoned elsewhere in China.