Xinhua is the official Chenese News Agency

BEIJING (Jan. 24) XINHUA - A signed article carried in today's China Daily, the national English newspaper, refuted Dalai Lama's fabrications about Tibet.

Tibet was frequently in the news last year as the Dalai Lama continually decried the remarkable economic and social achievements made in this inalienable region of China, the article says.

"The Dalai Lama seemed to be one of the busiest international travellers of 1996," it says. He showed up in Denmark, Germany, Australia and South Africa under all kinds of excuses, trying to convince the world with his groundless "bad news" about Tibet and win sympathy from those who know little about the real situation there, the article says.

It says, some countries and interest groups are reluctant to see an increasingly strong and independent China. They focus on the Tibet issue in an attempt to realize their own political or economic interests.

"Those people do not care about the facts or the feelings of people in another country," it says, stating that some biased Western media have joined the anti-China chorus by promoting the "bad news" and criticizing the Chinese government.

The article refuted a recent article published by the Deutch Press Agency claiming that more than one million out of six million Tibetans had lost their lives under Chinese rule, mainly because of torture, execution, starvation, compulsory sterilization or abortion.

However, those people who have some basic knowledge about Tibet will not be fooled by lies and fabrications, the article says.

A recent survey conducted by Beijing University shows that the population of Tibetans in Tibet nearly doubled in just 42 years, increasing at an average annual rate of 1.6 percent from 1.15 million in 1952 to 2.23 million in 1994.

The 1950 figures provided by Tibet's old government under the Dalai Lama's rule show that Tibet then had a population of one million, it says. "I have no idea how the Western media got the idea that Tibet has a population of six million," says the article's author, Chen Yali.