The Guardian - London, 25 January 1997

Andrew Higgins in Hong Kong reports that spiritual muscle is replacing the military variety in the war of allegiances

LOCKED in a pitiless rivalry with China usually measured in war planes, missiles and diplomatic realpolitik, Taiwan has found religion in its battle to keep Beijing at bay.

With both Tibetan Buddhism and Christianity in China facing what human rights activists describe as the harshest crackdown in 20 years, Taiwan is cultivating the Dalai Lama and the Pope as potential allies.

The exiled Tibetan "God King" announced this week from his sanctuary in northern India that he would soon make a "religious journey" to Taiwan, his first to the island citadel of the Kuomintang or Nationalist Party, which was exiled by the 1949 communist revolution.

The previous week Taiwan's prime minister, Lien Chan, met the Pope at the Vatican. The Holy See is one of 30, mostly tiny, states that recognise Taiwan rather than the People's Republic of China.

The Dalai Lama's invitation to Taiwan by a Buddhist group is certain to rile Beijing, as did the Pope's meeting with Mr Lien.

Preparations for the Dalai Lama's visit, expected in March, coincide with a frantic bidding war by Taipei and Beijing to woo some of the world's poorest countries, the last waverers in a contest in which diplomatic recognition is traded for aid and cash.

Some countries, such as Niger, which welcomed the Chinese foreign minister on Monday, switch their allegiance back and forth, upping the ante each time.

Religious leaders are less easily bought, and far more influential. China and the Vatican broke off relations after the 1949 revolution, which led to the expulsion of foreign missionaries and the execution or jailing of thousands of Chinese Roman Catholics.

Tortuous negotiations to re-establish links have been set back in recent months by a Chinese campaign to uproot an underground church - the United States-based Cardinal Kung Foundation - that professes loyalty to the Pope rather than China's state-controlled Patriotic Catholic Church.

A campaign of repression in Tibet has similarly helped burnish Taiwan's appeal to the Dalai Lama, whose influence extends to Mongolia and large swaths of Siberia.

In the past the Kuomintang has been as unsympathetic as the Communist Party to Tibet's demands for self-rule: both consider the Himalayan region an integral part of China.

Taiwan's transition to democracy, however, has mellowed its pretentions. Like the Pope, the Dalai Lama has held informal and unfruitful talks through intermediaries with Beijing.

After a period of relative tolerance in the 1980s, China has now reimposed rigid controls, asserting the - Party as the supreme authority on spiritual an' temporal matters.

When the Dalai Lama endorsed a young Tibetan boy as the reincarnation of the late Panchan Lama - the second highest Buddhist figure - who died in 1989, the Communist Part spirited the child to Beijing and enthroned its own official "reincarnation", a six-year-old boy.

The Dalai Lama has continued to seek talks with China, even presenting his trip to Taiwan as a gesture of reconciliation.

A Taiwanese newspaper this week quoted himsaying: "We are against the Chinese Communist government, not Chinese Chinese culture. If mainland China can implement democracy, Tibet can accept the fact of being part' the big nation."