(XINHUA is the official news agency of the People's Republic of China)

BEIJING (Feb. 5) XINHUA - A group of Chinese scholars have strongly criticised the US State Department Human Rights Country Reports for the year 1996, which was released last week.

At a seminar in Beijing today, the scholars maintained that the January 30 State Department report violates the goals and basic principles of the UN Charter and completely ignores the progress that China has made in protecting human rights.

This malicious and slanderous attack on China's human rights record only serves to expose its real intension of interfering in other countries' internal affairs under the excuse of human rights, according to human rights researchers and experts in the fields of history, philosophy, law, social sciences, and journalism.

"The report is full of groundless accusations and intentional fabrications," Tian Dan, deputy secretary-general of the China Society for the Study of Human Rights, commented. He cited the report's allegation that "Chinese authorities also detained foreigners visiting Tibet, searched them", claiming that a visiting foreign scholar, Ngawang Choephel, was detained by Chinese authorities and sentenced to 18 years in prison for making a documentary film about Tibetan's performing arts.

The facts, however, are somewhat different. According to Tian, the 30-year-old native of the Zanda County of Tibet's Ngari Prefecture, who used to be a teacher in the song and dance troupe of the Dalai Lama's "government in exile," was sent by the Dalai Lama clique in July of 1995 to gather information in Tibet under the guise of making a documentary about Tibetan performing arts, with equipment and funding provided by a certain country.

Ngawang Choephel followed an 'outline for intelligence gathering' that had been prepared, in Lhasa, Shanna, Nyingchi and Xigaze in the Tibet Autonomous Region. The Chinese security departments obtained ample evidence to prove the espionage charge and arrested him in accordance with the law, Tian noted.