Published by World Tibet Network News - Sunday, March 23, 1997

TAIPEI, March 23 (Reuter) - More than half of Taiwan residents support a meeting between visiting Tibetan exiled leader the Dalai Lama and President Lee Teng-hui, despite rival China's protest, an opinion poll showed on Sunday.

Fifty-five percent of 923 residents polled said a face-to-face between the two leaders would help improve Taiwan's relations with the exiled Tibetan government, according to the China Times newspaper survey conducted on March 22.

Only 11.2 percent of the respondents opposed a meeting, saying this could trigger Chinese protests.

China has assailed the Dalai Lama's visit, and particularly the expected March 27 meeting with Lee, as collusion between "splittists" seeking independence for both Tibet and Nationalist-ruled Taiwan.

Beijing views Tibet and Taiwan as parts of China and has warned against their independence. Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists fled the mainland to Taiwan after losing a civil war in 1949, and the Dalai Lama left Tibet after clashes with the communists in 1959.

On his arrival in Taiwan on Saturday, the Dalai Lama told a news briefing he looked foward to seeing Lee, who was reportedly planning the meeting for the Taipei Guest House instead of the Presidential Office on March 27.

The Presidential Office declined to givew the place and time of the planned meeting.

But analysts said holding the meeting at the guest house instead of Lee's office would play down the political nature of their first-ever face-to-face dialogue.

Also, the Dalai Lama was expected to meet the leader of Taiwan's pro-independence Demoncratic Progressive Party, Hsu Hsin-liang, on March 26. Party officials said they would meet in Chungli, south of Taipei, in the afternoon.

On Saturday, pro-independence activists clashed with pro-Chinese unification supporters outside the Kaohsiung airport in southern Taiwan when the Dalai Lama arrived.