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

KAOHSIUNG, Taiwan, March 23 (Reuter) - Exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama spent his first full day in Taiwan on Sunday with a schedule of dawn-to-dusk preaching, but finished the day on a note of praise for modern China's founding father, Sun Yat-sen.

Ignoring communist China's vitriolic attacks against his six-day visit to the Nationalist-ruled Chinese outpost, the Tibetan Buddhist god-king concentrated on religious matters with a series of lectures across southern Taiwan.

The only break from Buddhism came at the end of the day, when the 1989 Nobel peace laureate was awarded an honorary doctorate of philosophy by Sun Yat-sen University.

The Dalai Lama used the occasion to praise the revolutionary Sun and the republic he created in 1911 by toppling the Qing dynasty.

"Since my childhood I have had great admiration for that great leader," the ochre-robed monk now draped in a black academic robe and topped by a tasseled mortarboard told a largely academic audience.

"He really made a big effort to change that great nation."

His kind words for China contrasted with the angry words from Beijing that have dogged his visit.

China has assailed his journey and an expected Thursday meeting with Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui as the collusion of "splittists" bent on independence from China for both Tibet and Taiwan.

Since arriving to a politically charged welcome on Saturday, the Dalai Lama has studiously avoided commenting in detail on the new China-Taiwan frictions his visit has aroused, promising to take questions at a scheduled Monday news conference in the capital Taipei.

The 61-year-old monk started his day with a visit to Taiwan's oldest lamasery, the Kungke Temple in Tainan, then dropped by the Kuangteh Temple on the outskirts of Kaohsiung before returning to the port city's municipal stadium to address a crowed estimated at more than 20,000.

The stadium appearance was the first of three major "enlightenment meetings" at the heart of his busy schedule in Taiwan, which the Dalai Lama and his hosts have insisted is strictly religious.

The trip nonetheless has stirred political passions in Taiwan as advocates and opponents of the island's independence from China have tried to marshal the visiting monk to their cause.

Those feelings first spilled into the streets on Saturday, when the Dalai Lama's arrival in Kaohsiung triggered raucous protests and a few shoving matches between rival factions.

His visit has stirred a long-dormant debate about whether Tibet is part of China a question with deep ramifications for a far hotter debate about whether Taiwan should reunite with China or go it alone.

Taiwan's exiled Republic of China government, ousted from the mainland by the triumphant communists in 1949, maintains that Taiwan and Tibet both are part of China and that Taiwan should reunite with the mainland, though not before Beijing embraces multiparty democracy.

Advocates of Taiwan's independence from China insisted that the Dalai Lama, who leads a Tibetan government-in-exile in India, be treated as a visiting head of state, calculating that this would bolster Taiwan's own right to self-determination.

Pro-independence forces want to abolish the cabinet's Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission, which insists that Tibetans including the Dalai Lama be regarded as Chinese subjects on the premise that Tibet is part of the Taiwan-based republic.

Since making initial contacts in 1993, the Dalai Lama has refused to visit under such conditions, saying they reflected political "misunderstandings."