The Daily Telegraph, Wednesday 5 November 1997

THE Tibetan government-in-exile yesterday rejected a proposal by the Chinese President, Jiang Zemin, to open a dialogue with the Dalai Lama if he publicly recognised Tibet as an "inalienable" part of China.

Tempa Tsering, the Dalai Lama's spokesman, said that by making this demand during his trip to America, President Jiang had asked the spiritual leader to re-write Tibet's history and accept the "fiction" that it was ever a part of China. This would constitute an "enormous historical lie" and the Dalai Lama, as a Buddhist monk, would have no part in it. Return to top