Published by: World Tibet Network News Thursday, November 28, 1997

BEIJING, Nov 27 (AFP) - China confirmed Thursday that senior Tibetan officials had cancelled a trip to Britain after London proposed they meet groups critical of Beijing's policies in Tibet.

"The Chinese and British side have different opinions over the arrangements over the itinerary of the visit to Britain by the delegation of Tibet Autonomous Region," a spokeswoman for China's Foreign Ministry said.

"This delegation will not visit Britain," she said. The group, led by Raidi, the top ethnic Tibetan in the Lhasa government and deputy communist party secretary of the region, was due to start its trip to London on December 2.

Britain's Foreign Office had planned meetings with the Tibet Society and the Free Tibet campaign as well as parliamentary all-party groups on Tibet and China. But the Tibetan officials cancelled when it learnt the full extent of

London's plans.

"We were putting together a programme for them in which we would have arranged for them to meet a range of people and views. In the end they decided they did not want to do that," said a spokesman for the Foreign Office.

The visit would have been the first official trip from Tibet since the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, although its leader Raidi accompanied Qiao Shi, head of China's parliament, on a 15-day trip to Germany, Austria and Switzerland in January 1994.

Raidi is regarded as a hardliner who played a leading role in the Cultural Rrevolution when Tibetan Buddhism was suppressed and many monasteries destroyed.