World Tibet Network News Tuesday, April 28, 1998

WASHINGTON, April 26, 1998 (Reuters) Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who leaves Sunday for Asia, plans to make Tibet a significant element in her talks with Chinese leaders on human rights, U.S. officials and other sources said.

The issue of Tibet, and Beijing's attitude toward the Buddhist religion and culture there, is among the most sensitive U.S.-China issues, so there may be little public discussion.

But U.S. officials and congressional and human rights sources told Reuters Albright planned to discuss the issue when she visits Beijing Wednesday and Thursday.

She will urge Chinese leaders to make some gesture on Tibet either ahead of or in connection with the summit in late June in Beijing between Chinese President Jiang Zemin and President Clinton, they said.

"I think Tibet is an issue of rising salience and prominent visibility on the (U.S.-China) agenda for the American side," one U.S. official said.

Albright also plans to discuss human rights more broadly, with special emphasis on urging Beijing to make good soon on its commitment to sign an international covenant on political and civil rights.

Clinton's upcoming visit is the first to Beijing by a U.S. president since Chinese authorities crushed pro-democracy forces with a military crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Albright, on the first of four 1998 trips to Asia, will stop first in Japan, then to China, South Korea and Mongolia.

The United States has long accepted that Tibet which Chinese troops took over in 1950 is part of one China but is looking for China to address the issue "in a constructive way" and to resume a dialogue between Beijing and Tibet, the U.S. official said.

Early resumption of dialogue between Beijing and the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled religious leader, is unlikely, but if China eased its hold on the region, released some political prisoners or took other confidence-building measures, that could help lay groundwork for a dialogue and resonate positively in the United States, the official said.

Albright was taking with her to China Greg Craig, State Department policy planning director and special coordinator for Tibet, and Assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck, who handles human rights.

U.S. officials said Tibet was "gaining strength" among Americans as an issue on the Sino-U.S. agenda.

It has stirred popular attention in a way that other issues on which the administration focuses like terms for China's membership in the World Trade Organization and its export of missiles and related technology have not, they said.

About three dozen Tibet supporters demonstrated outside the Chinese Embassy in Washington Saturday, a few blocks from where top government figures and journalists were attending the annual White House Correspondents Dinner.

Such popular support was partly due to a pro-Tibet campaign waged by personalities like actor Richard Gere. And a spate of Hollywood movies has captured the splendors of Tibet's culture and what critics of China say is

Beijing's effort to crush it along with any hint of Tibetan independence.

Beyond that, China's hard line on Tibet has begun to alienate one of Beijing's strongest supporters in Congress, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, who got to know Jiang when she was mayor of San Francisco and

maintains a strong friendship with him.

In recent years, when anti-China sentiment was at its most virulent, Feinstein was one of the few U.S. officials arguing for continued engagement with Beijing.

But Feinstein has also been a supporter of the Dalai Lama and Tibet, urging Beijing to resume a dialogue and grant the region greater autonomy.

In a little-publicized incident, the senator flew to Beijing at China's request last September to deliver a letter from the Dalai Lama to Jiang, congressional aides said.

In the letter, the Dalai Lama proposed talks with Chinese leaders and said the question of independence for Tibet would be "off the table" in these discussions, one aide said.

"The response in the actual meeting (with Jiang) was not very positive. It was sort of dismissive," the aide said.

There was some expectation Beijing might make a gesture toward Tibet in connection with last October's Jiang-Clinton summit in Washington. But that never happened.