Beijing has no interests to meet “new Tibetan leader”

2011-05-17 (China Military News cited from UPI) — China has little interest in meeting with the new leader of Tibet’s government-in-exile, saying the former leader, the 14th Dalai Lama, remains a saboteur.

The communist government in Beijing won’t be looking for talks with Harvard law Professor Lobsang Sangay, elected as prime-minister-in-exile in April, said Zhu Weiqun, executive vice minister of the United Front Work Department.

Zhu’s department is in charge of talking to religious groups, including the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader and former political leader. His department has had several years of on-again, off-again talks with the Dalia Lama, who announced in March that he was giving up his political role.

Sangay, 43, was elected as the kalon tripa — prime minister — with 55 percent of the 49,000 votes cast.

Sangay, a Tibetan refugee is a legal scholar, political activist and international human rights lawyer. He is a visiting Research Fellow at the East Asian Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School.

But the Dalia Lama remains the ceremonial head of state as well as the spiritual head of millions of Tibetans, in and outside the country, which Chinese forces have occupied for more than 60 years.

“It doesn’t matter who is the kalon tripa of his government-in-exile, they are a splitist political clique that has betrayed the motherland,” Zhu said in an interview with the government-owned magazine China’s Tibet.

“There is nothing legal about them and they have no qualifications to talk with the central government’s (Beijing’s) representatives.”

The interview with Zhu was ahead of the 60th commemoration of an agreement between China’s communist government and “the Local Government of Tibet on Measures for the peaceful Liberation of Tibet,” the magazine article said.

In October 1950, the People’s Liberation Army won a decisive victory over a Tibetan army at the border town of Chamdo. It was the end of less than two weeks of hostilities, which the Chinese call the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet.

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