Negotiations between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama about the future of Tibet have resumed after a two-year gap following a secret visit to Beijing last month by the Dalai Lama's elder brother, it was claimed last night. Speaking after celebrations to mark his 50th anniversary as temporal leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama yesterday said his brother, Gyalo Thondup, held talks with Chinese consular officials. Mr Thondup, a former Tibetan envoy, had earlier received "indications" the Chinese wanted to see him.
Mr Thondup returned to Dharamsala, the north Indian home of Tibet's government in exile, bearing a message from the Chinese side, but the Dalai Lama last night refused to disclose its contents. "It is early days," he said.
He said he had responded to Beijing's overture by suggesting a Tibetan delegation visit China for further talks. There had not yet been a reply.
Beijing's formal position is that the door is still open to talks it broke off in 1993 if the Dalai Lama explicitly "renounces independence". Informal talks briefly resumed after President Clinton met President Jiang Zemin in China in 1998, but were terminated soon afterwards.
The Chinese government has recently preferred to ignore the Dalai Lama, arguing that after his death Tibetan nationalism would disappear.
But senior Chinese officials consistently condemn the Dalai Lama as devious, insincere and representing feudal forces. "The Dalai Lama engages in activities aimed at splitting the country under the pretext of religion," the Tibet communist party leader, Raidi, was quoted as saying in the People's Daily last week. "His cheating and hypocrisy actually go against the doctrine of Buddhism."
Beijing claims that Tibet is undergoing rapid modernisation, that average incomes are rising fast and that it will benefit even more from China's policy of speeding up development of its western regions.
The Tibet Information Network, a campaigning and research group based in London, argues that China's "Great Leap West" is designed to submerge the identity of the Tibetan people.
Moderate Chinese officials acknowledge that Tibet is a public relations disaster abroad for the Chinese government, but complain that western reporting is invariably negative.
Observers suggest that local officials in Lhasa are more hardline than Beijing, and include many who were active there during the Cultural Revolution. Serious talks between China and the Dalai Lama could undermine their grip on power. The Tibetan government has tightened restrictions on the monasteries in the last four years and portraits of the Dalai Lama are completely banned.
The Chinese insist that the Dalai Lama, who fled in 1959, must accept that Tibet is an integral part of China and must give up his "splittist" efforts.
But in recent years, the Dalai Lama has been pursuing a "middle way" and calling on the Chinese to grant Tibet meaningful autonomy, rather than independence. This would leave China in control of Tibet's foreign policy.
"Everybody knows I'm not seeking independence. My commitment to the middle way has not changed. The Chinese government need not have any suspicion of that," the Dalai Lama said yesterday. "It is very, very essential, whether we make progress or not, that we meet face to face. I think one of the obstacles is ignorance."
The Dalai Lama said his brother, who lives in New Delhi, initially had been unsure whether to take up the Chinese offer to travel to Beijing. But he had encouraged him to go so he could visit Tibet, find out what the "real situation" there was, and inform the Chinese government "accordingly".
But Chinese officials prevented him from visiting Tibet, he said. Mr Thondup, who has a Chinese wife and was educated in Nanking before the invasion of Tibet, first visited Beijing as an emissary of the Dalai Lama in 1979 and has held talks with Chinese officials on several occasions.
News of the latest development - which has prompted the Dalai Lama to postpone a visit to Taiwan - emerged following celebrations at the temple outside the Dalai Lama's chalet-style home in Dharamsala, a former Raj hill resort surrounded by snowy mountains in the foothills of the Himalayas.
The Dalai Lama was made political leader at the age of 16, soon after the Chinese began their invasion of Tibet in 1950.
Representatives from all four of Tibet's schools of Buddhism took part in the three-hour ceremony - though the 15-year-old Karmapa, who escaped from Tibet in January to the embarrassment of the Chinese authorities, was absent. The Karmapa, Urgyen Trinley Doje, is the spiritual head of the influential Kagyu sect, which rivals the Dalai Lama's.
Indian government officials are reluctant to grant the Karmapa formal asylum for fear of offending China. Last night the Dalai Lama said the boy had been unable to attend the ceremony because he had a "stomach upset".
