BEIJING — Less than 24 hours after China offered to meet with an envoy of the Dalai Lama, state-controlled news media on Saturday kept up their campaign of denunciations of the Tibetan spiritual leader.
“The behavior of the Dalai clique has seriously violated fundamental teaching and commandments of Buddhism, undermined the normal order of Tibetan Buddhism and ruined its reputation,” the Communist Party’s People’s Daily newspaper reported.
China Daily, the official English-language newspaper, published an interview with Lahlu Tsewang Dorje, a Tibetan who fought on the Dalai Lama’s side in a failed 1959 uprising, according to the paper, and later became a top political adviser to the Chinese Tibetan authorities. “I think the Dalai clique is our enemy and we should fight until the end,” he was quoted as saying.
The tone of the articles raised questions about China’s seriousness in preparing for negotiations with the Dalai Lama over restoring stability to Tibet, which has essentially been under government lockdown since deadly rioting in Lhasa, its capital, on March 14.
Rather than stepping back from its hammering of the “Dalai clique” for instigating the violence in an attempt to split the country and sabotage this summer’s Olympic Games, China continued to hit hard. “The Lhasa March 14 incident is another ugly performance meticulously plotted by the Dalai clique to seek Tibet independence,” said the Tibet Daily, a Communist Party newspaper.
The Chinese government has been under intense international pressure to begin talks with the Dalai Lama, who is honored in the West as a man of peace and who denies advocating violence or trying to divide the country or jeopardize the Beijing Games. Global leaders are facing growing calls to boycott the Games’ opening ceremony on Aug. 8 if Beijing refuses.
The two sides have met off and on for decades, most recently last summer, without making progress on key issues, including whether the Dalai Lama can ever return to Tibet and what a new Tibetan autonomous region within China would look like. The Chinese government said Friday it would meet with an envoy of the Dalai Lama and determine whether conditions were ripe to begin talks.
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