Many Chinese apologetic about Beijing’s Tibet policy

(TibetanReview.net, Dec23, 2010) The Dalai Lama has said Dec 18 he had been receiving an unending stream of visitors from Mainland China recently, in groups of two and three, and sometime even 10, reported the exile Tibetan government-run Tibet.net Dec 21. He has said many of them had told him that as Chinese people they felt ashamed and expressed apology over the suffering inflicted on Tibetans by the Chinese government. “With tears in their eyes, they beseech me not to forget the Chinese people,” he was quoted as saying.

Speaking to the Tibetans and local people in remote Ravangla town of Sikkim, the Dalai Lama had said, “It would be difficult to many Chinese to support our call for complete independence, but our present middle-way policy which is not ‘we win, you lose’ kind of stand, would be beneficial to both China and Tibet.”

He has said that since Mar’08 protests across Tibet, Chinese scholars had written over 1,000 articles, with about 200 of tem being by people living in Mainland China. “All these are 100 per cent in support of our Middle-Way policy and critical of the Chinese government’s wrong policies on Tibet,” he was quoted as saying.

The Dalai Lama has said that although Buddhism had reached China some 400 years before it did in Tibet, knowledge about the religion was much richer in the latter. “Therefore, it is very important that we should always keep our identity as Tibetans and feel proud of it,” he was quoted as saying.

The visit on Dec 18-19 was the Dalai Lama’s fifth to the Ravangla Tibetan settlement.