US lawmakers’ trip made with troublemaking intent

A US bipartisan delegation of seven lawmakers, headed by Republican representative Michael McCaul and including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi of the Democratic Party, arrived in the Himalayan town of Dharamshala on Tuesday for a meeting with the Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile there since 1959 after he fled Xizang in the wake of a failed armed rebellion.

The US politicians, of course, are fully aware of the provocative nature of the ongoing visit, given the 88-year-old Dalai Lama’s experience over the past several decades of colluding with external forces to compromise China’s sovereignty by pushing for “the independence” of the autonomous region.

As a Foreign Ministry spokesman put it, the Dalai Lama is not a purely religious figure, but “a political exile engaged in anti-China separatist activities under the cloak of religion”. Yet the anti-China US politicians still went ahead with the visit, trying to use Xizang as a pretext to disrupt social stability and hinder the country’s development.

It should be noted that the visit came shortly after the US Congress passed legislation last week called “Promoting a Resolution to the Tibet-China Dispute Act”, which China hawks in Washington claim seeks to encourage Beijing to speak with the Dalai Lama clique and reach a negotiated agreement. US President Joe Biden is expected to sign it into law soon.

The rising frequency with which the anti-China forces have sought to play the “Xizang card” in a renewed smear game against Beijing reflects how desperate they have become to use whatever remaining value the Dalai Lama clique has to create trouble for China. The clique, representing the feudal serfdom ruling class of old Xizang, is fast fading into history.

That US lawmakers have passed a bill dictating what the government of another sovereign country should do in terms of its internal affairs is absurd enough. That it is based on lies, such as Beijing has refused to talk with the Dalai Lama, makes it even more preposterous. The central government received 13 visits by private representatives of the Dalai Lama between 1979 and 2002, and it is his consistent denials that Tibet is an integral part of China, and refusal to stop his attempts to separate it from the country that has shut the door on negotiation.

The US has played a despicable role in the Dalai Lama clique’s separatist activities. In the mid-1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency helped to train Tibetan separatists to carry out subversive activities in Xizang. During the armed rebellion in Xizang in 1959, the CIA helped the Dalai Lama to flee, and supported rebel forces with weapons and ammunition.

Today Xizang enjoys social stability and harmony, with sound economic performance, and local people’s well-being is well protected. The autonomous region also keeps making fresh progress in achieving high-quality development. Any attempt by separatists and their foreign masters to destabilize Xizang and contain and suppress China is doomed to failure.

Editorial, China Daily