Tibet autonomy out of question: China

Beijing: The Dalai Lama's calls for "high-level autonomy" for Tibet will never be accepted by Beijing, a Chinese official said, taking an unbending line before talks by exiled Tibetans about the future of their cause.

Zhu Weiqun, a vice minister of the Chinese Communist Party's United Front Work Department, said yesterday that envoys of the Dalai Lama had pressed his long-standing demand for "genuine autonomy" for the mountain region during talks in Beijing last week.

Ahead of an agenda-setting meeting of exiled Tibetan activists, the Dalai Lama's representatives gave their Chinese hosts a "Memorandum for all Tibetans to enjoy genuine autonomy".

But Zhu's public response was unyielding. China would "never allow ethnic splitting in the name of genuine autonomy," he told a news conference.

"In fact, this is seeking a legal basis for so-called Tibetan independence, or semi-independence or covert independence," said Zhu, whose department oversees the ruling Party's dealings with religious organisations.

His remarks were Beijing's first detailed comment on the talks with envoys from October 31 to November 5, the ninth such discussions since 2002 and the first since the Beijing Olympic Games.

They also laid out China's stance ahead of the meeting of exiled Tibetans, some of whom embrace more radical demands going beyond their 73-year-old leader's ideas for autonomy.

"Contacts and talks failed to make progress, and they should assume full responsibility for it," Zhu added, referring to last week's meetings.

The Tibetan government-in-exile blamed the Chinese for failure of the latest round of talks.

"When the Chinese were not willing to accept regional autonomy, they should have said this from the beginning," Karma Chophel, speaker of the Tibetan Parliament in-exile, said from Dharamsala in India, headquarters of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

But the Chinese officials said the only point of the talks was to impress on the Dalai Lama that their government would not relax its hold on the region that saw deadly riots and protests in March.