China Blasts Dalai Lama’s Speech

China lashed out at the Dalai Lama on Thursday after the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader gave a speech in which he said Buddhists were living in prison-like conditions and expressed sympathy with the people of Xinjiang.
The speech, given to mark the 51st anniversary of his flight from Tibet to India, drew official Chinese ire at a regular Foreign Ministry news briefing in Beijing.
“The Dalai Lama made another statement yesterday, this is nothing new. In the past few years, year on year, the Dalai Lama has distorted the true situation in Tibet, and attacked and insulted the central government’s policies in Tibet, to trumpet his separatist claims of independence or semi-independence,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told journalists. China calls the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner a dangerous separatist, pointing to his speech in which he referred to Xinjiang as “East Turkestan”, the name given to it by pro-independence exiles. The region is populated by the ethnic minority Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking largely Muslim people. Ethnic violence in Xinjiang last year between Uighurs and Han led to at least 200 deaths.
“Regarding his mentioning of his sympathy with East Turkestan, this exposes and proves his intent on splitting up China and wrecking ethnic unity,” Qin said. In his speech the Dalai Lama also said Beijing had put monks and nuns “in prison-like conditions”, making “monasteries function more like museums … to deliberately annihilate Buddhism”.