Reuters: “For decades, Beijing has maintained that the Dalai Lama is a separatist, but Tibet‘s exiled spiritual leader once had a special relationship with the father of Xi Jinping, the man in line to become China’s next president.
Few people know what Xi, whose ascent to the leadership is likely to be approved at a Communist Party congress later this year, thinks of Tibet or the Dalai Lama.
But his late father, Xi Zhongxun, a liberal-minded former vice premier, had a close bond with the Tibetan leader who once gave the elder Xi an expensive watch in the 1950s, a gift that the senior party official was still wearing decades later.
The Dalai Lama, 77, recalls the elder Xi as “very friendly, comparatively more open-minded, very nice” and says he only gave watches back then to those Chinese officials he felt close to.
“We Tibetans, we get these different varieties of watch easily from India. So we take advantage of that, and brought some watches to some people when we feel some sort of close feeling, as a gift like that,” the Dalai Lama said in an interview in the Indian town of Dharamsala, a capital for Tibetan exiles in the foothills of the Himalayas.
The Dalai Lama gave the watch to the elder Xi in 1954 during an extended visit to Beijing. Xi was one of the officials who spent time with the young Dalai Lama in the capital where he spent five to six months studying Chinese and Marxism.
The Dalai Lama fled to India five years later, after a failed uprising against Communist rule, but as late as 1979, Xi senior was still wearing the watch, the make and style of which the Dalai Lama can no longer remember.
Xi senior was a dove in the party, championing the rights of Tibetans, Uighurs and other ethnic minorities. He also opposed the army crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen student protests and was alone in criticizing the sacking of liberal party chief Hu Yaobang by the Old Guard in 1987. Xi senior died in 2002.
The Dalai Lama has never met Xi junior but his fondness for the father is, for some, a sign that China’s next leader may adopt a more reformist approach to Tibet once he formally succeeds President Hu Jintao next March. Some expect him to be more tolerant of Muslim Uighurs in the western region of Xinjiang, and also of Taiwan, the independently ruled island that China has vowed to take back, by force if necessary.
“To understand what kind of leader Xi Jinping will be, one must study his father’s (policies),” said Bao Tong, one-time top aide to purged party chief Zhao Ziyang. Bao was jailed for seven years for sympathizing with student-led demonstrations for democracy centered on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.
“No (Chinese) Communist will betray his father,” he added.”
via Insight: Does China’s next leader have a soft spot for Tibet? | Reuters.
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