LONDON — The Dalai Lama spoke in his customary platitudes, and the Chinese regime responded with its habitual bluster, but a corner was turned in the China-Tibet dispute last week. From now on, it's likely to get worse.
After a five-day meeting in Dharamsala, India, that gathered together Tibetan exiles from all over the world, the Dalai Lama emerged with his authority unchallenged and the policy toward Beijing unchanged. "[The] majority of views have come up supporting the Middle Way path to the Tibetan issue . . . which is right," he declared Sunday. In other words, the Tibetans should seek only autonomy under Chinese rule, not full independence.
The Chinese regime's official mouthpiece in Lhasa, the Tibet Daily, replied that "the so-called 'Middle Way' is a naked expression of 'Tibetan independence' aimed at nakedly spreading the despicable plot of opposing the tide of history." The gutter-Marxist vocabulary is out of date in today's China, but the Tibet Daily got the Chinese regime's attitude right: The Communists have never believed that the Dalai Lama was telling the truth.