The meeting between the supreme leader of the People's Republic of China and the Dalai Lama's brother took place in Beijing on March 12, 1979. Deng immediately blamed the Gang of Four for the difficult situation in Tibet. It was then the standard excuse for all what had gone wrong in China (and in Tibet) since the mid-1960s.
Deng said he was keen to improve the lot of the Tibetan population. He told Thondup that he would like to invite the refugees in India and abroad to return to Tibet. He told the Dalai Lama's brother: 'It is better to see once than to hear a hundred times.'
It was during this encounter with Gyalo Thondup that Deng Xiaoping said: 'The door is opened for negotiations as long as we don't speak about independence. Everything else is negotiable.'
It is in these circumstances that three delegations were sent by the Dalai Lama in 1979 and 1980 to visit their native land after a gap of 20 years and much suffering.
A few months earlier, the Panchen Lama, the second-most important Tibetan religious figure, and Bapa Phuntso Wangyal, the 'first Tibetan Communist' who led the Chinese troops into the Tibetan capital in September 1951, had been released after more than 15 years in Chinese jails.
Wangyal still remembers Deng Xiaoping's return: 'He changed the course of Chinese history, ushering in a new era in politics, society, and the economy. The kind of ultra-leftist thinking that had produced the anti-rightist campaign and the disastrous Cultural Revolution was now suppressed, and those who had had previously been imprisoned were being released -- if, like me, they were still alive. One dimension of Deng's new policy was the attempt to resolved outstanding international issues, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Dalai Lama and the exiled Tibetans.'
But many in China would soon discover that Deng's 'reforms' had limits.
The first were the Tibetans.
Based on Deng's statement to his brother, the Dalai Lama decided to drop the independence of Tibet from his agenda and instead seek 'genuine' autonomy.
Despite several rounds of talks and contacts, the Chinese did not budge. Exactly 30 years after Gyalo Thondup had met Deng's representative for the first time, Zhu Weiqun, the head of the United Front Work Department, stated in Beijing on November 10, 2008, 'Comrade Deng Xiaoping had never made such statement. It is a complete distortion of Deng Xiaoping's statement.'
So much for the reforms!
The Dalai Lama. Photograph: Shailesh Bhatnagar/Reuters
Also read: Claude Arpi: The end of the Dalai Lama's Middle Way?
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