Opinions

The Dalai Lama landed in America to the usual swirl of praise and protest. After receiving an honorary degree from UC San Francisco last Friday, he is scheduled to meet with George Bush, attend a reception on Capitol Hill and

China occupied Tibet and East Turkestan by force with no right as soon as the communists had taken over the leadership in Beijing in 1949. As a result of this enforced occupation, Tibet not only lost one fifth (more than 1,200,000) of all Tibetans by violence

The area in front of the Potala Palace, a symbol of Tibetan culture, could now pass for a noisy street in Beijing. (European Press Agency)

Not far from Potala Palace, the hilltop fortress once home to Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and still a symbol of Tibetan culture, the main commercial boulevard here has become a very different symbol, of how Tibet is inexorably becoming more Chinese.

Josef Astor for The New York Times

In the spring of 1992, out of the blue, the fax machine in Richard Davidson's office at the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison spit out a letter from Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama.

The Dalai Lama visits Washington this week, and he may be bringing good news to a president sorely in need of it. For the first time in recent years, there is reason to hope that the Chinese are finally willing to consider new ways of resolving the protracted Tibetan problem.

In recent months, Western news media and human rights groups have focused attention on restrictions limiting Internet access in the People's Republic of China (PRC) to websites on sensitive topics, including most independently produced information on Tibet.

Local Tibetans who live near Mount Kailash have been warned by the authorities not to speak about plans for a road around the sacred mountain, an important place of pilgrimage for Buddhists, Bon practitioners, Jains and Hindus.

To his holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama: Welcome again to San Francisco. More than 25 years ago at Dharamsala, we talked about Sacred Mountains and your return to Tibet.