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Chinese did not respond and the leadership is believed to be divided
on it.
6. Chapter IV of the White Paper refers to trials and punishment. Its specifies that trials should be public, but when the EC Presidency made a demarche in January appealing for clemency for the dissidents and free access to trials Jiang Enzhu (assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs) replied that the tribunal decided who should attend. Foreign diplomats and journalists were in fact prevented from attending the trials. The death sentence is said to be applied only for the "most heinous" crimes but an Amnesty International report published in April 1991 said that they had recorded 960 death
sentences and 750 actual executions in 1990. These figures were taken from public sources and the actual figures would be higher. The death sentence is used for a wide range of crimes from murder and rape to drug trafficking, embezzlement and prostitution/pimping. A recent example was the reported execution of two Chinese who
snatched the handbag of a British tourist.
7. The situation in Tibet continues to cause concern. The Chinese
are likely to protest strongly about the Prime Minister's decision to meet the Dalai Lama in his private and religious capacity. We should continue to press the Chinese to resolve the problem of Tibet by granting the Tibetans a decent autonomy and by entering into dialogue with the Dalai Lama. They have recently said that the Dalai Lama's high profile campaign makes dialogue out of the question, but they also refused to respond to his previous approaches including the Strasbourg proposals (which offered China
responsibility for defence and foreign affairs for an autonomous Tibet). They could not hope for a more reasonable interlocutor.
FAR EASTERN DEPARTMENT
22 NOVEMBER 1991
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