BEIJING, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese mainland said Thursday it "resolutely opposes" the proposed visit of the Dalai Lama to Taiwan "in whatever form and capacity."

    "The Dalai Lama is not a pure religious figure," said a spokesman for the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office.

    "Under the pretext of religion, he has all along been engaged in separatist activities," the spokesman said.

    Seven mayors and county chiefs from Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Wednesday invited the Dalai Lama to visit the island.

    "When people from all sectors on the mainland are lending a hand to help Taiwan reconstruct and overcome the typhoon disaster quickly, some DPP members have taken the chance to plot the Dalai Lama's visit to Taiwan," he said.

    "Obviously this is not for the sake of disaster relief. It's an attempt to sabotage the hard-earned good situation in cross-Strait relations," he said.

    The scheme would be opposed by compatriots both on the mainland and in Taiwan, he said.

    Morakot, the worst typhoon that hit the island in 50 years, had claimed at least 461 lives and left 192 missing and 46 injured as of Tuesday, according to Taiwan's disaster response authorities.

Is Dalai Lama's "gov't-in-exile" secular?

    BEIJING, Aug. 19 -- Samdhong Rinpoche's recent remarks that the "Tibetan government-in-exile" is a secular one are ridiculous and fully expose the Dalai Lama clique's attempt to conceal its nature as a politico-religious one.

    To avert possible censures, the chief Buddha of the so-called "government-in-exile," defended his stance in an interview with Deutsche Welle, a German international broadcaster on Aug. 12, by arguing that his "government" is independent of religious intervention in its process of administration despite it being a combined spiritual and political rule. Full story

Article exposes ill intention of Dalai Lama's sabotage of ethnic relations

    BEIJING, Aug. 18 (Xinhua) -- A signed article Tuesday accused the Dalai Lama of using ungrounded and self-contradictory argument to comment on and damage the relations between the Han and Tibetan people.

    The article's author, Zhang Yun, an expert with the China Tibetology Research Center in Beijing, said the Dalai Lama used his "adept presentation skill and fluent English" to make speeches worldwide, but many of his words relating to the Tibet issue was self-contradictory. Full story

Dalai Lama's "democratic leadership" ridiculous

    LHASA, July 5 (Xinhua) -- The Dalai Lama's recent call for Tibetans to "embrace the democratic system of electing a leader" is totally ridiculous, a living Buddha of Tibetan Buddhism said Sunday.

    "It is totally against the tradition and convention of the Tibetan Buddhism, where the incarnation of the Dalai Lama should be decided according to a set of fixed procedures," Shingtsa Tenzinchodrak, a living Buddha of the Kagyu sect, told a group of visiting reporters in Lhasa, capital of Tibet autonomous region. Full story