Premier Wen Jiabao to attend the China-EU Summit, Asia-Europe Summit Meeting(ASEM), the SCO Prime Ministers Meeting and to visit Finland, Britain, Germany and Tajikistan

Foreign Ministry Spokesman Qin Gang announces:

At the invitation of Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Tajikistan Prime Minister Akil AkilovChinese Premier Wen Jiabao will visit Finland, the United Kingdom, Germany and Tajikistan from September 9 to 16.

Premier Wen will also attend the Ninth China-EU Summit and the Sixth Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) to be held in Helsinki, capital of Finland, and the Fifth Meeting of Prime Ministers of the Member States of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to be held in Dushanbe, capital of Tajikistan.

http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx/t270537.htm

China Detains Tibetan Abbot in Sichuan

DHARAMSALA—Authorities in the Tibetan region of Karze in southwestern China's Sichuan province have detained the abbot of a major monastery, possibly in connection with the appearance of posters supporting Tibetan independence one year ago, sources in the area said.

"Chinese security officials arrested Khenpo Jinpa of Choktsang Taklung Monastery based in Choktsang village, Serda county, Karze prefecture, on Aug. 23," a caller from the region told RFA's reporter in Dharamsala. Karze is known in Chinese as Ganzi.

"His room was raided and searched without any kind of advance notice," the caller added.

Around 1 p.m. on Aug. 23, a team of armed police arrived in two vehicles from the nearby regional town of Dartsedo (Kanding, in Chinese), the caller said.

Monastery surrounded

"[They] surrounded the monastery and did not allow anybody to leave or enter the area. Some members of team went inside the monastery and arrested Khenpo Jinpa," said the listener, who was calling from Serda (in Chinese, Seda) county.

"The security officials searched his room too but found no incriminating materials of any kind. They never explained reasons for his arrest," the source said.

His room was raided and searched without any kind of advance notice,

Caller to RFA's Tibetan service

An officer who answered the phone at the public security bureau in Dartsedo didn't deny the arrest had occurred and suggested speaking to his superior. Calls to his superior during office hours went unanswered.

An independent source in the northern Indian town of Dharamsala, home of the exiled Tibetan government and spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, confirmed the arrest of the abbot.

The source, from Serda county, said local officials had been overruled in the arrest by a special team dispatched from Dartsedo.

The caller said local Tibetan monks suspected the arrest could be related to pro-independence posters displayed a year ago at the monastery, although no arrests were made at the time.

Taklung Monastery is one of the oldest in the Serda area, and is currently home to around 300 monks.

Abbot Khenpo Jinpa, 37, was taught by Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok, who died after authorities demolished parts of his Larungar Buddhist Center in April 2001.

Karze, a traditionally Tibetan area administered by China's Sichuan province, also saw the arrest last month of a 16-year-old Tibetan girl named Yiwang for handing out pro-independence leaflets.

The Dalai Lama fled Lhasa in 1959 after an unsuccessful revolt against Chinese rule. He leads the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India, but Beijing has ruled him out of Tibet's future.

Images, writings, and video of the Dalai Lama, who is universally revered by Tibetans, are banned in Tibet, and those found in possession of them typically receive prison sentences.

Original reporting by RFA's Tibetan service. Translated by Karma Dorjee. RFA Tibetan service director: Jigme Ngapo. Written in English by Luisetta Mudie and edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

Media will be free to roam during Olympics, pledges Beijing

Jonathan Watts in Beijing
Wednesday September 6, 2006

Guardian

Beijing's Olympics organisers have promised that the international media will be allowed to travel freely around China by the time the Games start in 2008, Britain's minister for culture, media and sport Tessa Jowell said yesterday.

The assurance - given by the head of the organising committee, Liu Qi - would require a loosening of some of the tightest restrictions on foreign journalists in the world. Correspondents are frequently detained by police and sent back to Beijing when they try to cover sensitive stories in the provinces.

Britain, Germany and other European countries have urged China to drop these controls and to grant the same freedoms permitted to Chinese reporters in London, Berlin and other western capitals.

Mrs Jowell, who is visiting Beijing as UK Olympic minister, said she received a positive response when she raised the issue with her counterpart, Mr Liu. "He gave me a clear assurance that he would support unimpeded movement of accredited and non-accredited journalists to report not just on the Games but on China," she said.

It was unclear whether the relaxation would apply only for the duration of the Olympics, when more than 20,000 journalists are expected to arrive in Beijing, or be a permanent change.

Ms Jowell said she hoped greater media freedom would be one of the lasting legacies of the Olympics. "I believe that once we establish freedom in this way, even after the delegates and the athletes have gone home, China won't reverse it and the Games will have a lasting legacy of opening China to the world," she said.

The Foreign Correspondents Club of China, of which the Guardian is a member, has lobbied for reform against a backdrop of several dozen detentions in the past two years.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,1865766,00.html

British minister to raise press freedom with Beijing

By Nick Mulvenney
Reuters
Monday, September 4, 2006; 8:13 AM

BEIJING (Reuters) - Britain's Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell said on Monday she would raise the issue of press freedom in a meeting with Beijing Olympic organizers (BOCOG) this week.

Jowell, who is responsible for her government's media and sports portfolios as well as the 2012 London Olympics, said reports of harassment of journalists in China were "matters of concern."

"I will be talking about press freedom with organizers tomorrow," she told reporters at the site of the main stadium of the 2008 Olympics.

"I think what is to be welcomed is that I understand BOCOG have made it clear that access will be granted to accredited and non-accredited journalists.

"This is an important step in the commitment the organizing committee gave the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that hosting the Games would turn China to face the rest of the world.

"These kinds of basic freedoms are freedoms the rest of the world in some cases take for granted and in others aspires to."

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Paris-based Reporters Without Borders and the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China have all complained this year about China's treatment of the media.

Around 20,000 media accredited by the IOC to cover the Games will descend on Beijing for the 2008 Olympics with thousands more coming to report from China without access to the venues.

BOCOG have repeatedly said that all media would be able to operate in the same way they had at previous Games and where Chinese norms differed from international norms, international norms would prevail.

CLOSE LINK

BOCOG chief Liu Qi said last month that China would issue and implement regulations for foreign media reporting on the 2008 Olympics next year.

Jowell said the main reason for her trip was to forge a close link between the Games organizing committees of the two cities.

"I am here in order to find out what we can learn," she said.

"We want to look at what we can offer from previous experience and to make sure the great strengths and obvious expertise which has been applied by the Beijing Games is transferred to the London Games."

Jowell said two things that had already struck here were that Beijing was so clearly on track to have the venues constructed well in time for the Games and the way the Olympic legacy was being spread all over the country.

A visit to an Olympic education model primary school in the Haidian district of Beijing had also provided inspiration.

"They're obviously just so proud of the huge honor that has been bestowed on their city," she said.

"This isn't a specialist sports college, this is a fairly ordinary school which has embraced the Olympic ideals of friendship and cooperation.

"That is one of the lessons I'll take home with me...I think this is a way of further building a legacy in children who are not that interested in sport."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/04/AR2006090400219.html