Dalai Lama's envoys due in Beijing for fence-mending

By Benjamin Kang Lim

BEIJING, Oct 30 (Reuters) - Envoys of the Dalai Lama fly to Beijing on Thursday for closed-door, fence-mending talks, two sources with knowledge of the meeting said, days after he expressed dismay at China's attitude about Tibet's future.

The talks, the eighth round since 2002 and the first after Beijing hosted the Olympics in August, come amid growing concern about the Dalai Lama's health and the diminishing possibility of a meaningful settlement.

The exiled Nobel Peace Prize laureate, revered by Buddhists in Tibet and elsewhere, has said he wants a high level of autonomy for Tibet, but not outright independence. China considers him a trouble-making separatist.

Lodi Gyari and Kelsang Gyaltsen, the Dalai Lama's envoys in Washington and Switzerland respectively, are expected to sit down for talks with the Communist Party's United Front Work Department, which deals with ethnic minorities and religious issues, the sources told Reuters requesting anonymity.

No other details were available. China's official Xinhua news agency said on Wednesday a new round of talks with the Dalai Lama's envoys would be arranged "in the near future".

The Dalai Lama was hospitalised with abdominal pain in August and underwent gallstone surgery this month in the northern Indian hill town of Dharamsala, the seat of his exiled government since 1959 when he fled his Himalayan homeland after a failed uprising.

China and the Dalai Lama's envoys have met twice to try to ease tension since riots broke out in Tibet in March and heaped international pressure on China to talk.

Pro-Tibet activists disrupted the international leg of the Olympic torch relay, and Chinese studying or living abroad staged counter-protests after Beijing blamed the Dalai Lama and his followers for instigating the violence -- a charge he denies.