Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama said on Thursday that he is a Marxist, yet credits capitalism for bringing new freedoms to the communist country that exiled him — China.
“Still I am a Marxist,” the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader said in New York, where he arrived with an entourage of robed monks and a heavy security detail to give a series of paid public lectures.
Marxism has “moral ethics, whereas capitalism is only how to make profits,” the Dalai Lama, 74, said. However, he credited China’s embrace of market economics for breaking communism’s grip over the world’s most populous country and forcing the ruling Communist Party to “represent all sorts of classes.” Capitalism “brought a lot of positive to China. Millions of people’s living standards improved,” he said.
The Dalai Lama, giving a series of lectures at the Radio City Music Hall in central Manhattan until Sunday, struck a strikingly optimistic note in general, saying that he believed the world is becoming a kinder, more unified place. Anti-war movements, huge international aid efforts after Haiti’s earthquake this year, and the election of Barack Obama as the first black President in a once deeply racist United States are “clear signs of human beings being more mature,” he said. —
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Lama to hold Twitter chat with Chinese Web users
Beijing : The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, will hold his first online chat with Chinese Web users via Twitter on Friday, despite efforts by Beijing to silence him on the mainland.
The 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner will hold an hour-long chat session to be broadcast on the Twitter account of Chinese writer Wang Lixiong, who has long been a critic of Beijing’s policies in Tibet.
Mr Wang said in a blog entry that the Dalai Lama will respond to about 250 questions submitted by more than 1,100 web users on the mainland. —AFP