“It’s important that the U.S. have a policy toward Tibet because the status quo isn’t working,” McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, told VOA Mandarin. “The Chinese government is just getting worse on a whole range of issues — jailing more and more Tibetans in Tibet and in the Tibetan region, so I think we need to re-assess. ... We need to start walking the walk.” China says the Himalayan region has been part of its realm for more than seven centuries and considers the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, to be a dangerous separatist. Many Tibetans insist they were essentially independent for most of that time and have protested what they regard as China’s heavy-handed rule since Chinese army units crossed the Yangtze River into eastern Tibet in 1950.
Congressional visit
Last month, McGovern traveled to Nepal and the north Indian hill town of Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama has been in exile from Tibet for almost 60 years. The eight-person House delegation led by Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, wanted to make China aware that they would not stand down in their campaign for human rights in Tibet. The delegation, including a lone Republican, Wisconsin’s Jim Sensenbrenner, met with the Dalai Lama. “His Holiness is not a separatist … but he wants to go home and so do his people,” McGovern said. “China is one of the great powers of the world, they’re doing great things on climate change,” he said, adding he’s always puzzled that China “is paranoid over this monk, and paranoid over his message.”
Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 7, 2014. McGovern is calling for a new U.S. policy on Tibet.
McGovern is the sponsor of the Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act of 2017. He introduced the bipartisan bill in the House in April with Congressman Randy Hultgren, a Republican from Illinois. Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida, and Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Wisconsin, introduced a companion bill in the Senate.
Travel in US
McGovern described his bill as saying “we will treat you like you treat us” in that it calls for restricting where Chinese can visit in the United States in the same way China restricts United States officials, journalists and other citizens in Tibetan areas of the People’s Republic of China. “If China wants its citizens and officials to travel freely in the U.S., Americans must be able to travel freely in China, including Tibet,” McGovern echoes on his website. He also wants the U.S. to “publicly call on the Chinese government to restart the direct dialog that used to exist between the Chinese government and the Tibetan people. That needs to be restarted.”
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