With the permission of the chair, I would like to take a little more time on this because this is one of the most important issues that concerns us in the Sino-Tibet conflict.
Since 2010, there has been no traction whatsoever from the Chinese side. They stopped dialogue. In hindsight we know for a fact the reason they originally wanted to resume or start a dialogue in 2002 was mainly so that Tibetans would not protest at the coming out party of China that was the 2008 Olympics. Therefore, the dialogue went on for some time, but there was no concrete result out of that. Since 2010, it has stopped.
Therefore, as you all know, I took over the responsibility of Sikyong on May 27 last year. There was the pandemic and I could not travel to other countries, except to Italy and Switzerland last November.
This time, before coming here, we had a series of round table meetings with the French in Europe to understand the current situation in Ukraine and post-Ukraine implications for the world and the new world order that might emerge to see how Europeans would look at China under those circumstances. It was quite educational for me.
Then I went on to have other meetings. This time I visited the United States on the invitation of Speaker Pelosi. We have had a series of meetings with Under Secretary Uzra Zeya, who was appointed by the Biden administration not even one year after into coming into office at the level of undersecretary. Under the Obama administration it was an undersecretary position, but it went down to assistant secretary during the Trump administration and now it has been elevated back to undersecretary. She will very soon be visiting Dharamshala, after my return there, and will meet with His Holiness and see how our administration works.
She also helped organize a round table meeting with ambassadors, where the Canadian deputy chief of mission was also present. The idea was to see how like-minded countries could come together on the resumption of dialogue. Then we also met with Kurt Campbell of the National Security Council, who is responsible for the Indo-Pacific. We had a series of meeting at the Congress, including a very long meeting with Speaker Pelosi and ranking members of both the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate foreign relations committee.
We feel that there should be a change in the narrative, because the Chinese propaganda and narrative are so strong that they make people believe Tibet has been part of China since time immemorial. China has the manpower and the resources to do that. People don't study Tibetan history.
I would like to note this book, Tibet Brief 20/20, written by Michael van Walt van Praag. His last assignment was as professor at Stanford. He's an expert on international law and the history of Tibet. Unfortunately, most of the sources of information for the western world regarding the history of Asia, particularly east Asia, come from Chinese sources.
What he did in this book over the last 10 years, working with about 70 experts from inner Asia, not just China but Japan, Russia, Mongolia, Uighur and central Asian countries, was to conclude that whether it's to do with the Mongolian order...and when says “Mongolian order”, our relations with China have been there from the seventh to ninth centuries. At that time, Tibet was a big empire, having conquered the Chinese capital, Xi'an, in those days up to Samarkand in Uzbekistan today. Tibet was a big empire. Then we had 400 years of disintegration. During those periods we had relations with the Mongols from 1220 onwards. Even the—