China146;s man in Tibet hardliner by even party standards

8220;He immediately went into attack mode,8221; Robbie Barnett, a Tibet expert at Columbia University, said of Zhang8217;s tenure.

8220;The campaign against the Dalai Lama was very aggressively stepped up and he had a zero tolerance policy for even very small incidents,8221; he said.

The spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama has lived in India since 1959, where he fled following a failed uprising against Chinese rule. Despite his exile status, he is still widely revered within Tibet.

Zhang, 57, was brought in from Xinjiang, another far-western, restive region, where he headed the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a paramilitary organisation aimed at asserting Beijing8217;s hold over the ethnic Uighur population, some of which has agitated for greater autonomy.

In Tibet, he presided over a 8220;patriotic education8221; campaign that extended from the monasteries to the general population, in which analysts say even government employees were forced to denounce the Dalai Lama in lengthy, hand-written essays.

China8217;s leadership regularly calls the Dalai Lama a traitor bent on splitting on the nation, but even in that context Zhang was seen as inflammatory.

8220;They are posing very extreme things, the ones who are currently running Tibet, and they are really going out on a limb by doing that,8221; said Robert Thurman, chairman of the Religion Department at Columbia University.

8220;You don8217;t hear that kind of thing from the very, very top,8221; he told a recent panel in Washington.

For now, as China seeks to reassert control over its Tibetan regions, chance of a renewed dialogue looks remote and the leadership seems united in its views of the Dalai Lama. In comments posted on the website of the China Tibet News, Zhang referred to the 8220;ugly faces of the Dalai clique8221;.

8220;China must form an all-encompassing network to strike hard against separatists,8221; he said.