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The Canadian Press Canadian reporter says Chinese news agency asked him to spy on the Dalai Lama Bourrie, 55, said he resigned in April after working for two years for Xinhua in Ottawa because its Ottawa bureau chief, Dacheng Zhang, wanted him to use his parliamentary press pass to gain access to the Dalai Lama's final news conference, and turn over all notes and materials without writing a story. Bourrie says the agency collected hours of video and other notes of the Dalai Lama's most recent trip to Ottawa on April 27 and 28, but it wasn't interested in publishing a story on the Tibetan spiritual leader. The Chinese government considers the Dalai Lama to be its enemy. When Bourrie asked if this would lead to a story, he said he was told by Zhang that Xinhua does not report on Tibetan separatists. "We were there under false pretences, pretending to be journalists but acting as government agents," Bourrie concluded in his article. "That day I felt that we were spies. It was time to draw the line. I put down my pen and notepad, listened to the Dalai Lama, shook his hand when he left, went home, and sent Xinhua an email telling them I quit." "The core issue is how much access we're willing to give to people who are both journalists and agents of the Chinese government in Ottawa," he said in an interview. "When the crunch came with the Dalai Lama, it was obvious they weren't working as reporters anymore; that they were working as agents of the Chinese government." The Chinese Communist Party created Xinhua in the 1930s to handle revolutionary propaganda. It is run by the government in Beijing, and has grown into an international multimedia empire. Xinhua is also widely suspected by western intelligence agencies of having links to China's spy services. Bourrie said he mostly covered routine political subjects, but said he received and rebuffed some unusual requests from his bureau chief. Among them, he said: find the names and addresses of the people who protested the 2010 visit of Chinese Premier Hu Jintao to Ottawa. "I think there's been a betrayal of the trust that the House of Commons puts in the parliamentary press gallery to protect Parliament Hill from foreign agents."
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