To Tibetan car dealer Purbu, the Dalai Lama always seems unhappy when Tibetans are really happy.

When knowing the recent claim of the monk that Tibetans are becoming more unhappy about the government, Purbu scorned "it is all imaginary and false."

"How can Tibetans be unhappy when the economy develops so fast with the support from the central government?" said Purbu, a car dealing company manager in Lhasa.

The deputy to the National People's Congress (NPC), the top legislature, made the remarks on the sidelines of the annual NPC session, referring to figures in a white paper on the situation in Tibet, which was released by the State Council Information Office last week.

Since 1994, the local GDP has grown at an annual rate of 12.8 percent on average, higher than the national average for the same period, partly thanks to 313 billion yuan (45.7 billion U.S. dollars) offered by the central government and other parts of the country, the white paper said.

Tibet also saw its GDP soar from 174 million yuan in 1959 to 39.591 billion yuan last year.

To Purbu, what is more important behind the figures is the truth he witnesses every day that every Tibetan shares the fruits of the robust economic growth, a dream their ancestors could hardly imagine in the times of the Dalai Lama, when more than 90 percent of the Tibetan population were slaves or serfs.

"Genocide" from thin air

NPC deputy Norde, an expert from Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Golog of Qinghai Province who studies the Tibetan epic Gesar, believes it is the best time in history in the conservation of Tibetan culture.

Norde refuted the Dalai Lama's claim of a culture "genocide" in Tibetan areas as unfounded.

He said the central government has devoted large manpower and material resources and set up special institutions to save and study the Tibetan epic Gesar and the Mongolian epics Jangar and Kirgiz Manas, commonly hailed as China's three major ethnic heroic epics.

Some parts of the epic Gesar, with at least 500,000 lines, have been translated into Chinese, French, English and Japanese, according to Norde.