In a simple office overlooking the Himalayan foothills of India a young Tibetan man sits at a computer, trying to succeed where the Dalai Lama has failed for 50 years — by talking to the Chinese. Every day, Sonam and ten other Tibetans — all fluent in Mandarin — surf social networking sites in search of Chinese people to talk to about their homeland. It can be painstaking work.

“Hi, want to chat?” Sonam, 32, asks one man from Beijing. “You male or female?” comes the reply. “Male.” “Not interested.” Like this one, many of the millions of Chinese in chat rooms are searching for love. Most do not want to talk politics. Some become abusive when they realise they are talking to Tibetan exiles.

Sonam contacts about fifty or so people every day and says that half are willing to chat and five or six want to talk in depth. He now has 200 “old friends” to whom he sends information on the Dalai Lama to circumvent China’s “Great Firewall”, which blocks websites about the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. “We don’t say this is right or wrong, or that the Chinese Government should be overthrown,” Sonam told The Times. “We just give people an alternative source of information.”

The aim of the project is bold: to change attitudes towards Tibet among ordinary Chinese in the hope that they will gradually shape Beijing’s policies. Sonam and his colleagues can talk to only a tiny fraction of China’s 300 million netizens — who are notoriously nationalistic. Arguably it offers better prospects, and more immediate results, than the failed negotiations between China and the Dalai Lama, who fled to India 50 years ago yesterday.

The project is the brainchild of Thupten Samdup, a Tibetan based in Canada. He was born in Lhasa in 1951, and escaped soon after the Dalai Lama in 1959 and, after studying in India and the US, moved to Canada in 1980 and worked for a high-tech company.

He became the head of the Dalai Lama Foundation in Canada, and in 2004 led a campaign to get Canadian MPs to support the Tibetan movement. More than two thirds signed up but when that failed to influence Canadian policy he became frustrated, took a year out, and decided that he was lobbying the wrong people. “There’s huge support for the Tibet campaign internationally, but the people who really need to be educated are the Chinese — these are the only people who can deliver what we want,” he said.

He established his Online Outreach Office in 2006 and now employs 11 people at an annual cost of up to $60,000 (£42,775), most of which comes from private donations.

Four or five similar projects have been set up since then, and Mr Samdup hopes to expand his to involve Chinese-speaking Tibetans throughout the 200,000-strong diaspora. His staff do not want to be identified because they have relatives in Tibet, but they all escaped recently and some are former government officials. That means they know how to talk to Chinese people and can outfox the censors. Mostly they use instant messaging services, running up to 20 chats at a time. They change avatars frequently because the censors block ones that discuss politics. If they want to send sensitive material they move to e-mail, which is harder to monitor.

The real art, however, lies in the pitch. Sometimes Sonam pretends that he is a woman to lure a Chinese man into conversation but mostly he just taps into China’s online political subculture. “You have to start with personal stuff, then move on to social problems and political problems, then Tibet,” he said. “It’s no use just quoting the BBC or CNN. You have to analyse China’s problems and show how it is violating its own laws and constitution. The best way is to ask questions, rather than to lecture.”

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