US PRESIDENT Barack Obama will receive the Dalai Lama in the Map Room of the White House today, despite Chinese warnings that the meeting could “seriously undermine the political foundation of Sino-US relations”.
Last October, Mr Obama was criticised for postponing the visit to placate China in the run-up to his trip to Beijing.
China accuses the Dalai Lama of being a dangerous separatist who advocates independence for Tibet. The Dalai Lama says he only wants more autonomy for his people.
For 20 years, every US president has met the Dalai Lama, so Beijing knew today’s meeting was inevitable. The choice of the Map Room was calibrated to show enough sympathy for the Dalai Lama to silence critics in the US, but not so much as to antagonise China.
Beijing feared a public meeting similar to the one held in October 2007, when former US president George W Bush presented the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama in the Capitol Rotunda.
“For Chinese diplomats, the real objective for the last six months or so has been not to stop the meeting, which their experts knew was impossible, but to get it to be private,” Robert Barnett, director of Tibetan studies at Columbia University, said yesterday on the website of the US Council on Foreign Relations.
“The meeting will take place in a private room . . . That’s an obscure issue of protocol that, as the White House knows, makes a lot of difference to Beijing officials but none to American or Tibetan perceptions of the meeting.”
Prof Barnett said China’s “fire-breathing” strategy had prevented the leaders of Australia, New Zealand and Germany, as well as Pope Benedict XVI, from meeting the Dalai Lama, and had forced Britain and France to backtrack on Tibetan autonomy.
The Dalai Lama is one of a host of issues dividing the US and China. Other disputes involve US arms sales to Taiwan, China’s censorship of Google, emissions, the undervalued renminbi, China’s reluctance to support sanctions against Iran, and trade disputes. But China’s possession of $755.4 billion (€554.9 billion) in US treasury bonds has given it the upper hand.