WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – President Barack Obama hosted exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama at the White House yesterday, drawing an angry reaction from China and risking further damage to strained Sino-U.S. ties.
Raising issues that quickly stoked China’s ire, Obama used his first presidential meeting with the Dalai Lama to press Beijing, under international criticism for its Tibet policies, to preserve Tibetan identity and respect human rights there.
Obama sat down with the Dalai Lama — who is reviled by the Chinese government as a dangerous separatist but admired by many around the world as a man of peace — in the face of wider tensions over U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan, China’s currency practices and Internet censorship.
While defying Beijing’s demands to scrap the talks and showing a willingness to irritate an increasingly assertive China, the White House took pains to keep the encounter low-key, barring media coverage of the meeting. But it later posted a photo on its official website of the two men side by side in conversation.
Beijing clearly was not placated, saying it was “strongly dissatisfied” about the meeting and expected Washington to take steps to put bilateral relations back on a healthy course.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said the meeting between Obama and the Dalai Lama “violated the U.S. government’s repeated acceptance that Tibet is a part of China and it does not support Tibetan independence”.
Beijing did not threaten retaliation and its response was in line with past denunciations of U.S. dealings with the Dalai Lama. But the visit could complicate Obama’s efforts to secure China’s help on key issues such as imposing tougher sanctions on Iran and forging a new global accord on climate change.
Senior Chinese military officers recently had proposed their country possibly sell part of its huge stockpile of U.S. bonds to punish Washington for the a proposed $6.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan, which China considers a renegade province.
“The thought process is definitely there, and it’s worrying,” said T.J. Marta, president of Marta on the Markets, a financial research firm in Scotch Plains, New Jersey,
China did in fact reduce its holdings of U.S. Treasuries to $755.4 billion in November, seen by some analysts as a sign of protest at U.S. policies.
But with China ranked as the United States’s second-biggest creditor to the United States, White House economic adviser Larry Summers played down the significance of Beijing’s $34 billion paring-back of its portfolio. Adding to tensions, Obama vowed recently to address currency issues with Beijing and to “get much tougher” with China on trade. Washington complains that China keeps its currency undervalued, hurting the competitiveness of American goods.
