President Barack Obama met with the Dalai Lama of Tibet on Thursday to discuss human rights and religious freedom for the people of Tibet, shrugging off the official protests of China.
The carefully choreographed meeting lasted 70 minutes in the Map Room of the White House’s main residence. Mr. Obama didn’t see the spiritual leader of Tibet in the Oval Office, a move designed to signal that the U.S. doesn’t view him as a political leader of Tibet, which Washington officially views as Chinese territory.
The Dalai Lama, speaking to reporters after the meeting, took advantage of a moment before the cameras on the White House grounds to thank the U.S. president for the meeting and declare himself “very happy.”
“Since my childhood, I always admired America not as a military power, but mainly as a champion of democracy, freedom, human value, human creativity,” the Dalai Lama said, wearing the robes of a Tibetan monk and flip-flops in snowy, cold Washington.
Mr. Obama expressed what White House press secretary Robert Gibbs termed “his strong support for the preservation of Tibet’s unique religious, cultural and linguistic identity and the protection of human rights for Tibetans in the People’s Republic of China.”
The intentionally low-key meeting included Obama confidante and White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and the National Security Council’s China specialists, Jeffrey Bader and Evan Medeiros.
The Dalai Lama then met at the State Department with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Again, the press and cameras were kept away.
China had expressed repeated objections to the meeting, and Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in a statement later that it “grossly violated” norms governing international relations and ran counter to principles laid out in joint statements by the two countries and repeated commitments by the U.S. that it recognizes Tibet as part of China and gives no support to Tibet independence.
Later Friday, China’s vice foreign minister, Cui Tiankai, summoned the U.S. ambassador in Beijing, Jon Huntsman, and “lodged solemn representations” over Mr. Obama’s visit with the Dalai Lama, according to a dispatch filed by the state-run Xinhua news agency.
After a relative decline in the number of high-profile meetings by the Dalai Lama with world leaders, Thursday’s meeting between the U.S. president and the Tibetan spiritual leader could chill already frosty U.S.-China relations.
White House aides said they gave Beijing ample warning, before and during Mr. Obama’s visit to China in November, that the meeting would take place. Administration officials said Sino-U.S. relations were mature enough to handle the meeting, especially since every president since George H.W. Bush has entertained the Dalai Lama.
Beijing always has objected to meetings between foreign leaders and the Dalai Lama, who began visiting Washington in 1991. In late 2007, George W. Bush presented the Dalai Lama with the Congressional Gold Medal in the first public appearance of a U.S. president with the Tibetan spiritual leader.
Since then, and after riots swept through Tibetan areas of China in early 2008, China has stepped up its opposition to the Dalai Lama’s global outreach.
“China has had a huge run of success in this strategy of using the Dalai Lama as a sort of casus belli,” said Robert Barnett, director of the modern Tibetan studies center at Columbia University. The result has been a sharp reduction in the number of meetings between the Dalai Lama and foreign leaders: two last year, compared with an average of four a year during the previous four years.
Against this background, Mr. Barnett said Thursday’s meeting took on greater significance than past meetings.
Yang Xiyu, a researcher with the China Institute of International Studies, said the meeting would create another sore point in U.S.-China relations, already strained by contentious matters such as the $6.4 billion sale of arms by the U.S. to Taiwan, human-rights issues and increasing pressure on China to allow its currency to appreciate.
“The meeting between Obama and Dalai Lama represents one disaster after another, like adding frost to the snow,” said Mr. Yang, citing a Chinese idiom.
Beijing’s position is that Tibet is an inviolable part of China and has been for centuries, although many foreign historians say the region functioned largely independently until the Communist Party came to power.