Obama Ignores China’s Strong Opposition to Meeting with Dalai Lama

President Obama did not heed China’s strong opposition and multiple petitions, meeting with the 14th Dalai Lama in the White House on Feb. 18. It has now been only three months since his high profile visit to China, in which he and Chinese leaders produced the “U.S.-China Joint Statement.”

According to international public opinion, there are complicated domestic and international political goals behind Obama’s meeting with the Dalai Lama, and the Dalai Lama hopes that by meeting Obama he can use religion as a pretense to market a ploy to split up the motherland.

Playing the “Dalai Card,” unchanging policies under the banner of “Change”

In 1991, President George H.W. Bush first met the Dalai Lama, setting a precedent for American presidents to visit the spiritual leader. Before Obama ascended to office, previous American presidents of both parties met with the Dalai Lama a total of 11 times. Obama raised the banner of “change,” but by meeting with the Dalai Lama he has in fact ended “change.” Why?

A commentary in the Japanese monthly journal Choice said that facing an unfavorable political and economic situation, the Obama administration shifted the attention away from its problems in order to win this year’s mid-term elections, and starting with the end of last year, began leaning toward “hammering on China”; the Dalai Lama has been used as a playing card.

In the analysis of Ted Carpenter, a scholar at America’s renowned Cato Institute, Obama is facing domestic political pressures (including some from the Democratic Party), and those pressuring him support the Dalai Lama and, moreover, dislike China. “The meeting is a way to gain favor with those constituencies.”

Martin Jacques, a visiting researcher at the Asia Research Center at England’s London School of Economics and Political Science, believes that the balance of power between the United States and China has changed; America is on the decline and China is on the rise. Obama’s meeting with the Dalai Lama can be seen as a reflection of America’s worry over China’s step-by-step rise in power and influence.

“Obama meeting with a political figure such as the Dalai Lama was no doubt done in order to set up barriers to China’s development, while at the same time establishing America’s hegemonic position,” says Pierre Picquart, an expert about China and doctor in geopolitics at the University of Paris.

Rallying foreign support, the political giveaway under a religious guise

In the public’s opinion, the Dalai Lama’s strategy for many years has been to market his political stance to Western governments while borrowing a religious identity. Meeting with American presidents has been the cornerstone of his strategy.

Carpenter says that through meeting with Western politicians, the Dalai Lama apparently wants to manufacture international, especially American, pressure so that Tibet will win “greater-than-now political autonomy,” or total independence from China.

Picquart says people in the West are confused by surface appearances and mistake the Dalai Lama as a defender of “freedom” and “religion,” and Western leaders are easily swayed by public opinion and thus make the bad decision to meet with the Dalai Lama.

The demands that the Dalai Lama raises to Western governments, sometimes very explicitly

As early as the end of 1992, the Dalai Lama wrote a letter to then newly elected President Clinton, clearly demanding that he support “Tibetan independence.” Then in 2008, after the violent March 14 incident in Lhasa, the Dalai Lama frequently appealed to several countries, racking his brain to find opportunities to meet with Western governments.

Ingo Nentwig, an ethnologist who has conducted extensive research in China’s Tibet, believes that the Dalai Lama’s political stance is internationally questionable, and that more people have a more realistic understanding of the issue. To change this situation, the Dalai Lama has no choice but to step up his activities.

“This is just like making an advertisement for a fake product. Sales might increase for a time, but the consumers will realize that what they have bought is counterfeit and lose interest in the product,” he said.

Counter-pressure, a product of “Cold War” thinking

American presidential meetings with the Dalai Lama did not begin with Obama. It comes from Cold War thinking and is a “playing card” in the pursuit of unilateral strategic interests.

International analysts believe that if America does not change its way of thinking, it will continue to play these “cards” in the future.

“If it weren’t for the media exalting him as a ‘martyr’ or ‘sacrifice’ of Chinese policy, these people in the West would never welcome or celebrate him,” says Nentwig.

He feels that part of the reason is that political forces in the West still view China from a colonialist perspective. They are not willing to accept the reality that China is a sovereign nation not submissive to the West.

The structure of the world is currently experiencing deep and broad changes. Seeking cooperation, development and accordance with Chinese-American bilateral interests is also the desire of the two countries’ people. China and America published the “U.S.-China Joint Statement,” establishing basic principles for handling relations between the two countries in the 21st century. What America needs to do is to put these principles into practice while there is still time.