By Eli Clifton and Charles Fromm

WASHINGTON – United States President Barack Obama met with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama on Thursday in the White House, raising objections from China and adding to existing US-China tensions over Taiwan arms sales, Internet censorship and hacking, tariffs on Chinese tires and calls for Beijing to readjust its currency.

The low-profile meeting, which noticeably took place in the White House Map Room instead of the Oval Office, was described by the Dalai Lama as having included discussions on democracy, freedom and human rights.

“The president stated 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,” said a statement released by the White House.
In a concession to Beijing, the White House postponed the meeting from last year so as not to hurt relations before Obama’s November trip to China, but state-run media outlets in China and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs have expressed displeasure.

“We urge the US to fully recognize the high sensitivity of Tibet-related issues, strictly abide by its commitment of recognizing Tibet as part of China and opposing ‘Tibet independence’, cancel immediately the wrong decision of arranging a meeting between President Obama and Dalai, not to provide Dalai any arena or convenience to engage in anti-China splitist activities, not to undermine the stability of Tibet and interfere in China’s internal affairs so as to protect China-US relations from being further undermined,” said a statement posted on the Chinese Foreign Ministry website on February 10.

While the Chinese have expressed opposition, the meeting in the Map Room was nowhere near as high-profile – and diplomatically problematic – as the 2007 decision by US president George W Bush’s to present the Dalai Lama with the Congressional Medal of Honor.

The Chinese responded by pressuring foreign governments not to host visits from the Dalai Lama, which led to anti-Beijing protests in ethnically Tibetan parts of China and a violent crackdown on protesters by authorities in Tibet. China went on to list Tibet as one of its “core interests”, a warning to the US and other countries not to tamper in issues related to Tibetan sovereignty.

“Generally, and despite attempts at nuance in timing and location of such meetings by White Houses past and present, Chinese public reactions rarely seem to moderate in response,” said Charles Freeman, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), in an interview on the CSIS website.

Tensions over the Dalai Lama’s visit are only the latest war of words to erupt between Washington and Beijing in recent months as the two countries deal with ongoing political, military and economic tensions.

In September, Obama authorized a 35% emergency tariff on Chinese tire imports in order to curb a “surge” of Chinese tires which, according to US trade unions, have cost 7,000 US factory workers their jobs. Beijing responded quickly to condemn the US tariffs and threatened to levy its own tariffs against US products.

In January, Google announced that e-mail accounts owned by diplomats, human-rights activists and journalists had been infiltrated by Chinese hackers, leading Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to deliver a speech outlining the administration’s position on intellectual property theft, cyber-security and Chinese Internet censorship.

China responded by accusing the US of “information imperialism” and denied charges that the government participated in the cyber-attacks.

Earlier this month, the Beijing-Washington relationship hit another rough patch when China threatened to impose sanctions on US companies participating in an upcoming $6.4 billion arms deal with Taiwan.

As the global economic crisis stressed both China and the US economies, China has sought to shift the investments from its balance of payments surplus away from US dollars and into equities and commodities while Obama has been under pressure to address the growing trade deficit with China.

With the Dalai Lama’s visit comes the latest round of harsh words between Washington and Beijing, leaving analysts to try and pick apart whether the growing political, economic and military tensions are part of a larger trend or the symptom of domestic pressures – most likely stemming from the global financial crisis – on both Chinese and US leadership.

China experts are warning that Chinese President Hu Jintao may retaliate for Thursday’s meeting by canceling his scheduled trip to Washington in April to attend the Nuclear Security Summit.

Indeed, the tensions between China and the US have growing global importance as cooperation between the two countries is crucial on a number of multilateral issues, including combating climate change, engineering a recovery from the global financial crisis and addressing the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran – although Tehran denies that it is pursuing military capabilities.

Managing this increasingly important and complicated relationship will require changes from both Beijing and Washington in how they conduct diplomacy in the bilateral relationship.

“For Chinese leaders, that will mean drawing a fine line between rhetoric and reality, limiting protests to gestures for their domestic audience even as they work with the United States on a number of fronts,” wrote Douglas H Paal, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post.

“For its part, the United States must maintain its principled commitment to human rights but also demonstrate some restraint on issues China considers ‘core interests’,” he said.

(Inter Press Service)