China's Tibet Obsession

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Rod Liddle

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Meetings with the President of the United States are a prize in diplomacy. President Obama has attracted criticism for offering them too freely. But the critics have till now been domestic, concerned that Mr Obama is throwing away leverage on autocratic states. China has suddenly reversed that pattern. Its leaders are warning Mr Obama against meeting a leader without a state: the Dalai Lama. China’s intervention is an unconscionable interference in US sovereign affairs. Its veiled threat of economic retaliation is self-defeating.

A meeting between Mr Obama and the Dalai Lama would show that, regardless of the shifting balance of world power, the US holds to its values. Liberty is not just a desirable Western value: it is the foundation of a civilised world order. Mr Obama would thereby keep alive the issue of China’s unadmitted historical atrocities, such as the brutal subjugation of the 1959 Tibetan uprising, which sent the Dalai Lama into his long exile. A meeting would signal that America, an indispensable nation for global security, will ask no one’s permission to whom to talk.

President Gerald Ford declined to meet Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1975, lest it inflame US-Soviet relations. He merely compounded a reputation for weakness. Mr Obama can do better.

He can acknowledge that China’s investments in dollar assets matter for America’s recovery. But they matter for China too. Any substantial disinvestment would weaken the dollar and reduce China’s investment returns. The issue is not finally about getting and spending. It is about Tibet, and America’s place alongside the too easily forgotten people on the roof of the world.

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