Council On Foreign Relations
Interviewee:
Robert J. Barnett, Director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program, Columbia University
Interviewer:
Deborah Jerome, Deputy Editor
February 17, 2010

Robert Barnett President Barack Obama’s scheduled meeting with the Dalai Lama this week drew harsh criticism from China, as did news of a $6 billion U.S. arms sale to Taiwan. The meeting occurs at a time when China is both more confident on the global stage and more concerned about a restive Tibet and other domestic issues, says Tibet expert Robert Barnett of Columbia University. “Both sides will want to avoid any serious rupture,” says Barnett, but a better understanding of each other’s positions would help.

All American presidents since 1990 have met with the Dalai Lama, yet President Obama’s scheduled meeting Thursday has drawn a sharp warning from China that the visit will undermine U.S.-China relations. Is China more irritated about this visit than it has been previously?

There is certainly a higher level of angry rhetoric from Beijing. There was even a possible threat (People’sDaily) on February 3, when Zhu Weiqun, a party official at vice-ministerial level, said that a U.S. meeting with the Dalai Lama “would be both irrational and harmful, [and] if a country decides to do so, we will take necessary measures to help them realize this.”

But in fact, behind the scenes, Beijing was far more disturbed by the previous presidential meeting, President George W. Bush’s presentation of the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama in October 2007–because that was the first and only time a U.S. president and the Tibetan leader had met in public.

So for Chinese diplomats, the real objective for the last six months or so has been not to stop the meeting, which their experts knew was impossible, but to get it to be private. That’s been achieved, because the meeting will take place in a private room, the White House Map Room. But that’s an obscure issue of protocol that, as the White House knows, makes a lot of difference to Beijing officials but none to American or Tibetan perceptions of the meeting. For China, the symbolic details matter, but for Tibetans in Tibet, it’s only whether the two people meet that is meaningful.

But there are other factors behind the angry rhetoric. China changed its Tibet policy because of its shock at the public meeting with President Bush in 2007. It upgraded Tibet to a “core interest” and began much more aggressive efforts to stop foreign meetings with the Dalai Lama.    more …