The Dalai Lama and US-China Relations

As those who have been paying attention to the news know, US President Barack Obama recently met with the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people. While Obama should be commended for going through with the meeting in the face of the usual vociferous Chinese protests, it is regrettable that like previous presidents he kept the meeting low-key. While viewed from a purely pragmatic point of view (and despite efforts by the lunatic fringe on the right to portray him as a wild-eyed leftist, Obama is clearly a pragmatist), this approach might seem best, in the long run making such efforts to accommodate the Chinese simply encourages them to continue not only oppressing the Tibetans but also to try to dictate to the rest of the world what their relations to the Tibetans will be.

As I explained in a previous article, Tibet is essentially a colonial territory of China, subjected to the same kind of old-fashioned imperialist exploitation that many parts of the world were subjected to by the Europeans in the past. Since the Chinese consider themselves to have been victims of imperialism in the past, most of them refuse to recognize that they are also imperialists, but an objective examination of the history and current status of places such as Tibet and East Turkestan can only lead to that conclusion. Therefore, for the Chinese to claim that meetings between the Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of the Tibetan nation, and foreign leaders constitutes interference in their internal affairs, is about equivalent to the British loudly denouncing any foreign leader who met Mahatma Gandhi in the days before India became independent (I don't know if how the British actually reacted to any such meetings, if any ever took place, but I imagine few would now consider such objections reasonable). In fact, the Dalai Lama is even more clearly deserving of the right to meet foreign leaders as an equal. Not only is his position as a religious leader of followers of Tibetan Buddhism roughly analogous to that of the Pope as the leader of the Catholic Church, but in his youth he was the political leader of Tibet when it was still an independent country, and remains the head of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Even if we accepted that the affairs of a colonial territory could be considered the "internal affairs" of the imperial occupying power, human rights considerations would still demand that foreign leaders meet the Dalai Lama regardless of Chinese objections. To make another analogy, imagine that in the days of apartheid in South Africa, Nelson Mandela had been in exile outside of South Africa rather than a prisoner inside it. Would Western leaders have refused to meet with him or even made special efforts to keep any meetings low-key just because the government of South Africa objected? Considering the strong opposition to apartheid in the West, it seems unlikely. While the ways in which the Chinese are oppressing the Tibetans and their culture are different from the way the white rulers of South Africa oppressed the blacks, the oppression is just as bad, and the place that the Dalai Lama holds in the hearts of Tibetans is similar to that Nelson Mandela held among black South Africans (not to mention the formal positions that the Dalai Lama holds, something which Mandela did not have before the end of apartheid).

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the world's countries seem to be too afraid of China to openly defy it, at least not to the extent of treating a meeting between their leaders and the Dalai Lama just like they would a meeting with any foreign leader. While I recognize the desire of the US and other countries to get China's cooperation on many issues, I am of the opinion that respect for human rights, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, and self-respect on the part of democratic nations demand that China not be allowed to dictate how they treat a leader such as the Dalai Lama.