The Dalai Lama Wants to Dance, Obama Just Wants to Shuffle

Last week I mentioned my confusion regarding the way Obama is doing his job- he seems determined to mix in a little bit of bad news with every good item, and vice versa. His love of compromise apparently extends into compromising on issues literally no one wants to see compromised. The Dalai Lama visit seems to be a timely example.

Instead of meeting with the Dalai Lama during his visit to Washington, as the last three presidents have done, Obama has lightly snubbed him by choosing to meet in Dharamsala instead after a November trip to Beijing. The justification being given for this is that Obama doesn’t want to anger the Chinese before this November visit. If keeping the Communist Party of China happy is the name of the game, why is Obama meeting with the Dalai Lama at all? Chinese commentators and officials will bloviate just as furiously about the post-Beijing photo-op as they would have at one done today, and after that they'll get on with their lives. Indeed, the only thing we know with any certainty from history is that the Chinese government is evidently unwilling to forsake so much as one yuan of trade over a meeting with the mostly powerless Lama. Did China start a mutually-destructive trade Armageddon over his meeting with Bush, or Clinton, or the other Bush?

The Post article mentions that Gibbs provided a more detailed explanation: a happier China is, in their view, more likely to willingly discuss Tibetan issues with the US. Perhaps they’re right; but I don’t see one semi-spurned meeting overturning decades of curt, meaningless replies from Beijing on the subject. In the meantime Obama has opened himself to criticism from both the left and the right, with legitimately distressed human rights groups partnered with Republicans who know an opportunity for taking potshots when they see it.

While I was reading some of the reactions to the Dalai Lama’s visit this morning I found this report about the 2008 Tibetan Riots on the International Campaign for Tibet website. The report documents the initial events in Lhasa, and then details the myriad protests and fights that followed across the ethnically Tibetan regions of China. It was somewhat hard to tell where they were talking about because they use mostly Tibetan place names instead of the Chinese renditions I had seen on my trip through Amdo, the northeastern edge of Tibet. Things got weird when I saw this picture of monks, nomads, and townspeople gathering outside a religious school that was the center of one dispute between Tibetans and government forces in one small town during the riots:

I had to take a look through the pictures from my trip to make sure- I have a picture of myself taken in front of the same (now closed) school during my visit to Langmusi, a small village with two Tibetan monasteries that is easily the most remote place I’ve ever been:


Before I left Wuhan to travel through Amdo I had already seen that Labrang, a much larger monastery town I stayed in for a few days, had played a huge part in the 2008 protests. Parts of this video were shot just a few feet away from the door to my hostel, one of the relatively few which had reopened by the time I came by in December 2008. It’s actually pretty unnerving to think that even tiny Langmusi, a tranquil high-altitude place in the absolute middle of nowhere, was a witness to police brutality and midnight “disappearances.”

Maybe Obama has it right: maybe all China wants is a little respect and then they’ll begin honest negotiations with Tibetan nationalists. I have a hard time convincing myself that moving an appointment from October back to November will really placate a government that’s willing to abduct monks and spend thirty years torturing them, but maybe Hu “earned his fame by cracking down on Tibetans during his term as Party Chief of Tibet” Jintao (yes, it’s a pretty unwieldy nickname) will surprise us all. That would be… well, surprising.