A group of US lawmakers met with Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama in India on Wednesday, a move that could anger China.
The visit came as President Joe Biden appears ready to sign a bill pressuring Beijing to resolve tensions with Tibet and protect the region’s native Buddhist culture.
The bipartisan delegation of seven lawmakers, led by Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, and which also included former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, arrived Tuesday in Dharamshala, a Himalayan city in northern India. where the Dalai Lama, 88, has lived in exile since fleeing China in 1959 following a failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule.
“I still have hope that one day the Dalai Lama and his people will return to Tibet in peace,” McCaul said after the meeting, according to Reuters.
McCaul said on Tuesday that Biden would soon sign a bill approved by Congress last week that puts pressure on Beijing to resume talks with the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan leaders that have been frozen since 2010, and to address the concerns of the Tibetan people. on their cultural, religious and linguistic autonomy. .
“This bill says to the Chinese government: things have changed now, prepare for it,” quoted Pelosi, whose 2022 visit to the Beijing-claimed island of Taiwan led China to encircle the island with fiery military exercises. real after she left, as said Wednesday.
The lawmakers’ meeting with the Dalai Lama is likely to anger Beijing at a time when the US and China are trying to improve relations. Beijing sees the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner as an anti-China “separatist”, which he denies, and opposes any contact with him by foreign authorities.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that Tibet-related issues were an internal Chinese matter and that China would take “resolute measures” to defend its sovereignty, security and development interests.
“We call on the US side to fulfill its commitments to recognize Tibet as part of China and not support ‘Tibet independence’,” spokesman Lin Jian said at a regular press conference in Beijing. “The US should not sign the bill into law.”
The Dalai Lama is traveling to the United States this month for medical treatment on his knees, his office previously announced. It is unclear whether he will meet with any U.S. officials during the trip.
Until Donald Trump’s presidency, the Dalai Lama met with every sitting US president since George HW Bush. Biden, who criticized Trump during the 2020 campaign for not meeting with the Tibetan spiritual leader, has not met with the Dalai Lama since taking office in 2021.
The lawmakers’ meeting with the Dalai Lama “seeks to offset the Biden administration’s reluctance to talk openly about Tibet,” said Brahma Chellaney, professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research, a think tank in New Delhi.
“The US and India need to work together, including countering China’s misinformation about Tibet and thwarting its plan to install a puppet as the next Dalai Lama,” he told NBC News in an email.
Like the US, India recognizes Tibet as part of China, despite welcoming Tibetan exiles.
McCaul said on Wednesday that the US would not allow China to interfere in the process of naming a successor for the Dalai Lama, believed to be a reincarnation of the Buddha, after his death.
There is already a dispute over who is the legitimate Panchen Lama, the second most important figure in Tibetan Buddhism, after the Dalai Lama and the officially atheist Chinese government identified two different people as reincarnations in 1995.
Activists say the Dalai Lama’s choice, a 6-year-old child, was kidnapped by the Chinese government days after being identified and has been forcibly detained ever since.
China says Tibet has prospered and modernized under Communist Party rule, pointing to the construction of highways, high-speed railways and other infrastructure and the promotion of tourism.
Critics argue that this has come at the cost of the erasure of Tibetan culture, language and religion as Beijing “Sinicizes” the remote, mountainous region it annexed in the 1950s.
“Such infliction of suffering and oppression on the Tibetan people by Chinese Communist Party authorities is unparalleled and unprecedented,” Tenpa Tsering, chairman of the Tibetan government-in-exile, said last year.
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