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Obama should meet the Dalai Lama. Someone needs to stand up to China

When Barack Obama hosts the Dalai Lama at the White House this week, he will be making a very public display of solidarity with a man that China considers to be a dangerous separatist. After a honeymoon period at the start of the Obama administration, Sino-American relations have deteriorated significantly. A series of recent disputes over trade, climate change negotiations at Copenhagen, whether to impose sanctions on Iran, a $6.4bn arms deal with Taiwan, and cyber-attacks directed at Google, have inflamed tensions between the two powers. Is it worth aggravating the situation further with a symbolic gesture of support for Tibetan independence?

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Simon Whitten
The Dalai Lama was ruler of Tibet by virtue of a brutal and reactionary religious dictatorship which today is matched only by the likes of Saudi Arabia, minus the relative civil content. Since his removal from power in 1959 following a failed coup, Tibet has developed more economically and socially than nearly any other region of the world. Slavery and Serfdom were abolished and the vast estates belonging to the aristocracy and the monasteries were given to those who had been forced to work them. One needs only to look to Indian Tibet to get an impression of what the Dalai Lama's ambitions for the Autonomous Region would look like in practice: a land of intense religious discrimination in which members of rival sects of Buddhism (those which question the divinity of the Dalai Lama) are routinely persecuted and in which the development of key social markers is poor even by Indian standards. The recent history of Tibet has been one of western meddling in China. In the aftermath of