Barack Obama cancels meeting with Dalai Lama 'to keep China happy'

Politics and nuance aside, do you have a general ethical position on this?

on pressuring other countries?

Strategic value being a guesstimate, of course?

I think that there is nothing at all wrong with pressuring other countries, it generates resentment though, and this needs to be weighted as part of the consequences.

And specifically, pressuring other countries about who they talk to is a basic part of the diplomatic playbook. Isolating people diplomatically is part and parcel of geopolitics.

My government, with the support of the ANC, pressured the South African government.

Do you see this as a moral equivalent?

Actually, I'm starting to see "the Dalai Lama issue" as a bit of a red herring. If China is actually successful in ostracizing him on the world political stage, on the basis of not being a "legitimate" representative of Tibetan Buddhists (who do, BTW, have legitimate human rights issues) , then China will have successfully silenced the major voice representing Tibetan Buddhists. (The question of whether he is "elected" or not is immaterial, in my opinion - do the Tibetans have any democratic right to elect anyone to represent their particular concerns under Chinese rule?)

I also think the Chinese "line" on Tibet (getting better & better all the time under their rule) would have a LOT more credibility if they allowed journalists into the country to report on what is actually happening there. Which they won't allow, despite repeated requests .
In the meantime, we are expected to simply take their word that everything's just fine in Tibet! If you read the internet blogs of exiled Tibetans & also Amnesty International updates on Tibet, things are definitely not quite as the Chinese authorities would have us believe.

A traveller from Toronto was walking on Beijing Road in Lhasa on Friday afternoon when he saw a crowd of Tibetans beating a young Han Chinese man and two women.

As he watched, stunned, the crowd with sticks and metal clubs beat the man, about 20, until he fell to the ground unconscious.

What I saw was calculated targeted violence against an ethnic group, or I should say two ethnic groups, primarily ethnic Han Chinese living in Lhasa, but also members of the Muslim Hui minority in Lhasa. And the Huis in Lhasa control much of the meat industry in the city. Those two groups were singled out by ethnic Tibetans. They marked those businesses that they knew to be Tibetan owned with white traditional scarves. Those businesses were left intact. Almost every single other across a wide swathe of the city, not only in the old Tibetan quarter, but also beyond it in areas dominated by the ethnic Han Chinese. Almost every other business was either burned, looted, destroyed, smashed into, the property therein hauled out into the streets, piled up, burned. It was an extraordinary outpouring of ethnic violence of a most unpleasant nature to watch, which surprised some Tibetans watching it. So they themselves were taken aback at the extent of what they saw. And it was not just targeted against property either. Of course many ethnic Han Chinese and Huis fled as soon as this broke out. But those who were caught in the early stages of it were themselves targeted. Stones thrown at them. At one point, I saw them throwing stones at a boy of maybe around 10 years old perhaps cycling along the street. I in fact walked out in front of them and said stop. It was a remarkable explosion of simmering ethnic grievances in the city.

Well the Chinese response to this was very interesting. Because you would expect at the first sings of any unrest in Lhasa, which is a city on a knife-edge at the best of times. That the response would be immediate and decisive. That they would cordon off whatever section of the city involved, that they would grab the people involved in the unrest. In fact what we saw, and I was watching it at the earliest stages, was complete inaction on the part of the authorities. It seemed as if they were paralyzed by indecision over how to handle this. The rioting rapidly spread from Beijing Road, this main central thoroughfare of Lhasa, into the narrow alleyways of the old Tibetan quarter. But I didn't see any attempt in those early hours by the authorities to intervene. And I suspect again the Olympics were a factor there. That they were very worried that if they did move in decisively at that early stage of the unrest that bloodshed would ensue in their efforts to control it. And what they did instead was let the rioting run its course and it didn't really finish as far as I saw until the middle of the day on the following day on the Saturday, March the 15th. So in effect what they did was sacrifice the livelihoods of many, many ethnic Han Chinese in the city for the sake of letting the rioters vent their anger. And then being able to move in gradually with troops with rifles that they occasionally let off with single shots, apparently warning shots, in order to scare everybody back into their homes and put an end to this.

In the early afternoon of March 14, the day the capital of China's Tibet Autonomous Region erupted in violence, a crowd of Tibetans broke into the clothing store owned by Mr. Peng's girlfriend's family, doused stacks of shirts and jackets with gasoline and set the piles on fire, says Mr. Peng. The details of his story couldn't be independently corroborated.

Mr. Peng's girlfriend, Liu Juan, and her parents, Liu Guobing and Wang Xinping, were hiding upstairs. As the fire spread, Mr. Liu and Ms. Wang jumped from a second-story window. Ms. Liu, who was 20 years old and the mother of their 9-month-old son, apparently was overcome by the smoke. Her body was found inside the burned-out shop the next day, says Mr. Peng, who wasn't in Lhasa at the time of the attack.

Mr. Peng spoke in a telephone interview Monday from Mr. Liu's bedside in the First People's Hospital of the Tibet Autonomous Region in Lhasa. Mr. Peng, 24 years old, says he related events as described to him by Mr. Liu. Mr. Liu, who is being treated for spinal injuries, was unable to speak on the phone.

Cases such as the Liu family's are fueling anger against Tibetans among the Han Chinese, the country's predominant ethnic group. Han are also voicing frustration with foreign media, which they feel are ignoring their suffering and instead focusing on Tibetans' grievances with the Chinese government.

I think that there is nothing at all wrong with pressuring other countries, it generates resentment though, and this needs to be weighted as part of the consequences.

And specifically, pressuring other countries about who they talk to is a basic part of the diplomatic playbook. Isolating people diplomatically is part and parcel of geopolitics.

Timor-Leste (Tetum: Timor Lorosae; officially the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste)

Nobody said those were China's reasons. They ostracize him because they don't want their territory separated and for the same reasons you want him more visible they want him less

But that doesn't mean that everything is "just fine", Tibetans want independence and they aren't going to get it and this causes conflict with the Han Chinese that are being settled in Tibet by China to change the "facts on the ground". The Dalai Lama calls it "cultural genocide" and there is certainly a lot of truth to their complaints about minority oppression (religious, educational, etc). The Tibetans hate the Han Chinese in the region and the Han Chinese hate the Tibetans, there is undeniable ethnic conflict and human rights abuses on both sides. The pro-Tibetan crowd doesn't like to own up to it, but the "protesters" shot are often rioters who murdered police or Han Chinese civilians.

And before you say that this is just the Chinese account of it, no it is not, this is corroborated by several westerners who were present at the time. The Tibetans were attacking and murdering Han Chinese for hours before the Chinese government started firing on the "protesters".

Here is a Canadian traveler's first hand account of the attacks on Han Chinese:

'I can't just let this guy die on the ground'

The government has quashed the expression of any dissenting opinions on the causes of the protests, which spread quickly across western China. The research paper was quietly posted last month on Chinese Web sites, and an English translation was released this week by the International Campaign for Tibet, an advocacy group based in Washington.

The authors of the report are members of a Chinese group called Gongmeng, or Open Constitution Initiative, which seeks to promote legal reform in China. Lawyers in the group also tried to file lawsuits on behalf of families whose babies suffered in the tainted milk scandal last year, and two members have defended Tibetans in court this year.

The authors of the report concluded that Chinese government policies had promoted a form of economic modernization in Tibet that left many Tibetans feeling increasingly disenfranchised over the decades. The researchers found that Tibetans had enormous difficulty finding work in their homeland, while ethnic Han Chinese migrants seemed to have a monopoly on jobs in restaurants, hotels and stores. When violent rioting broke out in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, on March 14, 2008, after four days of peaceful protests, businesses owned by Chinese were looted and burned. At least 19 people were killed, most of them Han Chinese.

“An important perspective for interpreting the 3/14 incident is that it was reaction made under stress by a society and people to the various changes that have been taking place in their lives over the past few decades,” the report said. “The notion that appears impossible to understand is the implication that reasonable demands were being vented, and this is precisely what we need to understand and reflect upon.”

The report also said: “When the land you’re accustomed to living in, and the land of the culture you identify with, when the lifestyle and religiosity is suddenly changed into a ‘modern city’ that you no longer recognize; when you can no longer find work in your own land, and feel the unfairness of lack of opportunity, and when you realize that your core value systems are under attack, then the Tibetan people’s panic and sense of crisis is not difficult to understand.”

The Dalai Lama said in an interview last week that migration by ethnic Han Chinese to the Tibetan plateau was one of the main threats to the future of Tibet, and he contended that the government in Beijing should allow a regional autonomous authority run by Tibetans to limit future migration as well as make policy on education, language and use of natural resources.

“Whether intentionally or unintentionally, some kind of cultural genocide is taking place,” he said.

Chinese leaders have long said that the Dalai Lama ruled over a feudal system that kept a majority of Tibetans enslaved. They argue that when the Chinese Communist Party dissolved the old Tibetan government in March 1959, about a million Tibetan serfs were set free.

The report also cast blame on the governing structure in Tibetan regions, saying that there had been problems adapting Tibetan culture and society to the “ruling state’s systems.” It also criticized the central government for putting into power incompetent Tibetan local officials who, the researchers said, play up the threat of separatist movements to acquire more power and money from Beijing.

The report quoted Phuntsok Wangyal, one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party in Tibet, as saying, “They are unable to admit their mistakes and instead put all of their effort into shifting accountability onto ‘hostile foreign forces.’ ”

Xu Zhiyong, a member of Gongmeng, said in a telephone interview that the report had been submitted to the government, but that there had been no response.

"Tremendous progress has taken place in Tibet's social and economic aspects since its democratic reform and the human rights situation there is the best in history," spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in a statement.

Ma's remarks came after the Dalai Lama on Tuesday received a US Congress award in honor of the late US human rights activist Tom Lantos.

"The Chinese people know well about Dalai, a primary chief of the feudal serfdom in old Tibet, who is still running programs to divide the homeland and sabotage social stability and unity among nations in Tibet," Ma said.

Sure, it's a reality of political life, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there's nothing at all wrong with pressuring other countries, or that such pressure shouldn't be questioned. Or opposed, even, when the pressure appears to be unreasonable. Particularly when the likely intention is to stifle legitimate debate or comment about the actions of the country applying the pressure.

For years Australia appeased Indonesia, out of fear of the consequences & also because it was believed to be in our interests to have a good working relationship with our more powerful neighbour. However, while successive Australian governments & diplomats kowtowed to Indonesian pressure, Australian people certainly didn't, & eventually East Timor gained it's independence in a democratic election & Australia was a major part of the UN peace-keeping force in there. Sure, our relationship with Indonesia suffered as a result (though it appears to be much-improved now), but was it worth it? I'd argue that most of us believe it was & that we should have taken a more principled "official" position in the first place!)