Dalai Lama brushes off Chinese anger over US award

The Dalai Lama today brushed aside China’s furious reaction to his receiving a prestigious award from US President George Bush, saying he rejected Tibetan independence and was eager to meet leaders in Beijing.

Speaking a day after he received Congress’s highest civilian honour in an elaborate public ceremony, the exiled spiritual head of Tibet’s Buddhists repeated his stance that Tibet should have “genuine autonomy,” not independence.

He told an audience gathered at a Washington hotel that Tibet, a poor, landlocked place with a small population, would enjoy more prosperity within China than outside. But he said autonomy means that Tibetans, not Chinese, must be allowed to make important religious, cultural and economic decisions.

The government in Beijing reacted angrily to the ceremony held on Wednesday in the Capitol building’s ornate Rotunda.

“The move of the US is a blatant interference with China’s internal affairs which has severely hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and gravely undermined the relations between China and the US,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said today.

At the event, the Dalai Lama, his saffron robes standing out in a sea of dark business suits, beamed as he and Mr Bush sat together and listened as the US’s most powerful lawmakers praised a man China demonises as a Tibetan separatist working to destroy Chinese sovereignty.

Dignitaries applauded beneath the Rotunda’s sweeping dome as Mr Bush handed the Dalai Lama the prestigious Congressional Gold Medal. It was hailed as the first public appearance of a US president and the Dalai Lama.

Mr Bush praised the Dalai Lama as a “universal symbol of peace and tolerance, a shepherd of the faithful and a keeper of the flame for his people”. He urged China’s leaders to hold face-to-face talks on Tibet’s future with the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

The Dalai Lama called for reconciliation with the Chinese government that has kept him in exile for nearly half a century.

But he spoke with alarm of the rising number of Chinese moving to Tibet, saying “there is a real danger that the Tibetans will be reduced to an insignificant minority in their own homeland”.

The 72-year-old monk has been extravagantly feted this week. Besides a White House meeting with Mr Bush and the Congressional award, he planned public speeches, appearances with movie actor Richard Gere and a tour of a Washington homeless shelter.

Mr Bush has met the Dalai Lama privately several times before. But the public nature of this visit has enraged China, which is holding its important Communist Party congress this week.

Mr Bush said he did not think his attendance at the ceremony would be a major problem.

“I support religious freedom; he supports religious freedom... I want to honour this man,” he told reporters at the White House.

Mr Bush is eager to ease anger in China, a growing economic and military powerhouse that the US needs to manage nuclear stand-offs with Iran and North Korea. But he also wants to be seen as a champion of religious freedom and human rights.

The Dalai Lama is immensely popular in the Himalayan region, which China has ruled with a heavy hand since its communist-led forces invaded in 1951. He has lived with followers in exile in India since fleeing Chinese soldiers in Tibet in 1959.