US lawmaker hits out at China’s ‘silly Tibet obsession’
WASHINGTON: A senior US lawmaker, who was in Dharamshala earlier this month with a congressional delegation to meet the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has lashed out against Chinese criticism of the visit and called it “negative and narrow-minded … (and) silly”.
The eight members of the House of Representatives, led by minority leader Nancy Pelosi, held public engagements with the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan community over two days, drawing criticism from Beijing.
“That’s the negative and narrow-minded attitude that the Chinese government has taken,” Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives’s powerful Foreign Affairs Committee, told the HT, in the sharpest response yet of Beijing from a member of the delegation.
“If they have nothing to hide, then they shouldn’t mind us going. We can’t let the Chinese through political pressure or economic pressure make us forget about the plight of the Tibetan people, or make us forget about human rights and religious freedom issues,” he added.
Engel’s remarks against China were significant given Beijing’s obsessive insecurities about the Dalai Lama. “Chinese government is a strong government. Their military is strong. I don’t think that the Dalai Lama, aged 82 (he is actually 81), represents any sign of threat to them,” Engel said.
A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson had said that the visit “to meet the Dalai Lama sent a very wrong signal to the world about Tibet independence and goes against the United States’ promises on Tibet. China firmly opposes this and has lodged solemn representations with the US.”