China says Sarkozy to blame for Summit collapse

China said the postponement of an EU-China Summit in France scheduled for December 1 was the fault of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose country holds the rotating European Union presidency until the end of the year, because he defied its insistence he should not meet the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.China delayed the summit that had been planned in Lyon, France, because Chinese officials said the atmosphere for it was poor and it would not achieve its expected goals, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said, according to a report in the official Xinhua news agency. Qin said the Chinese government was dissatisfied with the plans by Sarkozy to meet with the Dalai Lama on December 6 in Poland.

Sarkozy and other European leaders plan to meet him when the Tibetan joins other Nobel Peace Prize laureates in Gdansk to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Solidarity trade union founder Lech Walesa winning the prize.The Dalai Lama has long called for greater autonomy for Tibet within China, insisting that he does not seek independence for the region. China, however, accuses him of being a separatist, a charge Qin repeated. “The Tibet issue is related to China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and it touches China’s interests at the core,” Qin said. “We firmly oppose the Dalai Lama’s separatist activities in foreign countries in any capacity and firmly oppose the contact between foreign leaders with him in any form.”

“The Tibet issue is related to China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and it touches China’s interests at the core,” Qin said. He said China did not bear any responsibility for the postponement of the summit, charging that it had told France repeatedly ahead of the summit “to properly handle” the Tibet issue but France did not respond to China’s efforts to maintain relations with France and the European Union. The spokesman added, however, that it remained committed to developing its relations with Europe. The French daily Le Parisien said the postponement came despite French assurances that the meeting with the Dalai Lama would be “an informal meeting and not a private one.”

CHINA’S WARNINGS
China has in the past clashed fiercely with EU member states over the question of the Dalai Lama, who is popular in Europe. Such clashes have become an increasingly sensitive issue in recent years as China has become the EU’s second most important trading partner after the United States and its single most important source of manufactured imports. The EU had “set ambitious objectives” for the summit and “regrets” the Chinese decision, an EU statement said. International Tibetan groups also criticised China’s refusal to attend the summit. Vincent Metten, EU Policy Director of the International Campaign for Tibet, said the decision is “counter-productive to its own interests and risks damaging European confidence in China as a responsible partner. Beijing cannot escape the reality that the EU, the United States and the United Nations all have serious concerns about the political and human rights situation in Tibet and respect the Dalai Lama’s leadership and his willingness to engage with China,” said Metten.

Matt Whitticase, of the Free Tibet Campaign, said China “highlighted its deep insecurity over its deteriorating human rights record in Tibet as well as its ongoing determination to avoid being held accountable for such abuses” with the delay of the talks. Chinese police detained thousands of Tibetans earlier this year following independence protests and riots in many Tibetan areas. Virtual martial law was imposed in some areas after proindependence demonstrations and unrest began in Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Regional capital, in early March. The Chinese government said 19 people were killed in rioting from March 14 in Lhasa but the Tibetan governmentin- exile said about 140 people were killed, most of them Tibetans shot by Chinese police. Protests erupted in dozens of other Tibetan areas of China, including several in Sichuan.

FIRING AT SARKOZY
China was also miffed earlier in the year when there were demonstrative protests against the passage of the Olympic flame through Paris on its way to Beijing, and Sarkozy at the time hinted he might not attend the opening ceremonies of the games, but backed down after his critics said he was more interested in preserving trade and possible nuclear contracts with China, and that he had sold out his country and his principles for money. That temporarily assuaged the Chinese, who are notoriously sensitive to being snubbed and f o r defiance against its demands. With China holding a USD one trillion reserve and the European Union and west in dire need of capital, China has been getting its own way as of late, and now has channeled its anger toward Sarkozy, whom critics said China had seen as a leader compliant with its wishes, although Sarkozy’s wife, Carla Bruni, met separately with the Dalai Lama earlier.

“The Chinese delegation wanted to come. But the French regional authorities found it inappropriate to hold the meeting,” an official with the France-China Committee, Wang Jiann-Yuh, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa). This year’s meeting was to have dealt with cooperation among middle-sized enterprises and the means to resolve the credit crisis, among other issues. Following the summit in Lyon, the Chinese businessmen were to visit companies in the region around the city. Sarkozy, as well as European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso and Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, had been scheduled to address the economic summit. “The relations between the EU and France with China are now become complicated,” Wang said.

But Sarkozy isn’t the only world leader to have incurred Chinese anger by meeting with the Dalai Lama. In September of last year, Beijing complained when German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader to Berlin, but the government took no concrete action. US President George W Bush also met with the Dalai Lama last year in Washington, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown held talks with him in London in May of this year, but Sarkozy is the symbolic head of the EU until January 1, when the Czech Republic takes the EU helm. The Dalai Lama is also scheduled to appear at the European Parliament on December 4, just two days before meeting Sarkozy in Poland. Sarkozy had avoided meeting with him last August in France, just before the Beijing Olympic Games, although the French leader still incurred a lot of criticism at home by going to the games, even as brutal repression of Tibetan pro-independence demonstrators continued, many of whom were jailed and have disappeared from view.

French Green Party co-leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who had urged a boycott of the Olympic Games, said the diplomatic row represented “the failure of the EU strategy of emphasising conciliation” with the Chinese. “The Europeans yielded to the Chinese for the Games. Now the Chinese want to push their advantage,” Cohn-Bendit said. “Sarkozy humiliated himself ... for nothing.” A member of the France-China Committee suggested that one reason the Chinese may have singled out Sarkozy - rather than punish Bush, Merkel, Brown - is that they consider France a second-rank economic partner, unlike the United States, Britain or Germany. Before the Olympics, Sarkozy talked tough with China, demanding its authorities meet with the Dalai Lama’s representatives or he would boycott the Olympics.

During his reign as the EU president though, and with his flamboyant style, Sarkozy has become a visible world leader and some analysts said China wanted to punish and humiliate him as a way of getting at the west at the same time. He has found himself in a hard place now though because he ran on a promise of running a “moral foreign policy,” and after that has praised authoritarian leaders and curried favour with Russia, an important energy and trading partner, even after that country roared into Georgia in August to repel Georgian forces in South Ossetia. Uncharacteristically, at least initially, Sarkozy had no response to the Chinese cancellation, leaving him for the first time since taking office with nothing to say, and neither did anybody else in the European Union hierarchy.