Dalai Lama meeting irritates Beijing during upswing in US-China relations

PRESIDENT Barack Obama will make his first joint public appearance with the Dalai Lama on Thursday at the US National Prayer Breakfast on religious freedom, and may meet privately with him afterwards. At a time when US-China relations are in a relatively positive shape, Washington's latest overture to the Dalai Lama will anger Beijing given his profile as Tibet's most visible figure in its struggle for independence.

The Dalai Lama meeting also comes less than two weeks after Mr Obama's landmark visit to India. This yielded multiple commercial agreements, including on solar energy and nuclear power, a joint communique on Asia-Pacific affairs, including about the future of the South China Sea, and a discussion of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ambitions for a "quadrilateral security dialogue" between the United States, Japan, Australia and India.

The Obama-Modi meeting was closely scrutinised in Beijing. And predictably, it has been criticised in some Chinese quarters, including in Xinhua (the official state news agency) which dismissed the US-Indian dialogue as no more than a "superficial rapprochement ... more symbolic than pragmatic given their long-standing division".