French President Nicolas Sarkozy arrived in Gdansk yesterday for a gathering of Nobel Peace Prize laureates during which he was to meet the Dalai Lama, a move that has China fuming.
As current holder of the EU’s six-month rotating presidency, the French leader’s decision to engage with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader has so far seen Beijing retaliate by scrapping a China-EU summit in France earlier this week.
Beijing also warned that multi-billion-dollar trade deals between China and France were in jeopardy should the meeting go ahead.
“We have not noticed any kind of start of a boycott of our products,” a French presidential official said yesterday, emphasizing that France and China needed each other during a period of economic crisis.
Sarkozy was set to become the only European head of state to meet the Dalai Lama while holding the EU’s rotating presidency.
Asked on Friday in the northern Polish city whether he thought the French president might cancel the meeting with him, as has happened twice in the past, the Dalai Lama said: “Wait until tomorrow. I don’t know.”
Commenting on whether EU-China relations and trade could suffer over his planned meeting with Sarkozy, the Dalai Lama said: “China also needs Europe.”
“The original initiative of some pressure, sometimes is not followed by action,” he said.
France is digging in its heels, saying the meeting will go ahead and calling for economic ties to be spared from retribution, especially during the financial crisis.
“We cannot have France’s conduct dictated to, even by our friends,” French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said.
Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk met with the Dalai Lama yesterday in Gdansk, where, as a past recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, he had been invited to ceremonies marking 25 years since Poland’s anti-communist Solidarity icon Lech Walesa received the honor.
The former union leader is regarded as a key figure in the peaceful collapse of communism in Poland in 1989. The Dalai Lama, now 73, was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize the same year.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso attended yesterday’s ceremonies in Gdansk.
The Dalai Lama, who lives in exile in India, has sought “meaningful autonomy” for Tibet since he fled his homeland following a failed uprising in 1959 against Chinese rule, nine years after Chinese troops invaded the region.
China argues that he is actually seeking full independence, something he on Friday called a “totally baseless” claim.
“When China becomes more democratic, with freedom of speech, with rule of law and particularly with freedom of the press ... once China becomes an open, modern society, then the Tibet issue, I think within a few days, can be solved,” the Dalai Lama said on Friday.
Addressing the European Parliament in Brussels on Thursday, he said China lacked the moral authority to be a true superpower.
The head of France’s Tibetan community, Wangpo Bashi, told radio France-Info yesterday, “The Dalai Lama will raise human rights issues and above all the very urgent situation of Tibet ... where the situation nearly resembles that of martial law,” during the afternoon meeting with Sarkozy.
The meeting is “a very strong signal” for Tibetans, he said.
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
‘SOMETHING SPECIAL’: Donald Trump vowed to reward his supporters, while President William Lai said he was confident the Taiwan-US partnership would continue Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the US early yesterday morning, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts. With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. As of press time last night, The Associated Press had Trump on 277 electoral college votes to 224 for US Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee, with Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Michigan and Nevada yet to finalize results. He had 71,289,216 votes nationwide, or 51 percent, while Harris had 66,360,324 (47.5 percent). “We’ve been through so
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