US refuses to cancel Obama's Dalai Lama meeting

The United States has escalated a mounting row on multiple fronts with China, refusing Beijing's demand to cancel President Barack Obama's meeting next week with the Dalai Lama. The deepening public spat over Tibet, a row over US arms sales to Taiwan, China's dispute with Google and trade and currency disagreements, come at a key diplomatic moment, as Obama seeks Chinese help to toughen sanctions on Iran.
The White House announced Thursday that Obama would hold his long-awaited meeting with the revered Dalai Lama at the White House next week, drawing an angry reaction from China and a demand for the invitation to be rescinded. But Obama's spokesman Robert Gibbs signalled the White House would defy China's warning that the encounter would damage already strained Sino-US relations.
"I do not know if their specific reaction was to cancel it," Gibbs said. "If that was their specific reaction, the meeting will take place as planned next Thursday." Obama avoided the Dalai Lama when he was in Washington in 2009, in an apparent bid to set relations with Beijing off on a good foot in the first year of a presidency which included several meetings with President Hu Jintao. But he warned Chinese leaders on an inaugural visit to Beijing in November that he intended to meet the Buddhist monk.
China's foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said earlier that Beijing firmly opposed "the Dalai Lama visiting the United States and US leaders having contact with him."
The Dalai Lama fled Tibet into exile in India in 1959, after a failed uprising against Chinese rule. He denies he wants independence for Tibet, insisting he is looking only for "meaningful autonomy." Obama's meeting with the Dalai Lama will take place in the White House Map Room and not, in an apparent effort to mollify China, in the Oval Office, where US presidents normally meet VIPs and visiting government chiefs. The Dalai Lama arrives in Washington on February 17. In addition to meeting with the president, he will receive the Democracy Service Medal from the National Endowment for Democracy at a February 19 ceremony at the Library of Congress.