By Tendar Tsering
DHARAMSHALA, August 18: Days after 29-year old Tibetan monk Tsewang Norbu set himself ablaze protesting China’s occupation of Tibet, the US Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Beijing on a five-day trip August 17.
Joe Biden is scheduled to visit Chengdu, a city in the same south-western Sichuan Province where the situation in Tawu is being described as tense following the self immolation. The vice president will be giving a speech on US-China relations at the Sichuan University.
The visit seen as a warming-up meeting after relations between the two countries ran cold following the Tibetan spiritual leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s meeting with the US President Barrack Obama in the White House last July.
On his first visit to China as vice president, Joe Biden met his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, President Hu Jintao, and Premier Wen Jiabao.
The official talks and gestures of US-China camaraderie in the halls of Zhongnanhai, the power centre of the People’s Republic of China in central Beijing suffered a huge embarrassment Thursday night on a nearby basketball court, where Chinese and American players traded kicks and punches in a “friendly” match.
The game between Washington’s Georgetown Hoyas and Chinese professional side the Bayi Military Rockets erupted into a brawl as the match had to be stopped.
Before the vice president’s tour of China, Daniel Russel, US National Security Senior Director for Asian affairs told reporters in Washington DC that “protection of human rights globally is a central part of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy in China, as elsewhere.”
“And there are issues that every senior official who meets with Chinese leaders is going to raise, like human rights,” Daniel said.
Chinese activists too are hopeful that the US vice president will bring up the issue of China’s deteriorating human rights record in his talks with the Chinese leaders.
He Depu, an eminent Chinese political dissident in China said, “I hope he can focus his attention on the human rights conditions in China, and on the conditions of human rights activists and religious rights activists in particular”.
The US vice president will head off to emerging partner Mongolia and longstanding ally Japan tomorrow.
