By Tenzin Monlam
DHARAMSHALA, November 7: Seen as retaliation against Slovakian President Andrej Kiska’s meeting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama last month, China on Saturday cancelled a top-level meeting with Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico.
According to Slovak government, Chinese Premier Premier Li Keqiang, who attended the Fifth Summit of China and Central and Eastern European Countries (CEE) in Riga, Latvia met with 16 of his counterparts of the central and eastern Europe to talk on trade.
Li had been scheduled to hold a bilateral meeting with Fico. However, After the cancellation the Slovak government was quoted by the local SITA news wire saying, “The Chinese side cancelled the bilateral meeting with Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, scheduled ahead of the summit.”
The PM as appeasement told reporters that he has invited the Chinese leader to visit Slovakia. “I regret that instead of adding energy to further projects with China, we must repair the damage that has been inflicted,” Fico said.
However, Chinese official mouthpiece Xinhua claims that the two leaders met and talked over ‘joint efforts to promote bilateral cooperation and relations’.
China has highly criticized President Andrej Kiska’s informal meeting with the exiled Tibetan leader on October 16.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said that President Kiska is ‘clinging obstinately to a wrong course’ by meeting the Tibetan leader and called the meeting a ‘wrong act’.
“The Chinese side is firmly opposed to Dalai’s undertaking of anti-China separatist activities in any country in any capacity. We are also against officials from any country engaging with him in any form,” Hua said a day after the meeting.
