The Wall Street Journal has an interview of former Czech president and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Vaclav Havel. In it Havel speaks about Obama’s handling of China and the Dalai Lama and the elemental mistakes he is making in his policy towards Tibet and appeasement of China. After comparing Obama’s early dealings with China to French prime minister (and Munich architect) Edouard Daladier, he talks about his own efforts to outreach to the Dalai Lama and China’s response.

Politics . . . means, every day making some compromises, and to choose between one evil and another evil, and to decide which is bigger and which is smaller. But sometimes, some of these compromises could be very dangerous because it could be the beginning of the road of making a lot of other compromises, which are results of the first one, and there are very dangerous compromises. And it’s necessary, I think, to have the feeling which compromise is possible to do and which, could be, maybe, after ten years, could be somehow very dangerous.

I will illustrate this with my own experience. Two days after I was elected president, I invited the Dalai Lama to visit. I was the first head of the state who invited him in this way, directly. And everybody was saying that it was a terribly dangerous act and issued their disapproving statements and expressions. But it was a ritual matter. Later, the Chinese deputy prime minister and the foreign minister came for a visit and brought me a pile of books about the Dalai Lama and some governmental documents about what good care they have taken of Tibet, and so on. They were propagandist, fabricated books, but he felt the need to explain something to me.

I had a press conference with this minister of foreign affairs. And he said, “It was wonderful, meeting, because we were speaking openly. Mr. Havel gave me his opinion, and I explained the opinion of our government. I gave him this book, and he thanked me for it.”

This was unbelievable! Why did they feel the need to explain their point of view to the leader of such a small nation? Because they respect it when someone is standing his ground, when someone is not afraid of them. When someone soils his pants prematurely, then they do not respect you more for it. [Emphasis added]

Havel is right to criticize Obama’s tepid behavior when it comes to China and Tibet. He and Secretary of State Clinton have both tacked towards appeasing China with regard to Tibet and human rights, while extracting no concessions in return. Rather than standing their ground — the ground of America’s respect for human rights, freedom and democracy — Obama and Clinton have shown their fear of China and negotiated with themselves. Not shockingly, China has not budged an inch. Havel is a smart enough person and accomplished enough world leader that when he says Obama has “soil[ed] his pants prematurely,” listeners should pay attention. Havel knows what he is talking about and his critique should cause thoughtful reflection within the Obama White House and at Foggy Bottom.

Up at the Huffington Post, Josh Schrei has a provocative take on President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. Schrei writes:

Obama’s speech, in all its wandering glory, smacked of the somewhat bewildered attempts of a true American son to reconcile his deep seated idealism against an almost impossible pragmatism. Along the way, it inadvertently summarized the great tragedy of American foreign policy since World War II — the inability to rectify our lofty ideals with what it is we actually do in the world, which, often times, really isn’t that positive and certainly isn’t that clear.

With a new President — who obviously has great eloquence, a discerning mind, and admirable vision but has both inherited the gaffes of his predecessors and has an almost pathological addiction to the middle of the road — we are faced with our most muddled picture yet… in which we understand the value of the ideals we helped put forward post Second World War, but also know that we currently stand in violation of many of them; in which we eloquently stand for freedom and the individuals right to it and at the same time obtusely see war and occupation as one of our main instruments of forwarding that right; in which our leader stands on an anti-war platform while signing troop deployment orders; and, perhaps most paradoxically, in which we understand that the rise of societies who have no interest in our carefully crafted goals of freedom — like China — are a real threat to the very existence of those goals, yet choose to help them every chance we get.

This is a pretty apt summary of the internal tensions found in Obama’s speech. But Schrei makes the tension more explicit as he moves to close:

“Somewhere today, in this world, a young protester awaits the brutality of her government, but has the courage to march on.”

Generally, when men of character invoke such a scene, they do so because they actually intend to do something about it, not just because they are trying to please. And while President Obama has quoted this injustice, and made himself seem more sympathetic in doing so, and drawn out of us the emotions that make us feel that he is a person that really cares, the truth is that — as of yet — he is not doing a thing for this young protester.

Instead, his speechwriters capitalize on her suffering while simultaneously throwing accolades to her oppressors. (Again, see China)

At some point, this President will not be able to ride on the fumes of great — or in this case, not quite as great — speeches that play on the heartstrings of those of us who believe in justice, and will have to actively forge justice, if that is his road.

Now, as Josh points out, the tension is by no means limited to Obama. It has been a feature of every American president’s foreign policy since Truman. But coming from the lips of a young American president who has captured both our country’s and the world’s imagination to the point of being recognized for a Peace Prize in his first year in office, the tension grates harder than it might otherwise.

To put it a different way, Obama has to find ways to make sure that “change we can believe in” has less to do with the mechanical events of elections and more to do with actual realization of policy aspirations. It’s not enough to talk about the virtue of pro-democracy protesters in totalitarian regimes, especially when it comes (to pick one example) hand in hand with complete silence on China’s human rights abuses.  At some point, Obama has to stop being content with oration and start leading with the force of his actions.

Josh Schrei has written an open letter to President Obama following his trip to China. It’s powerful, honest and true. Here’s a passage:

As a lifelong Tibet supporter, I have endured 15 years of meetings with Senators, Representatives, and Chiefs of Staff and have been told roughly the same thing in every single meeting. We have to engage. We have to give them what they want. We can’t upset them.

Suppose for a minute that on the occasion of my first meeting I had a newborn son. And suppose that child had been raised solely according to the philosophy of those meetings. “We can’t upset him. We can’t offend him. His feelings get hurt when we ask him if he’s cleaned his room….”  What would I have now? A 15-year-old, overly-entitled, spoiled rotten, immature, selfish, brutal bully with the keys to the car. Beijing’s leaders deserve none of the leeway we have given them. None of it.

Today, I saw the statement you gave after the meeting you had with China’s Hu Jintao. To call it a statement would be to give you far too much credit.  Sir, they invoked your ethnic heritage and your love and study of one of the greatest men in modern history and used it to justify one of the greatest abominations of the modern era. Where is the outrage?

You are more than that tepid diplomacy. You are MORE than the man who stands idly by while lovers of truth and justice are slaughtered. You are meant to be their champion. And if not you, in this rapidly declining world, then who? Who???

There was a great deal of hoopla last month when President Obama broke with tradition and declined to meet with the Dalai Lama when he was in Washington, DC. While no American president has had a formal state visit with the Dalai Lama in the Oval Office, presidents of both parties have made it tradition to meet with the leader of the Tibetan government in exile every time he comes to DC. This pisses off the Chinese government to no end and the presumption was that if the Obama administration shirked the Dalai Lama, it would please the Chinese government and make them more likely to negotiate with the US on other key issues. In effect, Obama was voluntarily making concessions to the Chinese government with no concrete concession in return – only the presumption that doing so would yield results down the road.

Not surprisingly, this strategy failed.

On the currency:

Mr. Obama did not appear to move the Chinese on currency issues, either. China has come under heavy pressure, not only from the United States but also from Europe and several Asian countries, to revise its policy of keeping its currency, the renminbi, pegged at an artificially low value against the dollar to help promote its exports. Some economists say China must take that step to prevent the return of large trade and financial imbalances that may have contributed to the recent financial crisis.

Mr. Obama on Tuesday could only cite China’s “past statements” in support of shifting toward market-oriented exchange rates, implying that he had not extracted a fresh commitment from Beijing to move in that direction soon.

On Iran and nuclear sanctions:

The administration needs China’s support if tougher sanctions are to be approved by the United Nations Security Council. But during the joint appearance in Beijing on Tuesday, Mr. Hu made no mention of sanctions.

Rather, he said, it was “very important” to “appropriately resolve the Iranian nuclear regime through dialogue and negotiations.” And then, as if to drive home that point, Mr. Hu added, “During the talks, I underlined to President Obama that given our differences in national conditions, it is only normal that our two sides may disagree on some issues.”

On climate change:

Mr. Obama announced a setback on another top foreign policy priority, climate change, acknowledging that comprehensive agreement to fight global warming was no longer within reach this year.

Again, none of this is surprising, except perhaps to the administration. We’ve watched the Tibetan Government in Exile make concession after un-returned concession to the Chinese government for the last number of years. In all cases, China has taken these concessions and then continued to attack and smear the Dalai Lama, while making no concessions of their own. Now we see the Chinese government doing exactly the same thing to the US government’s non-negotiated concessions.

China is never going to compensate the US for political concessions we made when negotiating by ourselves, just as they will never do the same for the TGIE, just as the Republican Party will never recognize concessions Democrats make with themselves prior to sitting down at the negotiating table. Given that essentially no DC Democrats — the White House included — have learned how to negotiate from strength with the GOP, it’s not shocking that their efforts to appease China at the expense of Tibet have failed.

The Times Online:

China rounds up dissidents as President Obama touches down in Beijing

Chinese officials have rounded up dozens of Beijings’s tiny coterie of activists and petitioners in case any dissident tries to approach President Obama, who arrived in the city today.

The arrests continued to gather momentum even as Mr Obama told an unprecedented question-and-answer session with Shanghai students that freedom of information and expression were vital for a stronger, more creative society.

Among those detained was Qi Zhiyong, a dissident who lost a leg during the crackdown on the student-led protests in Tiananamen Square in 1989. He said that he had been held for trying to organise a human rights seminar on November 9 in a Beijing park. He and fellow organisers had planned for the seminar to last until the end of President Obama’s visit.

He had applied to police to stage a protest during Mr Obama’s visit “to press him to pay attention to human rights in China, people’s livelihoods and the relatives of jailed people, as he comes only to talk about climate change”.

Mr Qi said he was being held in the Beijing suburbs and had been charged with unlawful assembly and disturbing the social order.

As during the Olympics, the act of merely petitioning to lawfully to hold a protest was met by the Chinese government with arrest and imprisonment. And as is always the case under the Chinese Communist Party’s rule, there is no rule of law, only rule by law:

Also detained was the activist Zhao Lianhai, who attracted the attention of the authorities last year when he organised an online support group for parents of the thousands of children who fell sick after being fed tainted milk powder last year.

The activist group Human Rights in China said that Mr Zhao was handcuffed and taken from his home late on Friday night by police officers who searched his house and took away computers, a video recorder, a camera and an address book. When he refused to go with them, because the summons did not state a cause, the police filled in a summons for “provoking an incident”.

These are the actions of a government that deserves no support from President Obama.  It is tremendously disappointing that he  validates their hold on power by saying nothing or worse than nothing. He continued to support the “One China” doctrine and glossed over China’s ongoing illegal military occupation of Tibet as “differences”:

Mr Obama voiced public recognition of Tibet as a part of China – a remark that Beijing values. President Hu stood beside him impassive when he referred to the exiled Dalai Lama whom Beijing blames for unrest in Tibet and has branded a “jackal in monk’s robes”. Washington, Mr Obama said, supported the early resumption of talks between Beijing and the Dalai Lama “to resolve any concerns or differences the two sides may have”.

This is not leadership. It’s bland, ineffectual, and immoral passivism in the face of gross human rights abuses genocide and a brutal military crackdown.  Am I surprised? No, not terribly. But I am disappointed nonetheless.

I’m sure there’s  a lot of what follows that could be connected to cultural obtuseness and a simple lack of understanding that in America we don’t really talk or think the way the Chinese government is suggesting President Obama thinks. But then again, most of this is straight up racism. A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry has suggested that since President Obama is black, he should support what the Chinese government says was an abolition of slavery in Tibet.

A Chinese government spokesman said Barack Obama should be especially sympathetic to China’s opposition to the Dalai Lama and Tibetan independence, as a black president who lauded Abraham Lincoln for helping abolish slavery.

…

After Obama’s inauguration, the U.S. president said he would not have been able to reach that position without the efforts of Lincoln, said Qin.

“He is a black president, and he understands the slavery abolition movement and Lincoln’s major significance for that movement,” said Qin.

“Lincoln played an incomparable role in protecting the national unity and territorial integrity of the United States.”

Beijing calls the Dalai Lama a dangerous “splittist” encouraging Tibetan independence, a charge he denies. He says he is merely seeking true autonomy for Tibet, which last year erupted in riots and protests against the Chinese presence.

China’s stance was like Lincoln’s, said Qin.

“Thus on this issue we hope that President Obama, more than any other foreign leader, can better, more deeply grasp China’s stance on protecting national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” said Qin.

Wow.  Just wow.

There’s so much historical inaccuracy, abject racism, and ignorance in Qin’s statement to unpack, it’s hard to know where to start.

On the American Civil War: the union government had not previously conquered an independent confederacy prior to the South leaving the union. The US was always one united country, north and south, prior to the South’s attempt to leave the union and establish their own government. That effort lead to a brutal, bloody war and was only resolved through shattering violence. Today the North and South is strongly united and the North maintains no occupying military presence in the South.

Contrast this to Tibet and China. Tibet, a historical independent country with documented independence going back hundreds of years, was invaded by the Chinese army under Mao in 1949. It has been occupied illegally since then and remains a totally militarized territory where tourists, foreigners, and journalists are subject to massive restrictions of movement.

Or, to put it more succinctly, there is no similarity between Lincoln’s role to preserve the union during the Civil War and Hu Jintao’s current crackdown in Tibet to maintain China’s military occupation.

Also, just because Barack Obama is an African-American, it does not mean he will blindly embrace whatever position the Chinese government fantasizes Abraham Lincoln would hold with regard to Tibet and China.

The Chinese government has been putting immense pressure on President Obama to say Tibet is a part of China and cancel all meetings with the Dalai Lama. There’s certainly some evidence that their pressure has been working. But I have to imagine that even if the Obama administration is inclined to relax American support for the Dalai Lama and Tibet, this sort of racist, anti-historical insanity from the Chinese government will slow Obama’s movement to where China wants him to be. At least, one would hope that he doesn’t let crap like this influence his foreign policy strategy.