Paris's citizen gesture draws wrath of China

Beijing condemns Dalai Lama honor

Chinese citizens protested outside a Carrefour supermarket, a French chain, in Hefei in central China on Saturday. (AP Photo/EyePress)

PARIS - China stepped into an internal French political spat yesterday, fiercely condemning a decision by Paris's Socialist city council to make the Dalai Lama an honorary citizen of Paris.

"China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and resolute opposition" to the honor, said the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu. "This act of crude interference in China's domestic affairs has seriously damaged the Sino-French relationship, and in particular the existing friendly ties between Paris and Beijing."

Not only that, Jiang said, but also, "to make the Dalai an 'honorary citizen of Paris' now can only be considered as another grave provocation of 1.3 billion Chinese people, including the people of Tibet, and it will further encourage the arrogance of the Dalai and Tibet independence elements."

The attention Beijing has now provided will no doubt please the newly reelected mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, who is running hard to become leader of the Socialist Party, which is in disarray after losing the presidency a year ago to Nicolas Sarkozy and the right.

The gesture allowed Delanoe to distinguish himself from Sarkozy, who has waffled about whether he will attend the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on Aug. 8 or boycott it in protest.

Sarkozy is under pressure from French businessmen who are deeply involved in the Chinese economy.

The large supermarket chain Carrefour has 112 stores and 2 million customers in China and has already been a target for large Chinese protests, both instigated and not, of the sometimes violent scenes that met the Olympic torch in the streets of Paris on April 7.

Bernard Arnault, chairman of the luxury goods company LVMH Moet Hennessy-Louis Vuitton, whose products are popular with moneyed Chinese, told the newspaper Le Figaro that he understood "why the Chinese population could be affected by the attacks against its country."

There have been several days of anti-France protests aimed at French companies, and an Internet-led boycott of French goods. The Chinese have disseminated photos of a Chinese woman athlete in a wheelchair, carrying the torch, accosted by a Parisian protester in a Tibetan hat.

Sarkozy has said that his attendance at the opening ceremony will depend on whether China reopens dialogue with the Dalai Lama, while Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, a human rights activist in his youth, has said that "foreign policy cannot be reduced to human rights."

But in another effort to dampen Chinese reaction, Sarkozy also wrote a letter of apology to Jin Jing, an athlete who uses a wheelchair, offering sympathy and saying that he condemned this "painful moment" in the "strongest possible terms."

The note was hand-delivered in Shanghai by the president of the French Senate, Christian Poncelet. Jin was reportedly unimpressed, and Sarkozy appeared to be kowtowing more to French commercial interests than to Beijing.