BEIJING — The Chinese government let loose Sunday with an official protest and a torrent of angry editorials denouncing French President Nicolas Sarkozy for a meeting over the weekend with the Dalai Lama.
Beijing is always prickly about world leaders meeting with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, but the outpouring against France was exceptional. It comes during a year in which France has emerged as China's favorite whipping boy. Anti-French sentiments have been running high since April when pro-Tibetan protesters tried to wrestle away the Olympic torch during the relay through Paris.
China had warned Sarkozy for weeks against meeting with the Dalai Lama and withdrew from a planned summit with the European Union in anticipation. Sarkozy, who this year also holds the rotating EU presidency, met with the Tibetan for 30 minutes Saturday at a conference of Nobel laureates in Gdansk, Poland.
In Beijing, the French envoy, Herve Ladsous, was summoned to a Sunday evening meeting at the Chinese Foreign Ministry for what presumably was a severe tongue-lashing.
"This grossly interfered in China's internal affairs," Deputy Foreign Minister He Yafei told the ambassador, according to the state-run New China News Agency. He also said the meeting "gravely hurt the feelings of the Chinese people."
The Foreign Ministry made no explicit threats about retaliatory measures it might take. But the New China News Agency quoted what it said were "netizens" who were calling for a boycott of French products.
"We should start boycotting French commodities and never travel to France," the official news agency quoted someone writing on an Internet forum. Other bloggers on the Chinese site Sina.com denounced Sarkozy as "greedy and evil" and "an immature [politician] who thinks from his buttocks." President Bush has met three times with the Dalai Lama, who advocates more freedoms for Tibetans within Chinese sovereignty; those meeting with him this year have included British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. All the meetings drew criticism from China, which views any recognition of the Dalai Lama as tantamount to support for a free Tibet. But the campaign against Sarkozy has been more vigorous.
Jean-Vincent Brisset, a Chinese specialist at France's Institute for International and Strategic Relations, suggests that the French brought it on themselves by revealing that they were vulnerable to pressure.
