Shanghai, Nov. 16 (ANI): Even before Barack Obama touched down in Shanghai, he got a taste of Chinese taunts on Tibet, asserting that the black President should respect Chinese opposition to the Dalai Lama whose ancestors were ’slave masters’.

“He is a black President, and he understands the slavery abolition movement and Lincoln’s major significance for that movement. Lincoln played an incomparable role in protecting the national unity and territorial integrity of the United States,” The Independent quoted Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang, as saying.

The implication was that, prior to their going into exile, the Dalai Lama and his fellow members of the Tibetan monastic hierarchy had been slave-masters.

Free Tibet Campaign has blasted the allegation.

“It is an insult for the un-elected and authoritarian Chinese government to suggest that an instinctive democrat such as Abraham Lincoln would have sided with China in seeking to deny the Tibetan people their fundamental right to determine their own future,” said Stephanie Brigden of Free Tibet campaign.

The President will try to avoid confrontation while he is in the country that is, from a strategic point of view, probably the most important stopping-point on his nine-day Asian tour.

His China stay becomes even more important because China is the largest foreign lender to the US and it is expected to become the world’s second largest economy next year. (ANI)