Beijing, Nov.14 China has equated the unrest prevailing in Tibet to the US Civil War of the 1860s.

In a special message for President Barack Obama, Beijing said he (Obama) is black, he admires Abraham Lincoln, so he, of all people, should sympathize with Beijing's effort to prevent Tibet from seceding and sliding back into what it was before its liberation by Chinese troops, a feudalistic, slaveholding society headed by the Dalai Lama.

"He is a black president, and he understands the slavery abolition movement and Lincoln's major significance for that movement," the New York Times quoted Qin Gang, a spokesman of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, as saying at a news conference.

"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," he added.

Some scholars and analysts see this as an expression of an aggressive expansionism that will only deepen as China moves toward superpower status. Others argue that China is driven more by the need to recover territory wrested from it during the decades it was known as the Sick Man of Asia, when pieces of it were humiliatingly annexed by European powers and Japan.

Obama can expect to get an earful from Chinese officials not only on the Dalai Lama, whom the president says he will meet after the China trip, but also on Taiwan, the self-governing island that China says is a rebel province. (ANI)