BEIJING: China said it expressed grave concern to India about a visit by the Dalai Lama to a state in the country’s northeast at the heart of a long-running border dispute, saying it showed an anti-China bias.

Tibet’s spiritual leader is scheduled to visit a monastery in Arunachal Pradesh on Sunday on what he has said is a spiritual, and not political, trip. “We have expressed our grave concerns. We believe that this once again exposes the nature of the Dalai Lama as anti-China,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said.

“We firmly oppose the visits of the Dalai Lama to the eastern border regions ... this is a separatist action,” he said.

Ma said what he called the Dalai Lama’s attempts to damage relations between China and India will not succeed.

On a trip to Tokyo late last month, the Dalai Lama said the Chinese government reads too much political meaning into his frequent travels abroad. “The Chinese government politicises too much wherever I go. Where I go is not political,” he said. Despite strong criticism from China, the Buddhist leader, who lives in exile in India, recently visited Taiwan, which Beijing considers part of its territory.