JOHANNESBURG  South Africa has barred the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, from attending a peace conference here this week that is supposed to promote the 2010 World Cup and the potential of sport to unite people across races and nations.

The government said Monday that the Dalai Lama’s presence at the conference would have distracted the world’s attention from South Africa’s hosting of the World Cup and drawn it instead into the fraught relations between the Dalai Lama and China, one of the country’s most important trading partners. Thabo Masebe, a government spokesman, said the Tibetan leader’s presence “would not be in South Africa’s best interests.”

Three of South Africa’s Nobel laureates had invited the Dalai Lama to attend, and the government’s move to deny him entry drew sharp condemnations on Monday both here and abroad.

Critics of the decision, including Desmond Tutu, the retired Anglican archbishop of Cape Town who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, said South Africa had caved in to China, which has aggressively sought to extend its influence across Africa in recent years. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China said at a news conference this month that foreign countries should stay away from any involvement in the Tibet issue.