The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, turns 90 on July 6. On July 2, he released a statement about the process of selecting his successor:
The process by which a future Dalai Lama is to be recognized has been clearly established in the 24 September 2011 statement which states that responsibility for doing so will rest exclusively with members of the Gaden Phodrang Trust, the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. They should consult the various heads of the Tibetan Buddhist traditions and the reliable oath-bound Dharma Protectors who are linked inseparably to the lineage of the Dalai Lamas. They should accordingly carry out the procedures of search and recognition in accordance with past tradition.
I hereby reiterate that the Gaden Phodrang Trust has sole authority to recognize the future reincarnation; no one else has any such authority to interfere in this matter.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its organs such as the Buddhist Association of China assert that the People’s Republic of China’s central government is the only authority that can name Tibetan religious leaders. The CCP will likely appoint its own competing successor. This is what happened after the 1989 death of the Panchen Lama, another high-ranking Tibetan Buddhist leader. After the Dalai Lama selected a successor in Tibet, Chinese officials abducted the child (who has not been seen since) and installed a different boy in his place—one widely viewed by Tibetans as a puppet.
How might the battle over succession play out over the coming months? If the Dalai Lama announces a successor, how will Beijing respond? How robust is the institutional framework for maintaining legitimacy without the Chinese government’s recognition, and what are its potential vulnerabilities? What are the ramifications for China’s relationship with India, which hosts the Tibetan government-in-exile? How might other countries respond to Beijing? —The Editors
Comments
Ian Johnson
Get ready for two Dalai Lamas. China’s playbook for the Dalai Lama’s succession will be quite straightforward: Beijing will ignore everything that the current Dalai Lama says and try a rerun of the Panchen Lama succession in 1995, which worked out quite well for the authorities.
For those who don’t remember, the old Panchen Lama died in 1989, and in 1995 both the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Dalai Lama camps anointed their own successors. Each one claimed tradition, with the Chinese Communist Party rolling out a series of largely invented customs about golden urns to say that it, as the successor to the Qing dynasty, was following what had gone on since time immemorial, or something to that effect.
Whatever the truth, the tactic ultimately worked in China’s favor: There are two Panchen Lamas, and the power of that position has been fragmented.
Fast forward to now: If Beijing can do the same thing, that’s a big win for the Party’s ethnic policy. Some Tibetans will follow the Dalai Lama approved by the exiles because he essentially will have the imprimatur of the current Dalai Lama. But others won’t be so sure. China controls information and some will celebrate the Beijing-approved Dalai Lama.
More importantly, the new Dalai Lama won’t be appointed right away. Typically, a few years pass before the reincarnated Dalai Lama is found. Even then, the new Dalai Lama will be a kindergartener—not exactly someone mind-melding with Richard Gere and penning profound tracts on life in the 21st century.
The reality is it will be 20 years before the new Dalai Lama can weigh in on public debates. By then, it’s not clear what will be left of Tibetan culture anyway, especially with China racing forward with efforts to eradicate the language.
Isabel Hilton
The battle lines are drawn, with few surprises: His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama has firmly assigned the sole authority in the search and identification of his next incarnation to the Gaden Phodrang, his own office based in Dharamshala in northern India. Although he has made no further specifications about geography or gender, in the past he has come down in favor of rebirth outside China.
The Chinese foreign ministry’s response was from a familiar script: The final authority on all matters to do with reincarnation lies exclusively with China’s central government. In other words: The Dalai Lama has no right to lay down the conditions of his next rebirth. And not only has the Dalai Lama no right not to be reborn, according to Beijing, he has no say in where and how he will return. I sometimes imagine that I hear hollow laughter ringing out from the grave of one Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery, in London, a short walk away from where I am writing this.
Successive Dalai Lamas have been the highest temporal authority in Tibet since the 17th century, over which time the search for a new incarnation has always had political overtones: In one notorious case, the 5th Dalai Lama’s secretary concealed his master’s death for more than 15 years to finish building the Potala Palace. This deception meant that the child the secretary had identified was also concealed until his adolescence, by which time he had a taste for secular pleasures and never took his final vows.
Today, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) claims to have inherited the position of China’s Manchu emperors in their relations with Tibet. As followers of Tibetan Buddhism, the Manchu treated the Dalai Lama as a revered religious teacher. The CCP government is officially atheist, which renders its claims to spiritual authority over Tibetan Buddhism unconvincing, not least to the followers of that religion. The power of religion rests in the beliefs of its practitioners. Beijing can and will enforce its selection procedures, as it did with the Panchen Lama, but it cannot give that candidate spiritual credibility or authenticity in the eyes of believers. Religious practices mandated by politics become a colorful but empty performance.
In Tibet, in the 66 years since the Dalai Lama fled into exile in India, monasteries have been attacked, destroyed, rebuilt, and come under increasingly heavy political surveillance and control. The 14th Dalai Lama’s image is prohibited, but his presence remains in the minds and thoughts of Tibetans. Over the same decades, Tibetans have conserved and practiced their religion and culture in exile, in India.
For that community, its religion, and its culture, much will depend on how other governments react to the inevitable controversy over the identification of the Dalai Lama’s next incarnation. China will exert maximum political, diplomatic, and economic pressure to force other governments to acknowledge its right to dictate the choice. What the reaction will be from the United States, which has legislated on the right of Tibetans to exercise their choice without interference, or from the government of India, which has given shelter and protection to more than 100,000 Tibetan refugees, remains to be seen.
Tashi Rabgey
With the Dalai Lama's recent public announcement of his intentions for succession—and Beijing’s immediate rebuke—the lines are now drawn: Two rival 15th Dalai Lamas will emerge on the world stage, locked in a battle for succession that will cast a long shadow for generations to come. This looming struggle for succession is widely understood as a moment of truth for Tibetans in exile. What is less recognized is that this moment is also extraordinarily consequential for China.
Beijing has been bracing for this confrontation for decades—resorting to surreal measures such as decreeing the act of reincarnation itself as subject to government approval, and implementing massive operations such as the resident cadre system that has reportedly deployed nearly 300,000 personnel across rural Tibet over the past thirteen years—ensuring boots on the ground in the event of the Dalai Lama’s sudden passing. But the clearest signal of Beijing’s unease is the high-level overtures made in recent years to the Dalai Lama himself behind closed doors, probing the possibility of his return. After decades of denouncing him as a separatist, this has been a striking reversal—Beijing, it turns out, was the one feeling the pressure of the clock winding down.
Now, with the certainty of a legitimate 15th Dalai Lama emerging outside of China’s reach, the struggle for succession is on and will surely bring Tibet back into the global spotlight. For Beijing, this unwanted scrutiny comes at an uncomfortable moment, just as China is positioning itself as a stable and rational alternative to the political messiness of liberal democracy in the new transactional world order. It projects itself as a global leader that delivers prosperity without the hypocrisy or dysfunction of democratic governance. But with the Dalai Lama succession crisis, the world will recall another dimension of China’s late authoritarianism—one in which Communist Party officials have no compunction about the hypocrisy of staging coercive religious rituals to manufacture state-sanctioned divine legitimacy.
For global observers, Beijing’s very need for a puppet Dalai Lama will serve as a constant reminder of China’s legitimacy deficit in Tibet. The persistence of this Beijing’s legitimacy gap in Tibet reveals an extraordinary political fact: Uunlike other regions where Chinese authority has normalized over time, Tibet remains a sealed-off state of exception requiring perpetual crisis management, specialized security regimes, and legal procedures more commonly associated with occupied territories than with integral parts of a unified state.
Yet this political reality of Tibet as an anomalous zone within the Chinese state has largely been obscured from international view. During China’s meteoric rise, Tibet became a strategic blind spot in global political analysis—a territory the size of Western Europe made invisible through Beijing’s sleight of hand that reframed the Tibet dispute as a matter of managing ethnic grievances, advancing minority policies and promoting cultural diversity. Through this reframing, China managed to conceal from view one of the world's most contentious unresolved territorial disputes from global consciousness. The international spectacle of the Dalai Lama’s succession crisis now promises to change that: the world will be confronted with what has been hiding in plain sight all along.
Robert Barnett
There is nothing new about Chinese Communists’ seeking a leading role in the selection of Tibetan lamas. In the 1940s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), like the Republicans before them, actively promoted the candidacy of a child in eastern Tibet as the 10th Panchen Lama, the second most prominent lama in Tibet. The Party at that time needed him to endorse their plan to take over Tibet, which he did (although he was only 11 years old at the time). In 1992, the Party reached an agreement with some exiled lamas, led by the late Akong Rinpoche, to support their recognition of a child within Tibet as the 17th Karmapa, often seen as the third most important lama in the Tibetan system. And in 1993, the CCP arranged for the current Dalai Lama’s elder brother to meet with the lama running the search within Tibet for the reincarnation of the 10th Panchen Lama.
This history of Party involvement in reincarnations is of considerable importance because, in all these cases, the Party’s policy was more or less the opposite of its approach today. Until late 1993, the Party sought to exercise control over leading religious personages through the act of confirmation: It only demanded the right to confirm a choice made by the relevant lamas. And it was willing to cooperate with lamas in exile, including the current Dalai Lama. Its perception of its role was thus not dissimilar to that of Manchu emperors in the Qing era. (There were major differences, of course: those emperors were not ethnically Chinese and were not atheists.)
Everything changed in August 1993. That month, Beijing abruptly cut off contact with the Dalai Lama. The following summer China’s leaders held a conference on Tibet policy (the “Third Forum”) which denounced the Dalai Lama ad hominem and declared him personally responsible for all political problems in Tibet. Any possibility of cooperation with him over the selection of reincarnations became unthinkable. It was this that led to the dispute in the summer of 1995 over the selection of the 11th Panchen Lama, and the disappearance of the child identified as that reincarnation by the Dalai Lama.
By November 1995, the Party issued a radically revised policy on reincarnations: Instead of asking only to confirm a choice made by lamas, it now required lamas to seek permission from the Party to search for a reincarnation, take part in a search, nominate a candidate, and carry out a selection. This was formalized in China’s 2007 regulations on reincarnation, which even said that only the Chinese authorities can decide if a lama is allowed to reincarnate, and that no one else is allowed to search for that lama.
Since that time, the no-cooperation approach has defined China’s policy over reincarnation and over religion, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama. There was a moment of hope for cooperation at one point: For a few months in 2013, just after Xi Jinping came to power, some Chinese scholars, aware of Xi’s father’s historic role in encouraging inter-ethnic cooperation in China, openly pushed back against the “Third Forum” approach. One exceptional scholar, Jin Wei, even published an article openly calling for talks with the Dalai Lama to resume. But that window closed in 2014, when Xi ruled decisively for the continuation of the hard-line, anti-cooperation approach.
This history suggests a deeply-buried but constantly reemerging debate, if not struggle, within the Party over whether or not to prioritize cooperation, termed the “United Front” in Party parlance, with religious and non-Chinese (non-Han) elites. Earlier phases of that debate have recently been chronicled in major studies by the historians Benno Weiner and Joseph Torigian . That same history helps explain why the Dalai Lama didn’t announce his policy on reincarnation years or decades earlier. He had no need to do so before late 1993, since until then the post-Mao CCP appeared willing to cooperate. In the decades that followed, the Tibetan leaders in exile seem to have waited in case moderate voices within the Party might eventually be able to shift it back to a cooperative approach. Very likely, Chinese of that opinion were sending messages to the Dalai Lama and his advisors assuring them that such a swing was possible, if only he would wait long enough.
The 90th birthday statement suggests that the Dalai Lama has given up the long wait for China to return to a collegial approach. Or does it? It says that there will be a 15th Dalai Lama and that the selection process will be the traditional one—but China says the same thing, so that is not a conflict. The conflict is over the Dalai Lama’s assertion that only his “labrang”—his office or immediate entourage, also known as the Ganden Phodrang— has the authority to search for and recognize his successor. But, despite the ornate spectacle and defiant rhetoric, the Dalai Lama did not repeat earlier assertions that he will be born only in the “free world.” Was this a signal that the Dalai Lama has not yet closed the door on China?
Almost nothing is known in public about the current state of talks between the exiles and Beijing, which resumed last July. But if China is as desperate as it seems to have a role in the selection of a 15th Dalai Lama, it has an easy option: It could simply return to the imperial stance it took until the early 1990s and ask merely to confirm the decision made by the relevant lamas. Very few would place a bet on the chances of China reverting to that position, and perhaps even fewer would trust a promise by China on such an issue. Nevertheless, we can guess that Chinese strategists and policy advisers, including long-quiescent proponents of imperial-style cooperation who might privately regret China’s decision to challenge the Dalai Lama on an issue where he enjoys far greater standing than Beijing, will be closely studying the Dalai Lama’s statement, and those of the many leading lamas supporting him.