Taiwan can learn from Tibet
Recently, the Dalai Lama, highlighting the plight of Tibet and its conflicts with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), said the party is planning to assassinate him by using Tibetan conscripts to poison him. China of course has dismissed these assertions. However, history and China’s longstanding desire to eradicate Tibetan culture and religion lend credence to the Dalai Lama’s concerns.
One historical precedent that seems to validate the Dalai Lama’s concern is when the 10th Panchen Lama died suddenly in 1989, months before China’s Tiananmen Square crackdown. Speculation at the time suggested Chinese President Hu Jin-tao (胡錦濤), then Party Secretary of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, had arranged for him to be poisoned.
Also, the success of China’s policy of cultural genocide in Tibet hinges on the death of the Dalai Lama and the CCP’s control of the process to select his successor. Since the Dalai Lama has been talking recently about making changes to the succession process, including choosing his successor before his death, it has become urgent for the CCP to hasten the Dalai Lama’s demise before he can name the next in line and foil the CCP’s master plan.
What has the CCP done to make sure the next Dalai Lama is pliable and loyal? This intrigue began with the untimely death of the 10th Panchen Lama, who had become concerned with the CCP’s cultural genocide in Tibet in 1989. Tibetan custom requires the Dalai Lama to select the next Panchen Lama by choosing a boy thought to be the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama. On May 14, 1995, the Dalai Lama announced that Gedhun Choekyi Nyima was the 11th Panchen Lama. The CCP disagreed and kidnapped the boy, who was six years old at the time. The party appointed Gyaltsen Norbu, a boy it had selected, as the Panchen Lama instead. Why go through so much trouble to choose the Panchen Lama? Poisoning the Panchen Lama, kidnapping the next real Panchen Lama and installing a CCP replacement was part of Beijing’s plan to complete its genocide against Tibetans because the primary function of the Panchen Lama is to select the next Dalai Lama, and, among other things, educate him. In other words, a CCP Panchen Lama will choose and indoctrinate a CCP Dalai Lama.
If that happens, Beijing’s plan will be complete, and Tibetan Buddhism will be gone forever, replaced with “Tibetan culture with Chinese characteristics,” which equates to no Tibetan culture.
Kidnapping a child to hijack a religion is not “freedom of religion.” Gendun Choekyi Nyima is the real Panchen Lama, and he was kidnapped in 1995. Why has the world tolerated this abominable act for so long? Where is Gendun Choekyi Nyima and why is he still missing? Did Beijing have him murdered too? The CCP’s 50-year campaign against Tibet is instructive for Taiwan. Gyaltsen Norbu is not the Panchen Lama, just as Taiwan is not an “area” of China.
Uighur culture is also being eradicated by the CCP and Uighurs are becoming a minority in their own ancestral home. We do not know how many of them have been murdered by the CCP. Rebiya Kadeer is not a terrorist, Falun Gong is not an evil cult and imprisoning journalists, activists and writers is not “free speech.” House arrest, imprisonment, torture, disappearance, or “re-education” of all who criticize the government is not “justice.”
Vigilance is required to ensure Taiwan’s government does not open the door to, or cooperate with, the CCP to achieve cultural genocide in Taiwan — the destruction of language, culture, religion, freedom and democracy, silently and irreparably. The CCP, if nothing else, is patient. It has waited for more than 50 years to wipe out Tibetan culture — Taiwan occupies a similarly strategic geographical area for China, and is a thorn in its side, a shining contrast of freedom to the CCP’s totalitarianism.
For those Taiwanese who do not appreciate or understand the importance of the Dalai Lama’s struggle against the CCP to preserve Tibetan existence, please pay attention now. The CCP will stop at almost nothing to achieve its long-term strategic goals, and it sees the 23 million Taiwanese as merely an annoying obstacle to its pursuit of dominance in the South and East China Seas, the Western Pacific and beyond. When the Dalai Lama speaks, pay attention and beware.
Lee Long-hwa
New York
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