On the 80th birthday of the 14th Dalai Lama, who has been in exile since 1959, Tibet’s future looks more uncertain than ever. The Dalai Lama has seen his homeland — on the world’s largest and highest plateau — lose its independence to China. Once he dies, China is likely to install a puppet, potentially eroding the institution.
China appointed a pawn to the second-highest position in Tibetan Buddhism, the Panchen Lama, in 1995, after abducting the Tibetans’ six-year-old appointee, who had just been confirmed by the Dalai Lama. Twenty years later, the rightful Panchen Lama now ranks among the world’s longest-serving political prisoners. China also appointed the Tibetans’ third-highest religious figure, the Karmapa, but in 1999, at age 14, he fled to India.
This year marks another anniversary for Tibet: the 50th of the founding of what China calls the “Tibet Autonomous Region.” The name is misleading. Tibet is ruled by China and half of its territory has been incorporated into Chinese provinces.
With its conquest of Tibet in 1950 and 1951, China enlarged its landmass by more than one-third and fundamentally altered Asia’s geostrategic landscape. China became neighbors with India, Nepal and Bhutan and gained control over the region’s major river systems. Rivers that originate in Tibet are vital the world’s two most-populous countries, China and India, as well as the arc of nations stretching from Afghanistan to Vietnam.
For China, capturing the 437-year-old institution of the Dalai Lama appears to be the final step in securing its hold over Tibet. After all, since fleeing to India, the Dalai Lama — Tibet’s rightful political and spiritual leader, though he ceded his political role to a democratically elected government in exile in 2011 — has been the public face of resistance to Chinese control of Tibet. However, in recent years China has employed its growing influence — underpinned by the threat of diplomatic and economic pain — to compel a growing number of countries not to receive the Dalai Lama, reducing his international visibility.
The Chinese government, having issued a decree in 2007 that bans senior lamas from reincarnating without official permission, is essentially waiting for the Dalai Lama to die so that it can exercise its self-proclaimed exclusive authority to select his successor. China’s leaders seem not to be struck by the absurdity of an atheist government choosing a spiritual leader. It is as if former Italian leader Benito Mussolini had claimed that only he, not the College of Cardinals, could appoint the pope.
The aging Dalai Lama has publicly discussed a range of unorthodox possibilities for the future disposition of his soul — from being reincarnated as a woman to naming his successor while he is still alive. Moreover, he has suggested that the next Dalai Lama would be found in the “free world,” implying that he will be reincarnated as a Tibetan exile or in India’s Tawang District, where the sixth Dalai Lama was born in the 17th century.
Such declarations have motivated China to claim, since 2006, India’s entire Arunachal Pradesh as “South Tibet” and to press India, in the negotiations over a long-disputed Himalayan border, to relinquish at least the part of Tawang in that state. However, the declaration that has most infuriated China was made in December last year and suggested that he would be the last Dalai Lama.
China knows that there is no reason to expect that Tibet, whose people have largely scorned the Chinese-appointed Panchen Lama as a fraud, would accept its chosen Dalai Lama. If the Dalai Lama issued clear guidelines about his own reincarnation, Tibetans would be even less likely to accept China’s appointment. The question is why the Dalai Lama has hesitated to do so.
The biggest risk stemming from the Dalai Lama’s passing is violent resistance to Chinese repression in Tibet. As it stands, the Dalai Lama’s commitment to nonviolence and conciliation — exemplified in his “middle way” approach, which aims for Tibet to gain autonomy, but not independence — is helping to ensure that Tibetan resistance to Chinese rule remains peaceful and avoids overt separatism.
Indeed, over the past 60 years, Tibetans have pursued a model resistance movement, untainted by any links with terrorism. Even as China’s repression of Tibet’s religious, cultural and linguistic heritage becomes increasingly severe, Tibetans have not taken up arms. Instead, they have protested through self-immolation, which 140 Tibetans have carried out since 2009.
However, once the Dalai Lama is gone, this approach might not continue. Younger Tibetans already feel exasperated by China’s brutal methods — not to mention its sharp rebuff, including in a recent white paper, of the Dalai Lama’s overtures. Against this background, a Chinese-appointed “impostor” Dalai Lama could end up transforming a peaceful movement seeking autonomy into a violent underground struggle for independence.
Given that the rightful Dalai Lama would be a young child and incapable of providing strong leadership to the resistance movement, such an outcome would be all the more likely. China exploited just such a situation, when the Dalai Lama was just 15, to invade and occupy Tibet.
After the 13th Dalai Lama died in 1933, a leaderless Tibet was plagued by political intrigue, until the present Dalai Lama was formally recognized in 1950. The next power vacuum in the Tibetan hierarchy could seal the fate of the Dalai Lama lineage and propel Tibet toward a violent future, with consequences that extend far beyond the vast Tibetan plateau.
Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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