The Dalai Lama on Feb. 1 made history by winning his first Grammy Award for his spoken word album Meditations. The Chinese government swiftly condemned the award, accusing the organizers of using the platform for “anti-China manipulation.” Shortly thereafter, a coordinated smear campaign emerged linking the Dalai Lama to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The rumor, originating from Russian-state controlled broadcaster RT, was quickly amplified by pro-China media outlets as part of a broader effort to undermine the Dalai Lama’s moral authority. Grok, an artificial intelligence tool that has become a popular fact-checking tool, has flagged the claims as false due to a lack of credible evidence.
In 2023, pro-China Internet activists, often referred to as the 50 Cent Army, circulated a selectively edited video from a public event in Dharamsala, India. The footage was framed to imply inappropriate conduct by the Dalai Lama, despite Tibetan representatives saying the clip was taken out of context. The cases illustrate a recurring strategy of reputational attack rather than substantive political engagement.
China’s targeting of the Dalai Lama highlights how modern authoritarian regimes confront symbolic threats that cannot be neutralized through conventional coercive tools.
While democratic legitimacy is renewed through elections and institutional accountability, authoritarian governments depend heavily on constructed narratives of history, economic performance, moral authority and ideology. When they are challenged, especially on the international stage, they expose a regime’s vulnerabilities.
The Dalai Lama presents Beijing with a particularly acute challenge. First, he wields no material power, neither economically nor militarily, but instead commands moral and symbolic authority, which is inherently resistant to coercion. Second, his global status is derived not only from his role as a spiritual leader, but also from his former position as the political leader of Tibet and a central figure in the Tibetan exile movement.
International recognition, especially cultural honors such as a Grammy Award, does more than contradict Chinese state propaganda; it validates an alternative source of authority that stands in opposition to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) narrative.
Symbolic events, regardless of their magnitude, carry disproportionate significance in authoritarian regimes, where legitimacy rests on narrative control rather than electoral consent. When a regime cannot co-opt or control international cultural institutions, it adapts by shifting from suppression to strategic distortion.
Spin-based dictatorship relies on information manipulation and moral delegitimization to impose reputational costs on perceived threats. Rather than merely censoring unfavorable news, regimes flood the information environment with alternative narratives, generating confusion and doubt. The objective is not necessarily to persuade audiences, but to dilute positive symbolism by surrounding it with noise.
It is not unique to the CCP. It has historical antecedents in Soviet-era campaigns against dissidents, which frequently relied on sexualized or moralized accusations to erode credibility.
The Chinese government’s use of sexual insinuation and reputational manipulation against the Dalai Lama reflects a broader authoritarian playbook. The attacks show that when authoritarian regimes confront noncoercive symbolic threats amplified through global recognition, they use disruption as a mechanism of resilience. Moral delegitimization becomes not just a reactive tactic, but a strategic one, central to maintaining narrative dominance in an increasingly globalized information space.
Dolma Tsering is a postdoctoral researcher in National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University’s Department of Humanities and Social Sciences.
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