Why Is China’s Atheist Regime Trying to Pick the Next Dalai Lama?

The Chinese Communist Party is preparing to hijack an ancient faith. Freedom-loving people can’t let it succeed.

In early September, dozens of high-ranking Tibetan Buddhist monks and religious scholars gathered in the Chinese city of Lanzhou to discuss reincarnation, a major tenet of their faith. Observers would be understandably perplexed by how the participants “emphasized the importance” of the approval of China’s communist regime “in the recognition of reincarnated Tibetan religious leaders.”

The mystery has a simple, sinister answer: The meeting was organized by the Chinese Communist Party itself, through the Buddhist Association of China, a part of its United Front Work Department, which controls all religious expression in China.

Shamefully, the atheist CCP is attempting to reach into the afterlife to seize control of religious leaders that have escaped its grasp on earth.   

The CCP’s paranoia and brutality falls heavily on people of faith in China, and Tibetan Buddhists are among the most abused. The CCP’s efforts to wipe out Tibetans’ identity and establish complete control over their lives are thought to constitute crimes against humanity, and Tibet was a proving ground for techniques of repression used in the CCP’s genocide against the Uyghurs.  

The CCP is intensely hostile toward the 14^th Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhism’s highest spiritual leader, who escaped to India following the CCP’s annexation of Tibet in the 1950s. Since then, the Dalai Lama has been an active proponent of greater autonomy for Tibetans, founding the Central Tibetan Administration, Tibet’s government-in-exile based in northern India.

For the CCP, Tibetans’ veneration of the Dalai Lama constitutes a threat to its control over Tibet, which has seen periods of unrest incited by CCP repression. The future of the dalai lama as an institution is therefore linked to the future of Tibet itself.

Next year, the Dalai Lama turns 90 and is expected to announce plans for his reincarnation and succession. He has remarked that he may reincarnate outside of China, leaving the next dalai lama outside Chinese government control. He has also considered the possibility of choosing a successor while still alive. That would represent a break with the more common Buddhist tradition, whereby after the death of the dalai lama, a council of senior religious figures identifies a young boy as his successor and reincarnation.

The Dalai Lama has also suggested he may reincarnate as a woman, or even forgo reincarnation altogether.

For the CCP, the Dalai Lama’s succession is an opportunity to seize even tighter control of the Tibetan Buddhist faith and ensure its practitioners no longer have a spiritual leader to look to beyond China’s borders and outside the CCP’s reach. The CCP has been preparing to hijack the Dalai Lama’s succession for decades.

In 1995, the Dalai Lama identified a young boy in Tibet as the 11^th Panchen Lama, the second-ranking religious figure in Tibetan Buddhism. Almost immediately thereafter, the CCP forcibly disappeared the then-6-year-old child, who has not been seen since. The CCP then appointed its own Panchen Lama.

In 2007, the Chinese government released regulations stipulating that “[n]o group or individual may without authorization carry out any activities related to searching for or recognizing reincarnating living Buddha soul children.” In recent years, China has emphasized that the reincarnation of the dalai lama “must comply with Chinese laws and regulations.”

The United States recently enacted the Resolve Tibet Act, bipartisan legislation disputing the PRC’s misleading historical claims over Tibet and urging Beijing to agree to talks with the Dalai Lama’s representatives. In June, a bipartisan congressional delegation met with the Dalai Lama in northern India, warning that China is “trying to erase [Tibetans’] culture … . They are trying something that we cannot let them get away with.”

India also has a stake in preventing CCP subversion of the Dalai Lama’s succession. Aside from hosting Tibet’s government-in-exile, India’s Tawang district sits within what was once part of the historical Tibetan nation and was the birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama. It’s also the site of one of the largest Buddhist monasteries in the world. Beijing has opposed the Dalai Lama’s visits to Tawang, as China claims the district as part of a broader “South Tibet.”

 Although India’s deliberations surrounding the Dalai Lama’s succession have largely remained muted, a former Indian ambassador to China stated that India wouldn’t be “comfortable with China trying to control that process.”

With the Dalai Lama’s 90^th birthday next July, discussion over his succession will come to a head soon. The CCP has been preparing for decades to turn the next dalai lama into a tool to advance Beijing’s interests. The U.S. government is well aware of this plan. In its statement marking the Dalai Lama’s 89^th birthday, the State Department reiterated its support for Tibetans’ “ability to freely choose and venerate religious leaders without interference.”

But more than platitudes will be required, and the U.S. should be engaging now with representatives from the Dalai Lama’s office, the Tibetan government in exile, and the Indian government to better prepare for the succession.

The Chinese Communist Party cannot be allowed to quash the religious freedom of the Tibetan people and Buddhists worldwide.

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