ON JULY 2, THE FOURTEENTH DALAI LAMA announced that, like his predecessors, he will be reincarnated. The statement, timed to coincide with his birthday—the exiled spiritual leader turned 90 on July 6—came from Dharamsala, India, where he has lived since fleeing Tibet in 1959.
The Dalai Lama’s announcement brought joy and relief for Tibetans. Previously, he had left open the possibility that the ancient line of Tibetan theocratic leaders could end with him.
Far from an arcane religious matter, the Dalai Lama’s decision confirms that after his death, the world will be confronted with a legitimate Tibetan spiritual leader chosen through traditional methods overseen by the Dalai Lama’s office—as well as an impostor chosen by the Chinese Communist Party, which has occupied Tibet since it invaded in 1950.
A strategic competition is underway. Beijing is devoting financial resources and diplomatic pressure in support of its quest to gain international deference to a “Dalai Lama” it will appoint and control. Washington has yet to give the matter, and Tibet more broadly, the strategic importance they deserve.
After the People’s Liberation Army invaded Tibet, the Dalai Lama tried to reach a modus vivendi with the Communists. In his new memoir, Voice for the Voiceless, published in many languages around the world in March, the Dalai Lama recounts how during his 1955 visit to Beijing, Mao mistook the 19-year-old Tibetan leader’s effort at accommodation for a lack of integrity. As the visit ended, the Chinese Communist leader misjudged the Tibetan leader and tried to co-opt him, then ended their last meeting with a comment the Dalai Lama recalls as “disconcerting”:
As the meeting came to a close, Mao told me, “Your attitude is good, you know. Religion is poison. It reduces the population because the monks and nuns must stay celibate and it neglects material progress.” I was shaken and attempted to hide my feelings. . . . It was then I knew despite all the hints of positive dialogue that he was the destroyer of Buddha Dharma.
Four years later, as Chinese repression intensified, the Dalai Lama, then 23, trekked to the border with India and left Tibet for the last time. Generously welcomed by India’s leaders and people, he and his government settled ultimately in the hilltop town of Dharamsala. From there, he has sustained Tibetans in exile, preserving their religion, language, and culture while becoming a global figure sought after for his teachings on compassion and ethics.
MUCH LESS APPRECIATED in policy circles is the transformation of Tibet’s ancient theocracy. In 2011, the Dalai Lama completed the democratic transition of the exile government, assigning his political, temporal powers to an elected parliament and prime minister. This radical break with thousands of years of tradition followed other democratic transitions at the end of the twentieth century in South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Indonesia that remade the U.S. approach to the Indo-Pacific region to one favoring democratic alliances and partnerships.
Yet unlike other American democratic allies, the Tibetan exile government remains isolated internationally, largely thanks to China’s intense diplomatic pressure. The Trump administration made matters worse by cutting aid to the exile government earlier this year. Although these cuts were restored in recent days, other steps marking a retreat from international leadership—massive cuts to foreign aid, gutting of international broadcasting, including Radio Free Asia and its Tibetan service, and disparagement of U.S. leadership on behalf of democracy and human rights—all leave a vacuum China is only too eager to fill.
The U.S. approach to Tibet has not been based on history or international law. Instead, it has fluctuated with Washington’s perceptions of its own strategic interests. The United States understood that Tibet was de facto independent after the 1912 collapse of the last Chinese imperial dynasty. But America’s WWII ally Chiang Kai-shek hoped to recover lost imperial territory, including Tibet. American officials did not wish to undermine him, even though they knew that he exerted no authority there.
Even after the Communist takeover and Chiang’s flight to Taiwan, the United States tacitly supported his claim, now made from Taipei. Later, however, after the Carter administration decided to abandon Taiwan, Vice President Mondale told Deng Xiaoping, “Our position, whenever asked, is that Tibet is part of China.” Henceforth, he promised, the Dalai Lama would be received as “a religious figure, not a political leader.” In effect, Washington transferred its deference over Tibet from Chiang’s cultish dictatorship that never exerted authority there to Beijing’s Communist regime that invaded and repressed Tibet. Ever since, the United States has tried to minimize conflict with Beijing over Tibet.
For its part, Beijing continues to elevate the importance it places on Tibet. The Chinese Communist Party’s Tibet agenda is part of its drive to recover imperial reach and grandeur. In 1995, it revived an imperial ritual to install its own Panchen Lama, the second-most prominent lama in the Dalai Lama’s Gelug sect. Chinese authorities detained the young boy the Dalai Lama identified as the authentic reincarnate Panchen Lama. He has not been heard from since.
The Chinese Communist Party also pursues its Tibet agenda beyond China’s borders, co-opting and cultivating political and religious figures and appropriating Buddhist sites. In international organizations like the United Nations, China uses political and economic leverage to demand deference to its ahistorical claims to Tibet as part of China since antiquity and to intimidate countries from supporting the Dalai Lama or the exile government.
WHAT ARE THE STAKES for the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama? Washington should anticipate intense Chinese pressure to accept its impostor, possibly even military force across China’s long border with India.
Beijing will rely on pressure and brinkmanship to ensure concessions. Washington should show it takes the reincarnation and the Dalai Lama’s democratic legacy as seriously as Beijing does. It needs to start now to deny the impostor legitimacy—upgrading ties with the Tibetan government in Dharamsala and encouraging American allies around the world to do the same. In preparation for the Dalai Lama’s eventual death and the Chinese effort to exploit it, Washington should restore funding and staffing at Radio Free Asia. Finally, the State Department should sponsor an independent review of U.S. Tibet policy that results in an updated assessment of America’s strategic interest in Tibet and the safeguarding of the Dalai Lama’s legacy.
A man of profound equanimity, the Dalai Lama likely did not intend his spare and simple announcement last week as a challenge to the United States and its allies. But it is.