By Tenzin Dorjee, Board Advisor at UNPO Academy and Senior Researcher and Strategist at Tibet Action Institute and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Columbia University’s Political Science Department and Gyal Loo, a Tibet Specialist at Tibet Action Institute and the author of Social Structuration in Tibetan Society: Education, Society, and Spirituality
Introduction
In early July, thousands of Tibetans, Buddhists, and other well-wishers gathered in the northern Indian hill town of Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, to mark the 90th birthday of Tenzin Gyatso—better known as the 14th Dalai Lama. The de facto pope of Tibetan Buddhism announced that, when he passes away, Tibetan Buddhists will start the traditional process of finding and anointing a reincarnated successor, ensuring that the centuries-old institution of the Dalai Lama will continue. Just months earlier, in a new memoir, the Dalai Lama made clear that any search for a successor must take place in the “free world”—that is, outside China.
These landmark statements made Beijing bristle. The Chinese Communist Party opposes Tibetans choosing their own Dalai Lama and considers the matter an affront to the sovereignty of Beijing, which has ruled Tibet since 1950. Since 2011, the last time the Dalai Lama issued a major statement on the question of succession and reaffirmed his authority to determine whether he will be reincarnated, Beijing has repeatedly publicized its intentions to install a rival Dalai Lama when the current one dies. Before his July birthday announcement, Beijing’s interference had even prompted speculation that the Dalai Lama might consider terminating his lineage to prevent China from hijacking the institution and making it bow to the CCP’s will.
Devotees of the current Dalai Lama celebrated his recent decision. Chinese leaders, as expected, rejected the announcement and insisted that Beijing holds the power to choose and approve who will be Tibet’s next spiritual leader. The CCP assumes that the Dalai Lama’s passing will end the Tibetan resistance—or that “the Tibet issue,” as Chinese leaders often phrase it, will be forever resolved in Beijing’s favor. The government’s logic is simple. For more than six decades, the Dalai Lama—a charismatic and widely revered Nobel laureate—has unified the Tibetan exile community and boosted the Tibetan cause around the world. It is unlikely that future Tibetan leaders will be able to bring the same level of global credibility and internal cohesiveness.
But Beijing’s strategy ignores a crucial fact about the Dalai Lama’s role in the Tibetan freedom struggle. He has been the single most powerful force restraining violence and radicalization within Tibet for the past 50 years. He has advocated for Sino-Tibetan reconciliation, not greater hostility. Once he leaves the scene, the chances of conflict in and around Tibet are likely to rise. Beijing’s attempt to control the Dalai Lama’s succession may backfire, destabilizing China’s western frontier and provoking the very instability that Chinese leaders hope to avoid.
A DELICATE MOMENT
Historically, the interregnum between two Dalai Lamas has been a period of vulnerability for Tibet. When a Dalai Lama dies, a designated group of senior monks begins searching for a reincarnated successor by consulting oracles, interpreting visions, and testing candidates on their intelligence and spiritual connection to the prior Dalai Lama. Once the true reincarnation is identified––usually a boy no older than six or seven––it can take more than a decade to groom him for leadership. The power vacuum that ensues during this transition process has made the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, susceptible to foreign invasions and internal turmoil. For instance, a sustained power struggle between monks and reformers after the 13th Dalai Lama’s death in 1933 weakened the Tibetan state, leaving it ill prepared to resist the arrival of the People’s Liberation Army in 1950.
Tibet’s vulnerability will be especially pronounced during the next transition period because of the immense global popularity of the current Dalai Lama. Tibetan refugee communities in the Indian subcontinent, in particular, rely on financial assistance from India, the United States, and Europe to sustain their educational institutions, medical services, and cultural establishments. Much of this foreign aid rests on goodwill that the Dalai Lama has personally cultivated in capitals around the world. Beijing is betting that future Tibetan leaders will struggle to replicate the political access and diplomatic successes the current Dalai Lama has achieved.
The Dalai Lama’s unique moral authority and charismatic leadership have helped him foster and sustain a pan-Tibetan national identity that supersedes regional and sectarian attachments. The Tibetan diaspora encompasses people from three historical regions and five major schools of Tibetan Buddhism, each of which has its own subcultures, dialects, and histories. The Dalai Lama’s nonsectarian vision and unifying presence has helped Tibetans in exile avoid the fate of many diaspora communities that fall apart from internal strife, tribal loyalties, and turf wars.
Because of his outsize presence, China’s approach to the Sino-Tibetan conflict has been to wait until the Dalai Lama passes away rather than engage in serious negotiations while he is still alive. Beijing rejected the Dalai Lama’s “Five Point Peace Plan” in 1987, which called for turning Tibet into a demilitarized “peace zone,” an end to policies encouraging the mass migration of Chinese citizens of the majority Han ethnicity to Tibet, and stronger protections for Tibetan culture, language, and religious practice. Communist Party leaders dismissed the Tibetan leader’s Strasbourg proposal in 1988, in which the Dalai Lama relinquished the demand for full independence and instead proposed genuine autonomy for Tibet under Chinese sovereignty. The CCP also ignored the Dalai Lama’s Memorandum on Genuine Autonomy in 2008, which outlined specific constitutional mechanisms to ensure that Tibetans could manage their own internal affairs without challenging China’s territorial integrity. Beijing has refused to work with the Dalai Lama because it assumes his death will obviate the need for compromise and permanently resolve the Tibet problem in Beijing’s favor.
THE MIDDLE WAY
The insistence on waiting for the Dalai Lama’s death, however, may turn out to be a monumental miscalculation by Beijing. Chinese leaders’ animus toward the Tibetan leader, whom they have persistently demonized as “a wolf in monk’s clothing,” blinds them to the stabilizing role he plays in Sino-Tibetan relations. Although the Dalai Lama has used his influence to mobilize support for Tibetan freedom around the globe, he has often deployed his power to de-escalate conflicts in Tibet at critical moments. While Beijing blames the exiled leader for all unrest in Tibet, the historical evidence shows that the Dalai Lama’s personal commitment to nonviolence and dialogue has contained tactical escalation and political radicalization among Tibetans.
The Dalai Lama has been the key figure quelling violence when grassroots dissatisfaction has escalated into episodic uprisings in Tibet. In 1987–88, after protests in Lhasa spiraled into street violence, the Dalai Lama issued a stern warning to his fellow Tibetans to remain peaceful. Then, in 2008, when protests in Lhasa spread nationwide and escalated into vandalism targeting Chinese establishments, the Dalai Lama again intervened. He publicly threatened to resign his position as the leader of the Tibetan government in exile if the violence worsened. In both cases, Tibetans immediately backed off.
The Dalai Lama has also restrained the scope of the Sino-Tibetan conflict by opting to pursue regional autonomy within the People’s Republic of China instead of full independence for Tibet. He transformed what was once a maximalist struggle for national liberation into a diplomatic campaign for cultural accommodation. This conciliatory stance, motivated by the search for a middle ground between secession and surrender, came to be known as “the middle way.”
But the middle way is not the only potential approach that Tibetans have considered in their long struggle for self-determination. Pro-independence activists have frequently accused Dharamsala of muzzling their voices to reassure Beijing that the Dalai Lama’s calls for autonomy are genuine and not a stepping stone to independence. Critics argue that the Dalai Lama’s middle way, which prioritizes dialogue and reconciliation while de-emphasizing mass mobilization, has kept the movement from reaching its full potential and leveraging its explosive strength in the struggle against Beijing. They call for a return to the goal of rangzen—full independence—backed by more aggressive movements built on civil disobedience and boycott campaigns to undermine the Chinese regime domestically and isolate it internationally.
Without the Dalai Lama’s stabilizing presence, there is a possibility of more radical protest and violence in Tibet. Since 2009, more than 160 Tibetans have set themselves on fire in public places to protest Chinese rule. One notable example was Gudrup, a 43-year-old Tibetan writer who set himself on fire in 2012 after posting a message online calling for Tibetan independence. The willingness to self-immolate, often in isolation, under heavy surveillance, and with no expectation of immediate results, foreshadows how far Tibetans may be prepared to go to challenge Chinese rule. And without the pacifying force of the Dalai Lama, there will be fewer guardrails to prevent Sino-Tibetan disputes from sliding into intractable ethnic conflict.
BEYOND BEIJING’S REACH
Beijing’s waiting game also overlooks the sources of resilience within the Tibetan exile community. The Dalai Lama, aware of his people’s overreliance on his personal leadership, began democratizing his government in the 1960s. Tibetans, initially resistant to the transfer of the community’s political mandate from pontiff to public, slowly but steadily embraced this experiment in democratic self-governance.
Today, the Tibetan government in exile is a vibrant democracy that will outlive this Dalai Lama. Every five years Tibetans around the world go to the polls to elect a new president and parliament in exile. These elections draw high participation rates—77 percent of voters turned out for the 2021 elections—and they are deemed free and fair by independent monitoring networks. The elections are also a source of excitement for Tibetans in Tibet, who covertly follow them via broadcasts on the U.S.-sponsored Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. Unfortunately, and in a boost to Beijing, both stations have been gutted in the first six months of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term.
To be sure, the Tibetan diaspora democracy has its flaws. The parliament is sometimes ensnarled in legislative deadlock, and political candidates sling mud at their opponents during campaigns. But this transnational polity of 150,000 members across five continents has remained stable even as democracy has retreated elsewhere around the globe. The spirit and structure of democracy has laid the basis for cohesion that extends beyond the Dalai Lama’s personal presence.
Ultimately, the greatest source of unity and cohesion among Tibetans is the freedom struggle to liberate their homeland from CCP rule. Tibetans see Beijing’s refusal to allow a freely chosen successor to the Dalai Lama as an assault on Tibetan Buddhism and a denial of the right to self-determination. No policy wounds Tibetan dignity more profoundly than attempts to co-opt its spiritual and institutional heart. The more that the Chinese government insists on installing a quisling Dalai Lama in Beijing, the more that Tibetans are likely to unite in opposition.
In his memoir released in March, the Dalai Lama reaffirmed the power of the Tibetan exile community that exists beyond Beijing’s reach. Tibetan Buddhists outside China can continue to push for the Tibetan cause even as Beijing increases pressure on Tibet. The Dalai Lama wrote: “Given my age, understandably many Tibetans are concerned about what will happen when I am no more. On the political front of our campaign for the freedom of the Tibetan people, we now have a substantial population of Tibetans outside in the free world, so our struggle will go on, no matter what.”
FIGHTING FOR EXISTENCE
Any blatant move by Beijing to try to control the process of selecting the next Dalai Lama may backfire by driving Tibetan resentment into rage. Whereas China views the Dalai Lama’s succession question through the cold lens of realpolitik and statecraft, Tibetans see it through the cosmic prism of devotion and spiritual meaning. For the Chinese, the issue is strategic; for Tibetans, it is existential.
Beijing’s belief that force always trumps faith is a blind spot underpinning its failed strategies to win Tibetan hearts and minds. Without a civilizational understanding of Tibetans’ relation to the Dalai Lama and his central place in Tibetan Buddhism, Beijing’s only tool is coercion. So Beijing has relied on a sophisticated cocktail of repressive policies to suppress potential dissent in Tibet, including placing three out of every four Tibetan students in colonial-style boarding schools and installing mass surveillance systems in schools and places of worship.
Beijing’s approach to Tibet parallels its efforts to control minority populations in other restive regions of China. In the northwestern province of Xinjiang, for instance, Beijing has refused to engage moderate voices and has relied on direct repression, including sending a large swath of the population to internment camps, to erase local culture and silence dissent among Uyghurs. In both Tibet and Xinjiang, China’s heavy hand has quelled mass protests in the short term—but the overwhelming use of force is just as likely to radicalize the population as it is to promote deference to the CCP.
Unlike other minorities, however, Tibetans have advantages that can offset the power of Beijing’s coercive apparatus. Tibetans have a leadership structure and spiritual center that lies beyond China’s borders. Both Tibetans living under Chinese rule and those in the global diaspora view the government in exile as their true representatives. Even if Beijing attempts to install its own Dalai Lama, the global diaspora of Tibetans—and the millions of others who see the Dalai Lama as inspiration and spiritual guide—will continue to look to Dharamsala as the legitimate seat of Tibetan Buddhism and the 15th Dalai Lama.
It is no surprise that Beijing fears Tibetans led by the Dalai Lama: there are few groups more threatening to an authoritarian regime than national movements for self-determination that the regime cannot control and that are supported by a diaspora it cannot silence. If Beijing continues to insist on a hard-line approach to the Dalai Lama’s succession, global leaders can support Tibetan resistance efforts by amplifying the international consequences to China through economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, and public support for pushing back against further cultural and religious erasure. Such actions may not change Beijing’s attitude in the near term, but they will keep alive the legacy of the Dalai Lama and bolster Tibetans’ ongoing struggle for self-determination.