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"The Chinese have been destroyed by suspicion; Tibetans have been destroyed by hope."
heard in Lhasa, 1992
"... there is no indigenous peoples' question in China ..." Chinese government to the United Nations Open-ended Inter-sessional Working Group on Indigenous Peoples (UN Doc. E/CN.4/1995/WG.15/2 [10 October 1995]).
On 29 November 1995, the Chinese government an nounced that it had selected the 11th reincarnation of Tibet's second ranked religious leader, the Panchen Lama. The Chinese were seeking to invalidate the selection of the Panchen Lama that had been made in early May 1995, by a committee of 28 Tibetan religious officials at the Tashilhunpo monastery in Shigatse, west-central Tibet. That monastery is the Panchen Lama's seat of religious (and formerly secular) authority. The Chinese were furious when the committee leaked its choice of the Panchen Lama to Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile.2 The leak made it possible for Dharamsala to pre-empt Beijing as the locus of power in Tibet.
The Dalai Lama, exercising one of his chief prerogatives as the head of Tibetan Buddhism, acted quickly on the committee's choice; he announced on 14 May 1995 that 6-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima was the 11th reincarnation of the Panchen Lama. He appealed to the Chinese government to honor this recognition in the name of religious freedom and tolerance. Instead, the Chinese rejected the Dalai Lama's choice and took the poor child and his simple herder family into custody, where they are likely to remain for the near future. Then, the government called Tibetan senior monks and religious officials to Beijing, where they were compelled to declare themselves a new committee. This new committee was forced to admit publicly that the first selection of the Panchen Lama had been in error, and that it would make another choice from a short list of candidates prepared by the Chinese Communist Party. The chosen Panchen Lama was then announced by Beijing, in November.
Reportedly, the committee's choice was subject to the final approval of the State Council and the personal endorsement of Party Premier Li Peng. Thus the head of the Chinese Communist Party, a thoroughly atheistic Marxist, who is known in the West primarily for ordering the killing of students in Tiananmen, has been thrust into the role of Tibet's senior religious authority. Notwithstanding the dire human consequences that these actions portend, it is just the kind of irony that China watchers relish.
Controversy over the selection of the Panchen Lama may be seen as but another in a long series of episodes of reincarnation politics in Tibet.3 Yet under the present polarized situation of ethnic and political conflict, it also serves as an indicator of increasing efforts by the Chinese government to repudiate the Tibetan government-in-exile and to attack some of the more important dimensions of Tibetan culture. It is the most critical signal to date that Beijing has chosen to abandon the reform policy and promises of autonomy it made to Tibetans in 1980, and to turn back to the heavy handed and destructive policies of the Cultural Revolution era. The decision to formally repudiate the Dalai Lama's authority is also indicative of China's bristling sensitivity to an increasingly vocal international community that is strongly invested in a Tibetan autonomy, an autonomy that for many is exemplified principally by the free practice of an exotic variant of Buddhism.
Arguments over who has the authority to validate a reincarnation, a matter which to all appearances has no real political significance, thus represents deeper and more fundamental conflicts over the status of Tibetan autonomy. Playing politics with 6-year-old boys is not just a capricious response of a paranoid regime, but the culmination of half a century of troubled Han Chinese and Tibetan relations, failing reforms, and the uncertainties and suffering created by the rapid shifts of China's policy on "national minorities."4 A brief review of Chinese/Tibetan relations is in order.
Fourth World Bulletin • Spring/Summer 1996
Copyright © 1996 by the Fourth World Center
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