Congress can reaffirm the principle that his successor must be chosen by Tibetans.
–By Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal, 12 June 2025
Is there a man more constant and faithful to his cause and his people than Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama? He will turn 90 on July 6. The 14th in a line of Tibetan god-popes stretching back six centuries, he has for nearly 75 years contended with China, a cruel and remorseless foe, with valor, patience and stamina. Along with Pope John Paul II, he has been the most politically active spiritual leader in the postwar world, proof that men of God can be consummate politicians without losing their spiritual clarity.
Mao Zedong’s Red Army conquered Tibet in 1950, extinguishing its independence. China has proceeded to dismantle its culture through a policy of religious vandalism, cultural and political repression, and demographic colonialism. There has been a large-scale settlement on Tibetan soil of Han Chinese, who pour in without respite on high-speed trains. Tibetans feel suffocated by Chinese surveillance. As John Beck, a British journalist, observes in his recent book, “Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized,” the tyrannical methods that have turned “Xinjiang” (East Turkestan) into a vast prison were first conceived and implemented in Tibet.
The Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959 at age 23, escaping on the back of a dzo, a cross between a yak and a cow. “It was on this humble form of transport,” biographer Alexander Norman writes, “that the Precious Protector, the Victor, Lion Among Men, Wish-Fulfilling Jewel, Ocean of Wisdom . . . quit his homeland.” He has been in exile since, keeping alive the flame of hope that Tibet will regain the dignity of self-rule.
The Dalai Lama has given up on sovereignty, which the Chinese, who insist that Tibet was never independent, won’t concede. A realist, he has accepted for decades that China can keep Tibet as long as it gives the ethnic Tibetans autonomy. But Beijing continues to regard him as a subversive separatist—or “splittist,” in the Maoist argot that the Chinese communists still use—and won’t yield an inch.
In “Voice for the Voiceless,” published in March, the Dalai Lama offers a poignant, sometimes desperately sad, account of his struggle with China “for my land and my people.” Throughout his life, he writes, he has engaged with interlocutors who are open to honest debate. From Mao to Xi Jinping, by contrast, “the situation has been very different. I have often complained that the Chinese Communist leaders have only a mouth to speak but no ear to listen.” In other proof of Beijing’s bad faith, this year marks the 30th anniversary of the disappearance of the Panchen Lama—second in spiritual rank to the Dalai Lama—who was abducted by the Chinese authorities in May 1995.
The Dalai Lama has his foibles. He can be a ham—see, for instance, his TV appearance on “MasterChef Australia.” He can be guileless, once telling a teenage girl in a crowd in Norway that she was “too fat.” He has sometimes shown poor judgment, granting audiences to the Japanese cult leader Shoko Asahara, who went on to commit mass murder by releasing sarin gas in the Tokyo subway.
What is beyond dispute, however, is his fidelity to the freedom of the Tibetan people. As he approaches 90, the question of his successor grows urgent. By tradition, the successor of a Dalai Lama is someone in whom the deceased leader is thought to be reincarnated. (He was identified at age 2 as the reincarnation of his predecessor, known as the Great Thirteenth.) In his recent book, he writes that “since the purpose of a reincarnation is to carry on the work of the predecessor, the new Dalai Lama will be born in the free world”—that is, outside Tibet.
This sets up direct confrontation with China, which insists it will decide the matter. For all his powerlessness against the might of Beijing, the Dalai Lama has been a thorn in China’s flesh, one it wishes to be rid of when he dies. That could take time: He has said, citing an 18th-century prophecy, that he will live until he’s 113. All this guarantees that we’ll have competing, or dueling, Dalai Lamas: one in China, who bears Beijing’s imprimatur, the other in the Tibetan diaspora.
America’s position is set out in the Tibetan Policy and Support Act, which President Trump signed in 2020. The law affirms the right of the Tibetan people to “select and venerate their own religious leaders.” Any Chinese trespass on the process of succession would be a “clear violation of the fundamental religious freedoms of Tibetan Buddhists and the Tibetan people.” There could be no better 90th birthday present for the Dalai Lama than for the U.S. Congress to pass a resolution restating the principle that the 15th Dalai Lama must be a man born free, chosen only by the Tibetans themselves. Click here to read more.
