How will China react to Dalai Lama’s succession announcement?

The spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism continues to be a thorn in the side of the Chinese Communist Party.

The Dalai Lama has a following of a few million people. Picture: AFP.

The Dalai Lama is pretty much everything Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials pride themselves on not being: spiritual, eccentric, colourful, occasionally gaffe-prone.

He has a following of a few million people, mostly living on a remote plateau, or in exile, while the CCP rules over 1.4 billion. Yet in the story of China’s growth and the party’s rehabilitation since the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, the ever-cheerful 89-year-old in the crimson robes is the tiny, loose nut that repeatedly clogs the smooth machine.

His decision that his successor will be unveiled according to his followers’ preferred rituals will make matters worse, unless President Xi shows unmatched political dexterity.

The logic of state media’s recent thoughts on the “correct” way to choose a successor is that the party will appoint its own. So, in years to come, there will be two boy lamas, but there is little doubt whom most Tibetans and the faith’s celebrity adherents in the West will see as genuine.

China has form. When the tenth Panchen Lama - the second-highest spiritual leader in Tibetan Buddhism - died in 1989, there was a pause, and then in 1995 Tibetan monks loyal to the Dalai Lama claimed to have discovered his reincarnation. A single photograph of the rosy-faced six-year-old, birth name Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, was circulated, but he disappeared three days later, never to be seen again.

After years of facing down accusations and questions over his whereabouts, Chinese officials allowed British diplomats a glimpse, no more, of two photographs they said were of him, in one of which he was playing table tennis and the other writing Chinese characters.

In the meantime, the Chinese selected their own candidate for the role, who is now 35 and occasionally takes his seat in Shigatse, Tibet’s second city. Few outside the party recognise his authority.

If the Dharamsala succession team find the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation beyond the long arm of the CCP, most probably from the exile community in India, Beijing will almost certainly feel it has to double down. For President Xi, that will be risky.

It is already a matter of some absurdity that an atheist organisation feels it has to pronounce on who has been reincarnated as whom. At the very least, the two boys will become another global dividing line.

At the worst, an attempt to impose Beijing’s choice on Tibet would be a trigger of the sort that has prompted previous rounds of unrest and hostility in China’s far-off but closely watched Himalayan fiefdom.

The Times