Will appointing its own Dalai Lama after the death of the current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, serve to strengthen or weaken the Chinese Communist Party’s control over Tibet (“Beijing’s Dangerous Game in Tibet,” Foreign Affairs, September 1, 2025)?
Tibetans were happy when Tenzin Gyatso announced that he would go ahead with being reincarnated after he dies (sounds easy), that the next Dalai Lama will be someone born outside of China, “in the free world,” and that China lacks “authority to interfere.” Like the present Dalai Lama, who is now 90, the fifteenth Dalai Lama will thus, it is hoped, be beyond the control of the PRC government as he guides the Tibetan people. A search committee of Tibetan Buddhist leaders will have the job of finding the child who is the new Dalai Lama.
The People’s Republic of China has other plans. With the strong and charismatic fourteenth Dalai Lama finally out of the picture, the government believes that using a hand-picked spiritual leader or stooge will help it to further consolidate its control over Tibet, which it has been trying to subdue for three quarters of a century.
Is Beijing miscalculating?
However, Foreign Policy authors Tenzin Dorjee and Gyal Lo point out that in addition to inspiring resistance, Tenzin Gyatso has also controversially but effectively counseled restraint (“Beijing’s Dangerous Game in Tibet: How Controlling the Dalai Lama’s Succession Could Backfire,” September 1, 2025).
Chinese leaders…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….
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 pushed for a “middle way,” not actual full independence for Tibet but rather letting Tibetans pretty much manage their own affairs. (Which would entail massively scaling down CCP repression; e.g., no more kidnapping of Tibetan children and packing them off to boarding schools to be assimilated, no more destruction of Buddhist temples and statues, no more arbitrary detentions of Buddhist monks, etc.)
A radical alternative
To all proposals along these lines, the PRC government has responded, in effect, “Not interested.” “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.”
But activists who champion full independence for Tibet haven’t gone away, and without the 14th Dalai Lama to “stabilize” things, “there is a possibility of more radical protest and violence in Tibet…. 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.”
