Beijing’s high-stakes battle on roof of world
Strictly speaking the Dalai Lama, an increasingly frail 91, has a reincarnation rather than a succession problem. In Tibetan Buddhism, high lamas do not have crown princes.
They die and their consciousness is reborn inside a child. The hunt is on, then, for omens pointing to a suitable protégé, a new, easily moulded spiritual leader.
Both the monks of the Dalai Lama’s administration-in-exile and the propagandists deployed by the Chinese Communist Party are competing to find someone who can steer the Himalayas away from war.
The duel has elements of mystic pantomime but it is in fact naked geopolitics played out at high altitude.
The Dalai Lama, the 14th incarnation, has become the unifying symbol of Tibetan identity, a charismatic advocate for autonomy.
He was forced to flee in 1959 from Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, days before Chinese troops started to bombard the walls of his palace.
Since then, from his Indian exile, he has turned the Tibetan cause into a global one, picking up the 1989 Nobel peace prize and Hollywood acolytes such as Richard Gere and Lady Gaga.
Tibet was a sovereign buffer state between Asia’s two giants, China and India. And for Beijing, the Dalai Lama is the frontman for a westernsteered attempt to weaken China.
That reasoning permeates all Chinese calculations: whoever controls Tibetan Buddhism affects border security between the two nuclear powers, can define territorial claims and ultimately set the terms for regional dominance across the Himalayan belt. Beijing’s gamble: the stakes are so high that it’s worth risking the ignominy of rigging selection of the next spiritual leader.
In 1995 the Dalai Lama named a Tibetan child as the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, Tibetan Buddhism’s second-highest position — and Chinese agents promptly abducted him. Now China has set up a database of more than 1,300 government-approved living Buddhas, some of whose names will be placed in a golden urn. The final candidates will be chosen, under Chinese government supervision, and will have to show they have been born in China.
If China’s candidate does not make the grade it will lose face
The Dalai Lama refuses to hand over the levers of succession to a communist party that thinks religion is poison and reincarnation is primitive superstition. So: a stipulation that the 15th incarnated lama should be born in a free country. And no golden urn.
China’s fear is that the new Dalai Lama could be groomed by India.
And so, in anticipation of a turbulent selection process it has already ordered Tibetan monasteries to remove photographs of the current Dalai Lama, banned any public mourning when he dies and banned all contacts with exile groups. Digital surveillance has been stepped up and border security intensified lest the high lama’s supporters try to enter China from India.
It’s not just public unrest that China fears. If Delhi backs a favourite for the Dalai Lama in defiance of Beijing, this will be viewed as an Indian-backed challenge to Chinese sovereignty over Tibet with a likely escalation along the border. China is already using its digital diplomacy to influence Buddhist-majority nations such as Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar and Nepal. If its candidate for the head of Tibetan Buddhism does not make the grade it will lose face. All that makes up the classic Chinese nightmare: separatism, the beating back of communist authority, the encroachment of neighbours, the death of ideology.
That’s worth fighting for even though combat at high altitude is a nightmare. Thin air reduces helicopter lift, batteries drain quickly and the lack of oxygen slows down troops. China increasingly uses drones for border surveillance and houses its troops in solar-heated prefabs disguised as villages. It is ploughing research into highgradient mini-tanks, robot supply vehicles and robot dogs to fight in tight spaces. India has upgraded a fighter airfield and builds tunnels along the 2,100-mile “line of actual control”. It understands from scuffles in the past that however big your nuclear arsenal is, the defence of the border often comes down to an exhausted fist-fight in the snow.
These military reflexes are not at all in the spirit of the Dalai Lama who described war as “a complete anachronism”. But they give a sense of the power of place. Tibet is known as the roof of the world not just because of its towering mountains but because from them stem a feeling that the terrain both sits above and defines the boundaries of imperial ambition. Has China fully grasped that or does it merely want to crush a tiny, irritating neighbour? Does India understand Tibet’s separateness, or just want to give Beijing a bloody nose? The Tibetan plateau and the Himalayan glaciers feed Asia’s greatest rivers including the Indus, the Ganges, the Mekong and the Yangtze; more than a billion people depend on those waters. The flow becomes a matter of life and death at a time of drought or flash floods.
The race for a new Tibetan spiritual leader hides a Chinese scramble to become the upstream sovereign over downstream south and southeast Asia. China can flex its muscles, using online propaganda to undermine Asian support for Tibetan Buddhism or building dams that control the farming, fishing and energy needs of a great chunk of the continent. If Xi Jinping were able to position a stooge as the new head of Tibetan Buddhism he could perhaps look down from a Himalayan height and boast: “I’m now the master of the physical world.” But as the current Dalai Lama could tell him, that’s not enough, never will be.
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