With his relentless espousal of non-violence, the Dalai Lama embodies Tibetan resistance to Chinese occupation. This helps to explain why China is so intent on choosing his successor, and why the US and India must make sure that it does not.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

As the Dalai Lama – the spiritual leader of Tibet – visits the United States to receive medical treatment on his knees, concerns over who will succeed him have become acute. While Tibetans around the world pray that the 88-year-old Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, still has plenty of life ahead of him, China is eagerly awaiting his demise, so that it can install a puppet successor.

Tibetans regard the Dalai Lama as the living incarnation of Buddha. Since 1391, the Dalai Lama has been reincarnated 13 times. When one Dalai Lama dies, the search for the next one begins, with a council of senior disciples taking responsibility for identifying him, based on signs and visions. But in recent years, the Chinese government has insisted that only it has the right to identify the next Dalai Lama.

This would not be the first time China selected a leader of Tibetan Buddhism. In 1995, it anointed its own Panchen Lama, whose spiritual authority is second only to that of the Dalai Lama, after abducting the actual Panchen Lama – a six-year-old boy who had already been confirmed by the Dalai Lama. Almost three decades later, the real Panchen Lama is among the world’s longest-serving political prisoners.

China also appointed the Karmapa, Tibetan Buddhism’s third most important spiritual leader and the head of the Karma Kagyu sect. But in 1999, its appointee, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, fled to India. The ease with which the 14-year-old Karmapa escaped China raised suspicions among Indians about his loyalties. After imposing travel restrictions on him, India decided in 2018 no longer to recognize the China-anointed Karmapa as the legitimate head of his sect. Now, he and his rival Karmapa, Trinley Thaye Dorje, have issued a joint statement pledging to cooperatively resolve the leadership split in the Karma Kagyu sect.

But the Dalai Lama is China’s “white whale.” The incumbent – who was identified as the Dalai Lama in 1937, at age two – has been a thorn in the side of the Communist Party of China (CPC) since China’s 1951 annexation of Tibet. With his relentless espousal of non-violence, the Dalai Lama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, embodies Tibetan resistance to the Chinese occupation. (Had Tibet remained self-governing like Taiwan, it would be the world’s tenth-largest country by area.)

In his past incarnations, the Dalai Lama was not only Tibet’s spiritual leader, but also its political leader, making him a kind of cross between a pope and a president. But the Dalai Lama ceded his political role in 2011 to a Tibetan government-in-exile, which is democratically elected every five years by Tibetan refugees living in India and elsewhere.

Moreover, the Dalai Lama has declared that he might choose not to be reborn – a decision that would undermine the legitimacy of any Chinese-anointed successor. He knows that, for China, a Dalai Lama devoted to the CPC is much more useful than no Dalai Lama at all. He also knows that, while he has retained his mental acuity, his body is weakening. In 2016, he underwent radiation therapy for prostate cancer. He says he was “completely cured,” but he continues to struggle with his knees. Given his advanced age, more health problems are to be expected.

The Dalai Lama’s frailty is one reason why his travel schedule has slowed considerably. But it is not the only one: bowing to Chinese pressure, most countries – including European democracies and Asia’s Buddhist states (except Japan) – are unwilling to grant him entry. Fortunately, some countries have retained their backbones. The US is hosting the Dalai Lama for knee treatment, and India has proudly been his home for more than 65 years. India has officially designated the Dalai Lama its “most esteemed and honored guest,” while the Tibetan leader describes himself as a “son of India.”

In fact, India is home to the vast majority of Tibetan exiles, and has played a central role in helping to preserve the Tibetan culture, including by supporting Tibetan-language schools. By contrast, China has been working actively to destroy Tibetan culture and identity, especially since Chinese President Xi Jinping has been in charge.

Meanwhile, China’s appropriation of Tibetan natural resources has gone into overdrive, with consequences that extend far beyond the Tibetan Plateau. Resource-rich Tibet is a source of fresh water for more than one-fifth of the world’s population and a global biodiversity hotspot. The plateau influences Asia’s weather and monsoonal patterns, as well as the Northern Hemisphere’s “atmospheric general circulation” – the system of winds that helps transport warm air from the equator toward higher latitudes, creating different climate zones.

It is imperative that the US and India work together to foil China’s plan to handpick the next Dalai Lama. Already, America’s Tibetan Policy and Support Act, which took effect in 2020, says that “the wishes of the 14th Dalai Lama, including any written instructions, should play a determinative role in the selection, education, and veneration of a future 15th Dalai Lama.” And it calls for sanctions on Chinese officials who interfere with Tibetan Buddhist succession practices.

But more must be done. For starters, US President Joe Biden should take the opportunity presented by the Dalai Lama’s knee treatment to fulfill a 2020 campaign promise to meet with the Dalai Lama. More broadly, the US should work with India to devise a multilateral strategy to counter Xi’s plan to capture the more than 600-year-old institution of the Dalai Lama. This must include efforts to persuade the Dalai Lama to spell out, once and for all, the rules that must be followed to identify his successor.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

© Project Syndicate, 2024.

Brahma Chellaney, Taipei Times

Preserving its global dominance appears to have driven the West’s expanding involvement in the Ukraine conflict, with former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently arguing in a column that a Russian victory would be “a turning point in history, the moment when the West finally loses its post-war hegemony.” Such a decisive outcome, however, seems doubtful, given the attritional character of the Ukraine war and the progressively escalating Western involvement in the conflict.

The defining moment that formally brings the era of Western preeminence to an end is more likely to be a surprise Chinese aggression aimed at subjugating Taiwan.

With the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East testing U.S.-led alliances and with America already looking overextended, Chinese aggression against Taiwan could come sooner than many in U.S. policy circles expect.

There are ominous signs that Chinese President Xi Jinping is preparing his country for a war over Taiwan. But whether the U.S. is prepared to respond to such a contingency is becoming a vexed question, especially as international concerns grow that Xi might view America’s preoccupation with extended conflicts in Europe and the Middle East as a window of opportunity to act, without triggering a full-fledged war with the U.S.

The defense of Taiwan is assuming greater significance for international security for two other reasons. The first is the possibility that Xi might seek to replicate in the Taiwan Strait the techniques of incremental expansionism that his regime has successfully honed in the South China Sea without drawing a concerted U.S. response.

Tellingly, three successive U.S. administrations have failed to credibly push back against China’s intensifying expansionism in the South China Sea, relying instead on rhetoric or symbolic actions. As a result, the American debate now largely centers on how the South China Sea was effectively lost and what can be done now to respond to China’s increasingly aggressive sea tactics aimed at tightening its grip on this strategic corridor between the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

These tactics are triggering a number of incidents with other claimant states, particularly the Philippines and Vietnam, even as China seeks to interfere with U.S. and allied air and maritime transits.

China’s recent menacing military drills that encircled Taiwan seemed to be a rehearsal for implementing at least a blockade with the aim of slowly throttling the island democracy. In fact, this was the third Chinese dress rehearsal in less than two years for an assault on Taiwan.

Compared to the first large-scale Chinese military exercise in August 2022, when then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taipei, the latest drills were more sophisticated, elaborate and geographically expansive.

The second reason is the U.S. failure to genuinely pivot to Asia and the wider Indo-Pacific, despite U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin claiming that this region is “our priority theater of operations” and “the heart of American grand strategy.”

A just-released book, “Lost Decade: The U.S. Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power,” by two former American policymakers, Robert Blackwill and Richard Fontaine, bemoans that America’s “pivot to Asia” strategy (first unveiled in 2011) has failed thus far because a coherent approach to the Indo-Pacific remains largely absent. Consequently, the U.S. has been unable to respond adequately to China’s aggressive rise, in what the authors call one of the greatest mistakes in American foreign policy in the post-World War II period.

The plain fact is that, as long as conflicts elsewhere distract the U.S. from the pressing Asian security challenges, the Indo-Pacific is unlikely to become the hub of its grand strategy.

The latest American foreign assistance package that provides $60.8 billion for Ukraine and a meager $8.1 billion for Indo-Pacific security, including Taiwan, has dimmed the prospects of a correction in skewed strategic priorities. In fact, U.S. President Joe Biden recently plunged the U.S. deeper into the Ukraine war by permitting Kyiv to use American-donated weapons to strike inside Russia.

More fundamentally, the drawn-out Ukraine war is crimping America’s China policy and weakening its deterrent posture in the Indo-Pacific, thereby making a Taiwan Strait crisis more likely.

In an effort to forestall the U.S. from realizing its worst geopolitical nightmare, a formal Sino-Russian alliance, and to dissuade China from directly aiding the Kremlin’s war machine, Biden has been compelled to adopt a more conciliatory approach to Beijing.

This approach, in turn, is emboldening China vis-à-vis Taiwan. While stepping up coercive pressures on Taiwan, Beijing is making its ultimate goal clearer. Xi recently declared that the “essence” of his national rejuvenation drive is “the unification of the motherland.” And his new defense minister, Dong Jun, while accusing the U.S. of “malign intentions [that] are drawing Taiwan to the dangers of war,” told the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore that, “Anyone who dares split Taiwan from China will be smashed to pieces and court their own destruction.”

Yet some in the West insist that the U.S. must first rout Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield before turning to deter China. As if Xi would wait to move against Taiwan until the U.S. has humiliated Russia in Ukraine in a long war and then turned its attention to containing China. Indeed, the last thing Xi wants is an end to the Ukraine war because that would leave the U.S. free to pivot to Asia.

Make no mistake: With China’s lengthening shadow belligerently darkening Taiwan’s doorstep, the risks of failing to deter Chinese aggression against the self-governing island are increasing. Consequently, calls are growing in the U.S. that Washington must embrace strategic clarity in relation to Taiwan’s defense by abandoning its outdated strategic ambiguity policy, which was formulated when China was still backward and in no position to annex Taiwan.

America’s deepening involvement in the Ukraine war at a time it seems ill-prepared for armed conflict over Taiwan is a strategic mistake that could eventually come to haunt its long-term security.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).