mandag 30. juni 2025

How the Dalai Lama is planning to use his death to thwart China

The Dalai Lama will be 90 on July 6. According to his doctors, he remains in “excellent health”, but following knee replacement surgery last year in the United States, his advancing age and frailty have become more evident. It is a particularly significant age for the man who since 1959 has lived in India, having fled Tibet following the Chinese invasion of his country.

He has said that his 90th birthday is when he will make the decision, based on the Tibetan Buddhist belief in reincarnation, about his own future, and the future of the Dalai Lama as an institution. It is a decision that calls into play a religious tradition going back 800 years, the fate of a six-year-old boy described as the world’s youngest political prisoner, and the Chinese Communist government’s efforts to neutralise the influence of the man whom it has long considered the greatest obstacle to its control over Tibet and its people.