The two Panchen Lamas: China's role in Tibet and the clash with the Dalai Lama

Beijing/Dharamshala: Weeks before the Dalai Lama ruled out China's role in choosing his successor, President Xi Jinping met a Tibetan Buddhist monk installed three decades ago by Beijing as the faith's No. 2 leader, the Panchen Lama. The monk was appointed after the six-year-old chosen by the Dalai Lama for the position disappeared.

The June 6 meeting, in which the Panchen Lama affirmed his support for the Communist Party, and the Dalai Lama's rejection this week of a role for China in his reincarnation underline the schism between Beijing and the Buddhist spiritual leader, who fled to India in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule in Tibet.

China considers the Dalai Lama a separatist and wants to bring Tibetan Buddhism under its control but the Dalai Lama and his huge following have been obstacles to that ambition.

The declaration by the Dalai Lama that he will be reincarnated was welcomed by his followers as signifying the continuation of the 600-year-old institution central to Tibetan Buddhism. But many of them also fear Beijing will use his eventual death and succession to split the faith, with one new Dalai Lama named by followers of the Dalai Lama and one by the government.

The possibility is not lost on the Dalai Lama, who told Reuters in 2019 that "in case you see two Dalai Lamas come ... nobody will respect (the one chosen by China)".

The Dalai Lama turns 90 on Sunday and he said this week that upon his death only a non-profit organisation he has set up in India would be able to identify his successor. He previously said his reincarnation will be born outside China.

Beijing though says it has the right to approve the Dalai Lama's successor as a legacy from imperial times. The Panchen Lama is one of the senior Buddhist clerics who are supposed to help identify the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.

The child in Tibet who the Dalai Lama chose as the 11th Panchen Lama disappeared in May, 1995 and has not been seen since. A few months later, the Chinese government appointed Gyaltsen Norbu as the Panchen Lama.

"The reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, Panchen and other great living Buddhas is carried out in accordance with strict religious rituals and historical customs... and approved by the central government,"

China's foreign ministry spokesperson said on Friday.

At the meeting with Xi, Norbu vowed to "firmly support the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party", Chinese state media said. Tibetan officials living in exile in India, like the Dalai Lama, said it was exactly the kind of political interference that they wanted to avoid in the eventual succession of the Dalai Lama.

"Many people call him a fake Panchen, but officially, we call him the Chinese Panchen," Tenzin Lekshay, an official of the Tibetan government in exile in India, said about Norbu. "Once he was appointed by China, he had to show allegiance to them."

Lives in Beijing

Norbu is a senior member of the Chinese People’s Consultative Conference, a rubber-stamp political advisory body, and vice president of the state-controlled Buddhist Association of China. He does not live at the Panchen Lama’s traditional seat, Tashi Lunpo monastery in Tibet’s Shigatse city, but in Beijing and visits Tibet for a few months each year to meet government officials and take part in religious ceremonies, according to Chinese state media. Norbu's movements are heavily controlled by the Chinese government and he does not have unfettered access to the public, according to foreign scholars. He went to Buddhist-majority Thailand in 2019, his first visit outside greater China. Local media in Nepal said last year that the government there shot down a proposal by Norbu to visit Lumbini, the birthplace of Buddha.

A spokesperson for Nepal's foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Tibetan activists living abroad and Tibetan officials in India say, based on their conversations with friends and family in Tibet, that Norbu is not held in high esteem among ethnic Tibetans in China. Photos of his predecessor, the 10th Panchen Lama Choekyi Gyaltsen, are widely displayed in monasteries and religious buildings across Tibet and Tibetan-majority areas of China, as seen during various visits across the region by Reuters journalists. At last month's meeting in Zhongnanhai, the Communist Party’s leadership compound in Beijing, Xi implored Norbu to "advance the systematic promotion of the Sinicisation of religion”, according to state news agency Xinhua. The term refers to a years-long push to bring all organised religions in China under greater Communist Party ideological control.

It was part of a series of pronouncements taken by China’s senior leadership in the weeks leading up to the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday on Sunday, according to state media reports.

These include security czar Chen Wenqing’s warning against separatism during a visit last month to Qinghai province, which has a large ethnic Tibetan population.

For ordinary Tibetans living abroad, Norbu is just another monk from their community.

"I don't believe him as a Panchen Lama," said Tenzin Kunsel, an Indian-born Tibetan who is now an Australian citizen.

"I still strongly believe in the Panchen Lama who was selected by His Holiness."