[Breitbart] The Chinese Communist Party’s quest to dominate Tibetan Buddhism continued this week with a press conference on Thursday to assert that the communist regime will control the death of the Dalai Lama and not allow him to reincarnate outside of China.
The state-controlled China Tibetology Research Center and the All-China Journalists Association assembled pro-communist “experts” to claim that the Chinese government has controlled the reincarnation of the living Buddhas since ancient times and that the Dalai Lama himself, living in exile in India since China’s colonization of Tibet in 1959, should have no role in the process. Tibetan Buddhists believe in the Dalai Lama as the foremost of several living Buddhas, who have reincarnated in various men throughout the ages to lead the faith.
The Chinese Communist Party considers Tibetan Buddhism a direct threat to the regime, which demands full allegiance to and worship of dictator Xi Jinping. As it has done with Christianity and Islam, Beijing has attempted to eradicate Tibetan Buddhism through a ban on children adhering to any faith and the practice of imposing communist “Sinicization” of the faith, placing trusted Party members in leadership positions.
The Han Chinese government has also attempted to erase Tibetan identity wholesale by imposing the Mandarin language in the region – even renaming Tibet with the Han name “Xizang” – and eroding the use of Tibetan written language in schools. The government has also forced thousands of Tibetan children into “boarding schools” in which they are indoctrinated into communism, learn Mandarin, and are kept from learning their culture or religion.
The human rights organization Freedom House ranked occupied Tibet as the least free region in the world in its 2023 Freedom in the World report, published in March. |