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China casts late 10th Panchen Lama as an ally

By Benjamin Kang Lim | Reuters

The 10th Panchen Lama Choekyi Gyaltsen (1938-1989) in an undated photo. China is marking his death anniversary and has cast him as an ally by lauding him as an enemy of separatism.File photo/Photographer unknown

China is marking the death anniversary of the second-most senior figure in Tibetan Buddhism by lauding him as an enemy of separatism in the restive region as it enters a year laden with sensitive anniversaries.

The death of the 10th Panchen Lama, revered by Tibetans for championing their rights, on 28 January 1989, deprived the Chinese authorities of a buffer against tensions in the mountain region and helped stir demonstrations and riots in the regional capital Lhasa weeks later.

But Chinese officials now champion the late Panchen Lama as a model patriot, set against the exiled Dalai Lama, who they condemn as a separatist traitor.

In the official People’s Daily on Tuesday, a senior Communist Party official again lauded him as an example for restive Tibet, which erupted in riots and protest in March last year.

“We must learn from and continue his patriotic spirit,” wrote Du Qinglin, chief of the Party’s United Front Department, which deals with religious and ethnic groups.

“He was always at the forefront of the struggle against separatism and resolutely protected ethnic unity.”

But the 10th Panchen Lama’s political legacy is much more disputed than such propaganda presents. And a leading expert on Tibet said Beijing has trapped itself by failing to accept a successor Panchen Lama who is trusted by most Tibetans.

China lost a chance to win greater acceptance from Tibetans when it put under secretive house arrest the five-year-old boy chosen by the Dalai Lama as the reincarnation of the 10th Panchen Lama in 1995. Beijing has installed its own choice, who is spurned by most Tibetans.

“China’s leaders are locking themselves into a very tight corner — it can’t rule Tibetans without the mediation of a leader whom Tibetans trust and respect, but it denounces the Dalai Lama as a monster,” said Robbie Barnett, a Tibetologist at Columbia University in New York.

“The Panchen Lama has become increasingly important as a symbolic figure [for Tibetans] since his death because Beijing’s policies increasingly seem focused on undoing everything he struggled for,” Barnett said.

China is seeking to prevent fresh unrest in Tibet as it marks the 50th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s flight into exile in March. Most Tibetans still honour him as their supreme religious leader, and also reject Beijing’s preferred successor to the late Panchen Lama as an illegitimate choice.

A security lockdown has been imposed in most Tibetan areas to head off unrest with armed paramilitary police patrolling Lhasa’s streets.

Tibet was relatively stable for the decade until the 10th Panchen Lama’s death, as the Communist Party eased the harsh attacks on Tibetan Buddhism of Mao’s time and experimented with removing Han Chinese officials from many posts in the region.

China has since poured billions of dollars to modernise Tibet but the dispute over a key religious position has left a void that could presage the kind of conflict that could erupt after the death of the current Dalai Lama, now 73 years old.

After the Dalai Lama fled, the 10th Panchen Lama stayed on and was initially seen as a collaborator, but it emerged in 1997 that he spent over a decade either in prison or under house arrest for criticising Beijing in a 1962 petition over jailings, starvation and efforts to wipe out Buddhism in his homeland.

He was freed in 1977, a year after Mao’s death, and politically rehabilitated the following year.

Asked to comment on the 10th Panchen Lama’s legacy, his only child, Yabshi Pan Rinzinwangmo, now studying in Beijing, told Reuters: “My father never wavered in his convictions to do everything possible to broadly support Tibetan culture and Tibetans everywhere.”

Copyright © 2009 Reuters

Published in Reuters website