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By Khedroob Thondup

For more than four decades, the Tibetan leadership has held to a strategy that Beijing has consistently rejected. The reliance on a framework conceived in the 1980s—anchored in appeals for dialogue and autonomy—has not yielded meaningful negotiations. Instead, it has left Tibetans in a holding pattern, waiting for a door that Beijing has bolted shut. The time has come to recognize that persistence without adaptation is not resilience; it is stagnation.

 By Khedroob Thondup
China’s recent warnings to India not to interfere in the future reincarnation of the Dalai Lama are more than just diplomatic posturing. They strike at the heart of a centuries-old Tibetan spiritual tradition and the geopolitical contest over who gets to define its future. Beijing insists that the next Dalai Lama must be chosen under its authority, a claim rooted in its broader assertion of sovereignty over Tibet. Yet the Dalai Lama himself has repeatedly suggested that his reincarnation may well occur outside Tibet — most plausibly in India, where he has lived in exile since 1959.

By Khedroob Thondup
When Wang Huning, a senior member of the Politburo Standing Committee, traveled to Tibet, his words carried the weight of Beijing’s long-term vision for the region. His call for the implementation of the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress was not a passing remark but a reaffirmation of the Party’s central strategy: to bind Tibet’s development inseparably to the project of national integration.

By Khedroob Thondup

In 2023, His Holiness the Dalai Lama recognised the young boy in Mongolia as the 10th Bogd Jetsun Damba Khutuktu—the spiritual leader of Mongolian Buddhism, equivalent in stature to the Dalai Lama in Tibet. For Mongolians, this was a moment of profound religious continuity, affirming centuries of lineage that ties their national identity to Buddhism. Yet, ten years later, the reincarnation remains cloistered, unannounced, and largely hidden from public life. The reason is not spiritual hesitation but geopolitical coercion: China’s overwhelming influence has forced Mongolia into silence.