by Lee Feigon - Chicago Tribune Op-Ed Piece on Panchen Lama

CHICAGO, Dec. 8, 1995 (Chicago Tribune) -- Tibet will not be free until China is free. Just as Latvia, Lithuania and the other captive republics of the Soviet Union did not achieve independence until the Soviet Union became democratic, it is unlikely Tibetans will gain their autonomy before China's authoritarian government is eliminated. But that possibility inched closer to reality with China's recently announced selection of the next Panchen Lama, a move that included a renunciation of the candidate picked by the exiled Dalai Lama. How could this act hasten the independence of Tibet? Just as Soviet leaders lost power when their credibility unravelled, now the Chinese government's controversial decision to become the supreme arbiter in the selection of the Panchen Lama has revealed the vulnerability of its own rulers.

The Panchen Lama, Tibet's second most holy and revered leader, is not just a religious leader. He has historically been Tibet's second most powerful political leader as well. In the past, the communists acknowledged this by appointing the old Panchen Lama to a number of high-profile, though relatively powerless, political positions. Now by publicly proclaiming that they have to select Tibet's next Panchen Lama, the Chinese are acknowledging that their own civil government is inadequate and that the new Panchen Lama must continue to exercise a major political role in Tibet.

In the United States, this would be as if the Clinton administration were to say that President Clinton was the head of the government in all 50 states, but that in Hawaii one of the descendants of the old island kings could also rule, though Clinton, of course, would be the one to decide which of the descendants would have that power. Right now, even in Hawaii, few people pay any attention to who the real descendants of the old kings are and virtually no one, even pure-bred Hawaiians, vests them with any authority. But were the U.S. president to get involved in this process, most Americans would ask why the president didn't have enough authority to govern in Hawaii without also appointing a king to help him rule. The president would quickly become a laughingstock, not just in Hawaii, but in the other 49 states as well.

Similarly, if the Chinese government had let well enough alone and simply allowed the Tibetans to pick their own Panchen Lama, it would have showed that China's communist rulers were not defensive about their own leadership. Their government could have gradually extended its own authority and little by little eroded any position of Tibetan leadership until its power was hardly greater than that enjoyed by the present-day descendants of the old Hawaiian kings. This, in fact, is precisely what most Tibetans feared the Chinese were doing. But now the Chinese have overreached themselves, revealing their administrations to be on shaky ground not only in Tibet but in China.

Moreover this is not the first time a Chinese government's attempts to interfere in the selection of a Panchen Lama has led it astray. In 1942, the Tibetan government was in the midst of conducting the search for the new Panchen Lama when a Tibetan who was a member of the Chinese Central Executive Committee of the Guomindang government of Jiang Kaishek unilaterally proclaimed that a boy living in China was the new Panchen Lama. The Tibetan government refused to confirm this, but in 1949 the Guomindang government was driven out of the Chinese mainland by the communists and the Panchen Lama, approved by the old Chinese government, quickly transferred his allegiance to the Chinese communists, much to the chagrin of the Dalai Lama. It was this man who died in 1989 and whose successor the Chinese are now trying to pick.

The communists' experience with the old Panchen Lama, if not that of the Guomindang government, should at least have given them pause. For almost 20 years the Panchen Lama served as an ineffectual pawn of the Maoist government. But he never totally buckled down to them, and in the 1960s during the Cultural Revolution, the communists threw him in jail for 14 years. He languished in a cell near a former Red Guard named Wei Jingsheng, the man who in the late 1970s became China's most respected democratic dissident leader. Wei, whom the Chinese have recently re-imprisoned, later wrote about the incident and became a supporter of the Tibetan cause.

Though Tibetans and their supporters today worry that in picking a new Panchen Lama the Chinese will undermine further the authority of the traditional Tibetan leadership and erode what little hope the Tibetans have of restoring their state, the fate of the last Panchen Lama should make them feel much better. The Guomindang government's interference in the selection of a new Panchen Lama had no effect on the old Tibetan government. It was simply another factor in undermining the authority of a decaying Chinese regime. Later, the mistreatment of the Panchen Lama, in spite of his long years of support for the Chinese, not only aroused the ire of his Tibetan compatriots against the Chinese, but helped build sympathy for the Tibetans by dissidents such as Wei Jingsheng. The Chinese communist interference this time in the selection of a new Panchen Lama may have more dire implications for the Chinese than for the Tibetans.

[Lee Feigon is chair of the East Asian studies department at Colby College. He is author of "Demystifying Tibet: Unlocking the Secrets of the Land of Snows"]