Published by: World Tibet Network News 96/04/02 18:00 GMT

The Seattle Weekly

March 20, 1996

China's regime has taken flak for its recent missile-rattling at Taiwan, but they scored some fine publicity in the March 10 Sunday Seattle Times. A two-column photo, from China's official Xinhua News Service via the Associated Press, showed the winsome 6 year-old whom Beijing has designated as the Panchen Lama, Tibet's number-two monk. The item below, which combined material from Xinhua/AP and Reuters, concluded: "The enthronement of the boy superseded the announcement of a different reincarnation by the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled god-king. China anneced Tibet in 1950."

Though officially atheist themselves, the Chinese now presume to dictate Tibet's Buddhism. This imposed "enthronement " hardly supersedes the legitimate Panchen Lama in the view of Buddhist tradition or the Tibetans themselves; the poor tyke on his "throne" eerily recall Pu Yi, the puppet Chinese emperor installed by the Japanese. Meanwhile, Tibetan rights workers report that the original Panchen Lama, his family, and the monks who liiked after him have all disappeared in Beijing, making him "world's youngest political prisoner." "Religion comes our of the barrel of a gun," that enlightened master Mao might say today."

To call China's 1949-50 invasion of Tibet and the brutal suppression that's followed an "annexation" is like saying Germany and Russia "annexed" Poland in 1939. And to call the Dalai Lama a "god-king" is like calling the pope the "god-king of Catholicism." Beijing prefers such terms, so redolent of primitive superstrtion, and they show up often enough in US media. But the Times usually uses the more appropriate tag "spiritual leader" for the Dalai Lama.