In the years since, he has watched with alarm as China has continued its efforts to force Tibetans to assimilate, using tactics that include placing Tibetan children in boarding schools where they learn in Mandarin and are taught that the Chinese liberated Tibetans from serfdom. He also delivers blunt criticism of China’s treatment of its own citizens.
“Judging by Xi’s last decade in office, when it comes to individual freedom and everyday life, China seems to be reverting to the oppressive policies of Mao’s time, but now enforced through state-of-the-art digital technologies of surveillance and control,” he writes.
The Dalai Lama also addresses the fraught issue of his own succession.
Tibetan Buddhists believe that the Dalai Lama is the 14th reincarnation of previous Dalai Lamas, and that he is an enlightened being who returns in successive lives to continue his work as a spiritual leader. But the Dalai Lama has warned that China might try to choose the 15th Dalai Lama after his death, as it has done with the Panchen Lama, another high-level Tibetan spiritual leader.
To avoid Chinese interference, the Dalai Lama has said he will reincarnate in “the free world,” outside Tibet or China. And when he turns 90 this year, he writes, he will consult Tibetan religious leaders and citizens about whether they want to end the institution of the Dalai Lama altogether.
“Voice for the Voiceless” will be published by William Morrow in the United States and HarperNonFiction in Britain on March 11, and later released in Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, France, Holland and Brazil. It is also being published in Tibetan and translated into Chinese, in hopes that it might influence some Chinese readers, said Thupten Jinpa, the Dalai Lama’s longtime translator, though the book will very likely be banned in China.
“He wanted a testimony and an account of the evolution of his thinking,” Jinpa said. “This book is an attempt to present in a single volume all of his efforts, in not only reaching out to the Chinese for a negotiated settlement, but also rebuilding Tibetan civilization in exile.”
