Thirty years ago today, Chinese authorities disappeared a six-year-old Tibetan boy and his family. They haven’t been heard from since – but the impunity enjoyed by the Chinese government continues to fuel threats to religious freedom, collective punishment, enforced disappearances, and arbitrary detention.
In early 1995, the Dalai Lama identified a young boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, as the incarnation of the Panchen Lama, Tibetan Buddhism’s second highest-ranking monk. But the government, then headed by Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin, refused to acknowledge the Dalai Lama’s decision, and identified another child for the role. To prevent Tibetans from becoming loyal to the boy chosen according to religious traditions, authorities opted to abduct him and his family.
But this story didn’t end in 1995: the genuine Panchen Lama and his family are far from Beijing’s only Tibetan victims of enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention. Databases of Tibetans wrongfully detained currently reflect grim descriptions: “life imprisonment,” “forcible disappearance,” and, chillingly, “no further information.” Chinese government restrictions on information make definitive conclusions difficult, but research that likely underestimates counts of political prisoners shows that while Tibetans comprise only half a percent of China’s total population, they made up 8 percent of all prisoners of conscience sentenced between 2019 and 2024.
In 2017, United Nations human rights experts tasked with tracking arbitrary detention assessed the case of Tashi Wangchuk, a Tibetan shopkeeper, and determined that he had been wrongfully detained for his wholly legal advocacy in support of Tibetan-medium education. In the same decision the experts also argued that the scope and scale of such abuses across China might be so great such that they might constitute a crime against humanity.
It is possible Beijing will never clarify how, let alone how many, Tibetans have died in state custody. Even in high-profile cases authorities have refused to provide the remains of and key information to family and religious community members. The body of revered monk Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, who died in July 2015 after being tortured in prison, was swiftly cremated, preventing an investigation. Questions are swirling about Tulku Hunkar Dorjee, a well-known monk who fled political pressure to Vietnam, where he died under highly questionable circumstances in April 2025; he too was cremated without family consent, but with Chinese officials present.
Beijing’s efforts to erase Tibetans’ distinct identity is not limited to sometimes lethal ill-treatment in detention, or to silencing community leaders. In an effort to permanently disrupt the transmission of culture from one generation to the next, Tibetan medium education has been virtually eradicated in coercive boarding schools for children as young as four. Beijing’s claims of eradicating poverty across Tibetan areas are built on widespread human rights violations: seizures of land, water, and other resources; infrastructure development devoid of consultation; deep-seated discrimination against Tibetans in employment and education. State control of religion – from approving texts and clergy to managing monasteries – is pervasive, and punishments for violations severe. Monk Choegyal Wangpo is scheduled for release in September 2039; his “crime” was to talk to fellow monastics in Nepal.
Some democracies continue to call on Beijing to release the genuine Panchen Lama and his family, and decry other violations against Tibetans, including enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention. Over the years many democracies’ senior leaders have met with the Dalai Lama, and will no doubt send him good wishes as he marks his 90th birthday this July.
But absent tougher measures, Beijing is unlikely to change its conduct. When diaspora Tibetans go to the polls to elect a new exile government, and when succession to the Dalai Lama begins, democracies should support Tibetans’ choices, and publicly reject Beijing’s efforts to undermine or control either process. No democracy should receive Chinese government officials representing Tibetan issues until the genuine Panchen Lama and his family have been released.
And when Chinese officials assert, as they occasionally do under pressure, that the genuine Panchen Lama and his family are fine and happy with their lives, democracies should ask to visit them in person and reject this unverified claim for what it truly reflects: an intent by Beijing to continue covering up its ongoing crimes against humanity. The arbitrary detentions and enforced disappearances inflicted on generations of Tibetans should motivate the formation of international efforts to gather evidence of these widespread, systematic violations with the goal of holding Chinese government officials accountable – an approach that might help spare people across China more decades of abuses.