Why would anyone continue to trade, engage, and deal with a regime that abducts a six-year-old
By Benedict Rogers in UCA News
Thirty years ago, a six-year-old Tibetan boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, disappeared, together with much of his family.
This child and his family were kidnapped by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on May 17, 1995, and no one has heard from him or his relatives or known about his whereabouts or well-being ever since.
The kid had been named three days earlier as the 11th Panchen Lama, the second most important figure in Tibetan Buddhism after the Dalai Lama.
While there is no direct parallel in Catholicism, the closest comparison would be to say that the Vatican’s Secretary of State or the Dean of the College of Cardinals had been abducted, while the pope was in exile.
Or perhaps, in history, the Patriarch of Constantinople had disappeared.
In Anglicanism, it would be as if the Archbishop of York were kidnapped, while the Archbishop of Canterbury was in exile.
So the question before us today, 30 years on, is, where is Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, the 11th Panchen Lama, and his missing relatives?
And what kind of government abducts a six-year-old child just because he has been recognized as the reincarnation of a spiritual leader?
That is a question every government in the world — and especially across the democratic world — should be asking Beijing.
Today, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima will be 36 years old.
While he should be performing his spiritual and religious duties as a leader of Tibetan Buddhism, what is he actually doing?
Is he in prison? Under house arrest? Under what conditions?
Has he been forced to convert into a representative of the CCP?
Or a slave?
Are he and his missing relatives even alive?
These are the questions that should echo around the world tomorrow as we remember the anniversary of his abduction.
If President Donald Trump is serious about challenging China and embarking on a new trade deal, he should make it a condition that Beijing free the Panchen Lama.
When I was researching my book The China Nexus: Thirty Years In and Around the Chinese Communist Party’s Tyranny, and then preparing to travel to Dharamsala for an audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama at which I had the privilege of presenting my book, I read Isabel Hilton’s The Search for the Panchen Lama.
Published in 1999, it is still one of the best introductions to Tibet — and specifically to the Tibetans in exile in Dharamsala — and to this crucial question, which must remain on the international agenda: where is the Panchen Lama?
And how is the Panchen Lama?
The CCP’s inhumane treatment of the Panchen Lama, its aggressive attitude towards the Dalai Lama, and its barbaric repression of Tibet says everything about Beijing’s attitude to religious freedom, human rights and human dignity.
So too should its continuing genocide of the Uyghurs, its persecution of Falun Gong and barbaric practice of forced organ harvesting — recognized just last week in new and vital legislation in the US Congress introduced by Congressman Chris Smith.
The continued persecution of Catholics and other Christians across China has further intensified with the new religious restrictions, which took effect on May 1, restricting foreign missionary activity.
Six years ago, during the first Trump administration, the United States’ then Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, Sam Brownback, gave a profoundly important speech at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong — which I was once a member of — on religious freedom in China.
He said these memorable words: China — or more specifically, the CCP — is “at war with faith.”
That is true throughout the territories the CCP occupies, and especially today, in Tibet.
The question every person in the free world — and especially those in positions of influence, particularly the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, foreign ministers across the European Union, Canada, Australia, members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), and every special envoy or ambassador for freedom of religion or belief around the democratic world today — should ask is this:
Where is the Panchen Lama and his relatives?
Where is that six-year-old boy who is now a 36-year-old man?
To the regime in Beijing, if you have nothing to hide, nothing of which to be ashamed, then release the Panchen Lama and allow him to engage peacefully and spiritually with his Tibetan community worldwide.
To the regime in Beijing, if you have nothing to hide, why not tell us the thirty-year story of that six-year-old kid and his relatives you snatched in 1995?
And to the world: why would you continue to trade, engage, and deal with a regime that abducts a six-year-old kid?
Until kid-snatching stops, business should not continue as normal.
Kidnapping is bad; kid-snatching is even worse.
We should stop dealing with a gangster regime that snatches a six-year-old kid.
Those are questions our new Pope Leo XIV should consider very carefully as he reviews the Church’s agreement with the kidnappers in Beijing. And he should lead the world tomorrow in calls to free the Panchen Lama.
This article was originally published in UCA News.