Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday called on China to release the Panchen Lama, a prominent Tibetan religious leader whom Chinese authorities have held in prison for 25 years.
“It’s been a quarter-century since PRC authorities abducted the Tibetan Panchen Lama, when he was only six,” Pompeo tweeted. “He is now 31. The Chinese government should make known his whereabouts and allow believers of all religions in China to freely practice their faith without interference.”
Pompeo’s statement coincided with a release from the State Department telling China to release the Panchen Lama, who, in Tibetan Buddhism, is a religious figure with importance second only to the Dalai Lama. In the release, Pompeo noted that China has a long record of persecuting Buddhists in Tibet, where members of the sect have not been allowed to “select, educate, and venerate their religious leaders according to their traditions and without government interference.”
Pompeo pointed out that the Chinese abduction of the Panchen Lama, which is thought to have occurred with his disappearance in 1995, is part of a regime of “severe repression and discrimination” for all religious groups in China.
“China’s persecution of the Panchen Lama is not unusual,” Pompeo said. “The United States remains deeply concerned about the PRC’s ongoing campaign to eliminate the religious, linguistic, and cultural identity of Tibetans.”
Pompeo, a frequent critic of China, has, in the past, called upon the communist state to release religious prisoners both in Tibet and in Xinjiang, where more than 1 million Uighur Muslims are held in camps that Pompeo has called “reminiscent of the 1930s.” During a speech at the Vatican in 2019, Pompeo told leaders to “gird” themselves for a struggle with China for the “defense of human dignity and religious freedom.”
“When the state rules absolutely, God becomes an absolute threat to authority,” he said of the Chinese regime.
A report released to the State Department in April by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a nonpartisan federal watchdog, recommended that the U.S. threatens to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in China. It highlighted the country’s persecution of Uighur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and many Christian minorities as the main reason.
The report also suggested that the U.S. sanctions Chinese party leaders in Xinjiang, many of whom were also party leaders in Tibet when the regime first began persecuting Buddhists there.
