OPINION
As China continues to disappear Tibet’s 11th Panchen Lama Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, whom it abducted with his family 31 years ago at six years of age with absolute impunity to this day, Ashu Maan* makes the point that you can take away the Tibetan people’s religious leader, ban his photograph, forbid his name, but the belief that animated his recognition, the tradition that made him meaningful, the love that Tibetans carry for their spiritual heritage, none of that fits in a detention facility.
On a spring morning in May 1995, a six-year-old boy named Gedhun Choekyi Nyima was taken from his home by Chinese government agents along with his parents. He was never seen again.
He had just been recognised by the Dalai Lama as the 11th Panchen Lama, one of the most sacred titles in Tibetan Buddhism. Within days of that recognition, the Chinese state erased him. No trial. No charges. No explanation. Just silence that has now stretched across thirty-one years. Gedhun Choekyi Nyima turned thirty-seven years old on 25 April this year. Somewhere. Somehow. But the world doesn’t know where, and Beijing intends to keep it that way.
Why the Panchen Lama Matters
To understand why China moved so swiftly and so ruthlessly against a child, you need to understand what the Panchen Lama represents. In Tibetan Buddhism, the Panchen Lama is the second-highest spiritual authority after the Dalai Lama. But their relationship is more than a hierarchy; it is a sacred bond of mutual recognition. Traditionally, each helps identify the other’s reincarnation after death, a process that has guided the continuity of Tibetan religious leadership for centuries.
This is precisely what made Gedhun Choekyi Nyima a threat to Beijing.
The Chinese Communist Party has long viewed the Dalai Lama, currently in exile in India —as a political adversary who represents Tibetan aspirations for autonomy. If the Panchen Lama helps recognise the next Dalai Lama, then controlling who holds that title becomes a matter of enormous political consequence for the Party.
By seizing Gedhun and installing their own approved candidate, a boy named Gyaltsen Norbu, whose family reportedly has close ties to the Communist Party, Beijing effectively placed itself at the centre of one of Buddhism’s most sacred traditions. It was a calculated move. Spiritual authority, weaponised as a political instrument.
A Family Swallowed by the State
In the days following Gedhun’s recognition by the Dalai Lama, Chinese authorities moved fast. The boy and his parents were taken into custody. No formal arrest was announced. No legal process was followed. They simply disappeared into the machinery of the Chinese state. For years afterwards, Beijing’s only response to international inquiries was a terse assurance that the family was “living normally” and that their privacy should be respected. It was a statement offered without evidence, without access, and without any mechanism for independent verification, and it has remained China’s position ever since.
Think about what that means. A government abducts a six-year-old child, holds him and his parents incommunicado for over three decades, and asks the world to simply take their word that everything is fine. Meanwhile, inside Tibet, even speaking his name carries risk. Photographs of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima are banned. Discussing his case can invite state harassment. The Chinese government has not merely imprisoned this family — it has attempted to erase them from memory, to make their existence a subject too dangerous to acknowledge.
The World Has Not Forgotten — But Has It Done Enough?
The international response over the past thirty-one years has been consistent in its concern and, unfortunately, limited in its impact. The United Nations, along with five separate human rights mandates including the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, has repeatedly condemned China’s actions and demanded accountability. The European Parliament has passed resolutions calling on Beijing to disclose the Panchen Lama’s whereabouts. Governments and human rights organisations across the world have raised the case in bilateral meetings, international forums, and public statements.
And yet Gedhun remains missing.
This is not a failure of awareness. It is a failure of consequence. China has faced no meaningful cost for one of the most brazen enforced disappearances of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. When a government can abduct a six-year-old recognised religious leader, hold him for over three decades, and face nothing more than diplomatic statements in response, it reveals something uncomfortable about the limits of international human rights mechanisms when confronted with a powerful state that simply refuses to engage.
A Moment That Demands More Than Remembrance
The 31st anniversary of Gedhun’s disappearance is not just a date to mark solemnly on a calendar. It is an occasion that should prompt governments, particularly those with significant Buddhist populations and cultural ties to Tibetan traditions, to move beyond symbolic gestures.
Countries like India, Japan, South Korea, Mongolia, and Taiwan carry a particular moral weight in this conversation. They share spiritual and cultural bonds with Tibetan Buddhism that go beyond geopolitics. Their voices, raised in unison and sustained over time rather than offered as one-off statements, could carry a different kind of force.
But this isn’t only a cause for Buddhist nations. The disappearance of a child for exercising, or rather, for simply being recognised in a religious role, is an affront to principles that transcend any single faith or culture. It is about whether states can weaponise religion without consequence.
It is about whether a government can silence a people’s spiritual identity by force. It is about whether the international community’s commitment to human rights is a living principle or a rhetorical convenience.
What Thirty-One Years of Silence Means for Tibet
For Tibetans, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima’s disappearance is not an abstract human rights issue. It is personal. It is present. It is woven into the daily reality of living under a government that views their culture, their language, their religion, and their identity as threats to be managed rather than rights to be protected.
China’s installation of its own Panchen Lama is not merely a political manoeuvre; it is an attempt to hollow out Tibetan Buddhism from the inside, to replace its organic spiritual authority with a state-approved replica. Many Tibetans do not recognise Gyaltsen Norbu as legitimate.
He is widely referred to by critics as the “Panchen Zuma”, a Tibetan term for a fake or counterfeit. His authority exists on paper and in official Chinese media, but not in the hearts of a people whose faith runs far deeper than state decree. What the Chinese government has never seemed to fully grasp or perhaps grasps all too well and fears, is that you cannot imprison a people’s soul.
You can take away their leader. You can ban his photograph. You can forbid his name. But the belief that animated his recognition, the tradition that made him meaningful, the love that Tibetans carry for their spiritual heritage, none of that fits in a detention facility.
A Man the World Never Got to Know
Gedhun Choekyi Nyima is now thirty-seven years old. An entire life has passed in state custody, his childhood, his adolescence, his young adulthood, all of it unwitnessed by anyone outside the walls of wherever China is keeping him. We don’t know if he has been educated or isolated. We don’t know if he knows who he is or who the world once recognised him to be. We don’t know if he is well. We don’t know anything. And that is the most damning fact of all. In 2026, with all of humanity’s tools for documentation, communication, and accountability, a government can still make a person simply disappear and face no reckoning for it.
The 11th Panchen Lama deserves to be free. His parents deserve to be free. The Tibetan people deserve the right to their own religious traditions, their own spiritual leadership, and their own future, determined by their faith and their community, not by the calculations of a government that fears what they represent.
Thirty-one years is too long. The silence must end.
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* Ashu Mann is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Land Warfare Studies. He was awarded the Vice Chief of the Army Staff Commendation card on Army Day 2025. His research focuses include the India-China territorial dispute, great power rivalry, and Chinese foreign policy. His current research area is China with a particular focus on China’s atrocities in Tibet.