McCaul Introduces Amendment to Support Tibetans' Religious Freedom, Ability to Select Dalai Lama Successor

WASHINGTON - At this week's House Foreign Affairs Committee markup, Chairman Emeritus Michael McCaul (R-Texas) urged his colleagues to support his amendment, which updates makes undeniably clear that the U.S. government recognizes the Dalai Lama's succession as a private spiritual matter governed entirely by his office - and the CCP has no role.

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Remarks as delivered:

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In 2024, I led a bipartisan delegation to Dharamsala, India, and had the honor of sitting down with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He is one of the most remarkable persons I have ever met - full of warmth, wisdom, and full of humor. At one point he looked at me and smiled, and told me he plans to live to 110.

I hope he's right. But we cannot build American foreign policy on the hope that one man lives forever. The Dalai Lama has said he will not be reborn in China, but rather [in] freedom. The question [of] who succeeds the Dalai Lama is coming, and Beijing knows this.

Beijing has already built the machinery to hijack this process. Back in 2007, the Communist Party handed itself the supposed authority to approve who may and may not be reincarnated. Let that sink in - an officially atheist government claiming the power to license reincarnation for the Tibetan people. And just this March, the CCP instituted a new law - the Orwellian-named "Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress" - which stamps out minority languages, minority faiths, and minority cultures, all in the name of "ethnic unity."

In 2020, this committee did historic, bipartisan work by passing the Tibetan Policy and Support Act, establishing a powerful framework to defend the religious freedom of the Tibetan people. But as the CCP's tactics evolve, our statutory language must keep pace with that.

The Dalai Lama has already laid out how his successor is to be recognized after he is gone - placing that authority within his own office and the senior leaders of his faith. My amendment affirms that this is the process that U.S. policy recognizes, and the CCP has no role in that.

This is not only a matter of faith, Mr. Chairman. It is a matter of national security. If we sit on our hands, Beijing will name a counterfeit Dalai Lama - a spiritual figurehead loyal not to the Tibetan people, but to the Communist Party - and it will use him as an instrument of influence across the entire Himalayan region: in Nepal, in Mongolia, and right along the border of our partner, India. We cannot let the CCP weaponize a centuries-old institution of peace to extend its own control.

When I visited the Dalai Lama, again he told me, "I will not be reborn in China. I will be reborn in freedom." We must honor that wish by ensuring that this decision rests with him and his people - not with a government that has spent decades trying to erase them - and to erase him. Protecting Tibet has always been a bipartisan cause in this committee, and our law should say so just as clearly. So with that, Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to support the amendment, and I yield back.