In this ChinaFile dialogue with several experts on Chinese religion, I posit that two Dallai Lamas are likely to emerge in the coming years:

China’s playbook for the Dalai Lama’s succession will be quite straightforward: Beijing will ignore everything that the current Dalai Lama says and try a rerun of the Panchen Lama succession in 1995, which worked out quite well for the authorities.

For those who don’t remember, the old Panchen Lama died in 1989, and in 1995 both the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Dalai Lama camps anointed their own successors. Each one claimed tradition, with the Chinese Communist Party rolling out a series of largely invented customs about golden urns to say that it, as the successor to the Qing dynasty, was following what had gone on since time immemorial, or something to that effect.

Whatever the truth, the tactic ultimately worked in China’s favor: There are two Panchen Lamas, and the power of that position has been fragmented.

Fast forward to now: If Beijing can do the same thing, that’s a big win for the Party’s ethnic policy. Some Tibetans will follow the Dalai Lama approved by the exiles because he essentially will have the imprimatur of the current Dalai Lama. But others won’t be so sure. China controls information and some will celebrate the Beijing-approved Dalai Lama.

More importantly, the new Dalai Lama won’t be appointed right away. Typically, a few years pass before the reincarnated Dalai Lama is found. Even then, the new Dalai Lama will be a kindergartener—not exactly someone mind-melding with Richard Gere and penning profound tracts on life in the 21st century.

The reality is it will be 20 years before the new Dalai Lama can weigh in on public debates. By then, it’s not clear what will be left of Tibetan culture anyway, especially with China racing forward with efforts to eradicate the language.

For decades, Perry Link has been the dean of foreign scholars writing about independent Chinese thinkers, so it’s a real honor to be reviewed by him in The New York Review of Books. In this review of Sparks, he points out that one of my goals is to redefine what we mean by China:

The word “China,” as used by Western journalists and government officials, almost always refers to the thoughts, values, positions, and plans of high-ranking members of the Chinese Communist Party. This is the case when one reads of “China’s” position on Ukraine, “China’s” effort to stimulate domestic consumption, and so on.

In Ian Johnson’s bracing book Sparks, “China” means something else. Johnson writes of Chinese people who uncover momentous truths about their country’s modern history and risk their careers, indeed their lives, to do it. Their values and actions are continuous with ancient moral traditions as well as with the daily life that lies beyond official reach today. They, too, are China.

Over the years, the NYRB has been something like my spiritual home. It was at the urging of its former editor, Bob Silvers, that I began my Q&A series with public intellectuals (still up on the Review’s site here) that gave me the impetus to begin researching Sparks in 2010.  And so it’s especially meaningful to be reviewed in its pages, even if the book came out a year and a half ago! But I think people read the Review for the long-term and its influence isn’t measured in book sales or blurbs that you can extract from a review. Instead, it’s the engagement with the book, which this review does beautifully. 

For people not familiar with the Review, you’ll note that the essay is paywalled but please do sign up and you’ll get a few free articles–and perhaps you’ll also subscribe. In an era of diminishing book review sections in newspapers, supporting family-run publications like the Review is especially important. 

How I got to know Wang Yi, the jailed pastor of Pray for Early Rain Covenant Church. This article in Christianity Today (简体字 / 正體字）is an introduction I wrote to a collection of his theological writings, Faithful Disobedience: Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church Movement, which has recently been published in the United States.

His thoughts go far beyond the specifics of China, raising universal questions about how religions and governments act. But they also illuminate the party’s new stricter policies on religions, and explain why he chose to go to jail for his belief.

Spending time with Wang Yi (which I describe in detail in The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao) was a privilege, and it still sickens me to think of him in jail, far from his wife and son. I can only hope that he makes it through to the other side and is reunited with them.

Thanks to Christianity Today for reprinting this introduction, and Hannah Nation and others for their editing of his writings