If you are referring to my first paragraph, I wasn’t speaking about the Panchen Lama (Don’t know why the paragraph’s didn’t show up) but rather non Yellow Hat Tibetan Budhists.

The Communist Party is not the only one engaged in a media and psy-ops campaign, it just happens to be that the exiled Tibetans are much more successful for a variety of reasons.

For example Younghusband, the selection of the latest Panchen Lama is not precisely what you made it out to be. In actuality, the communists when through a lengthy and detailed selection process based on established precedent and tradition carried out by the leading tulkus within Tibet. The choice as it happened to be was Gedhun Choekyi Nyima who is also the child espoused by the Lamaist clique. The problem arose when Chadrel Rinpoche who was part of the government sponsored search committee leaked the results to the exiles. What then happened was that the Dalai Lama proclaimed the boy as the reincarnate Panchen Lama ahead of the Chinese announcement, thereby stealing their thunder. Basically if the boy was to be installed as the Panchen Lama, it would be perceived that the government was simply following the Dalai Lama’s lead and that final authority (both secular and religious since in Tibet they were the same) belonged to the exile leader. Perception is key to this entire affair and rather than letting the Dalai Lama steal the initiative, the Chinese scrapped Gedhun Choekyi Nyima’s candidacy and re-selected Gyaincain Norbu, the “official” Panchen Lama of today, from the list of remaining finalists.

That would at least keep the Tibetans from being split by a sudden change in succession tradition. Whether Chinese leadership would agree to giving up their tradition of government domination over religious matters is another issue.