Beijing’s outrage at the Dalai Lama’s Grammy win says less about music and more about the Chinese Communist Party’s enduring fear of moral authority it cannot control.
After 14th Dalai Lama was awarded a Grammy for Meditation: The Reflections of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in the audiobook category, China’s foreign ministry accused unnamed parties of using art awards for “anti-China political manipulation.” The statement, delivered with familiar indignation, was meant as a rebuke. Instead, it served as an inadvertent confession.
China, a state that spends billions annually on cultural engineering, narrative control, and global influence campaigns, now claims to be offended by the politicisation of art.
The irony is difficult to miss.
The Dalai Lama accepted the award with what has long unsettled Beijing most calm restraint. “I receive this recognition with gratitude and humility,” he said, adding that he viewed it not as personal acclaim but as recognition of “our shared universal responsibility.” No condemnation. No slogans. No provocation. Just words about responsibility.
That was enough.
Beijing’s anger stems not from the Grammy itself but from what it represents: a global cultural institution recognising a figure China has spent decades trying to erase, discredit, or redefine as a “separatist.” Since his exile in 1959, the Dalai Lama has remained one of the most recognisable Tibetan voices worldwide, despite being banned, censored, or denounced inside China.
China’s claim that art is being “used” politically would carry more weight if the state itself were not one of the world’s most aggressive practitioners of cultural instrumentalisation. From state-approved films and music glorifying party ideology, to tightly controlled publishing, museums, and religious expression, Beijing has long treated culture not as a realm of free expression but as an extension of governance.
According to multiple academic and policy studies, China invests billions each year in global soft-power initiatives, including state media expansion, cultural exchanges tied to political messaging, and the promotion of “acceptable” narratives abroad. Domestically, artists, writers, and filmmakers face censorship, blacklisting, or detention if their work deviates from party doctrine.
Against this backdrop, China’s sudden concern about the purity of art appears selective at best.
The Grammy win also comes at a sensitive moment. Last year, the Dalai Lama confirmed plans to name a successor according to Tibetan Buddhist tradition, which holds that the Dalai Lama reincarnates after death through a spiritual process rooted in centuries-old religious practice. He has stated that his reincarnation will occur in the “free world,” outside the control of an atheist communist state.
Beijing has rejected this outright, insisting that any reincarnation must comply with Chinese law and receive government approval—a position that has alarmed Tibetans in exile and religious scholars alike. China’s insistence that it, rather than Tibetan religious authorities, has the final say over reincarnation has been widely criticised as a politicisation of faith itself.
It is in this context that Beijing’s accusation of “manipulation” rings hollow.
The Dalai Lama’s Grammy was not awarded for a political manifesto but for a meditation audiobook hardly a weapon of subversion. No campaign was launched. No state lobbied the Recording Academy. The award was collected on his behalf by musician Rufus Wainwright, one of several contributors to the recording.
What unsettles Beijing is not politics masquerading as art, but art that refuses to submit to politics.
For a government that tightly scripts history, regulates belief, and demands loyalty even from the dead, the idea that a non-violent monk in exile can still command global respect is deeply uncomfortable. Moral authority cannot be legislated. It cannot be censored into submission. And it cannot be revoked by press conference.
China’s reaction to the Dalai Lama’s Grammy does not expose Western manipulation. It exposes the fragility of a narrative that demands total control and panics whenever that control slips.
In condemning the award, Beijing has once again demonstrated the very politicisation it claims to oppose.
