Dalai Lama turns 90

Landmark Anniversary: Gets Global Support in Challenge for China

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Leaders from India, the United States and Taiwan offered their support to Tibet's exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama on his 90th birthday yesterday, a landmark anniversary raising geopolitical questions for the future.

Tibetans fear China will eventually name a rival successor to the Dalai Lama, bolstering Beijing's control over Tibet, the territory it poured troops into in 1950 and has ruled ever since.

The man who calls himself a "simple Buddhist monk" celebrated in India, where he has lived since he and thousands of other Tibetans fled Chinese troops who crushed an uprising in their capital Lhasa in 1959.

The Dalai Lama says only his India-based office has the right to identify his eventual successor.