Obviously the abduction was a political move by the Chinese government in its breaking of the authority of the Tibetan theocracy.
Tenzin Gyatso, as possibly the only globally known Buddhist, does a disservice in conflating the terms reincarnation and rebirth. If they are taken in everyday parlance to mean the same thing, then fine, use them interchangeably. But they do not in Buddhism. Reincarnation, as properly understood is not a Buddhist teaching whereas rebirth is. ("Reincarnation means there is a soul that goes out of your body and enters another body. That is a very popular, very wrong notion of continuation in Buddhism. If you think that there is a soul, a self, that inhabits a body, and that goes out when the body disintegrates and takes another form, that is not Buddhism." - Thich Nhat Hanh) *
Why does Tenzin Gyatso make this conflation? Perhaps he thinks they are interchangeable in English. Perhaps it has its roots in the indigenous Bon religion. I suspect the more fundamental reason is that he was born into his dual role (both political AND religious leader) within a theocracy. On the religious side, Buddhism teaches rebirth and that there is no soul to reincarnate in another body. But on the political authority side, reincarnation and of course public announcement and recognition of the next generation of leaders maintains the line of authority, just like a king passing it on to his male heir. This contradiction is embedded in the nature of Tibetan theocracy. Gyatso has tried to separate the roles of religious and political leadership but it is far too late.
Here is a sense of the distinction between reincarnation and rebirth, by none other than Tenzin Gyatso himself, whilst obviously wearing his religious, rather than political, hat (the big yellow one) -
"Among the ancient schools of thought, which accepted the notion of continuity of consciousness, there were several non-Buddhist philosophical schools which regarded the entity, the ‘I’ or ‘self,’ which migrated from existence to existence as being unitary and permanent. They also suggested that this ‘self’ was autonomous in its relationship to the psycho-physical components that constitute a person. In other words they believed or posited that there is an essence or ‘soul’ of the person, which exists independently from the body and the mind of the person.
However, Buddhist philosophy does not accept the existence of such an independent, autonomous entity. In the Buddhist view, the self or the person is understood in terms of a dynamic interdependent relationship of both mental and physical attributes, that is to say the psycho-physical components which constitute a person. In other words our sense of self can, upon examination, be seen as a complex flow of mental and physical events, clustered in clearly identifiable patterns, including our physical features, instincts, emotions, and attitudes, etc., continuing through time." *
* -
The Buddhist Teachings on Rebirth
