Penpa Tsering in his Tibetan government in exile office in Mcleodganj, India.RUHANI KAUR/The Globe and Mail
The head of the Tibetan government-in-exile told a U.S. congressional hearing Tuesday that his people and culture will “die a slow death” if China does not change its policies toward them.
Penpa Tsering was one of several witnesses testifying before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), along with actor and long-time Tibet advocate Richard Gere. It was the first time Mr. Tsering had addressed U.S. lawmakers since his 2021 election as Sikyong, or president, of the Dharamshala, India-based Central Tibetan Administration. Tibetan leaders were sidelined in Washington for many years as the White House sought closer ties with Beijing.
“We have been vigorously working to amplify the Tibetan issue among U.S. lawmakers,” Tenzin Lekshay, a spokesman for the CTA, told The Globe and Mail. Thanks to lobbying by the Sikyong and other figures around the world, he added, “now we feel like the Tibetan issue is not just a Tibetan issue but an international issue.”
But even as repression and assimilation has continued in Tibet, it has not received the media or popular attention it once did. Mr. Gere, a prominent “Free Tibet” campaigner who has suffered professionally as Chinese influence in Hollywood has increased, said the Communist Party’s “process of assimilation and erasure is all too often concealed by Beijing’s intricate and powerful propaganda machine.”
The Globe reported earlier this year how Tibet has become an “information black hole” even for journalists and activists in the diaspora, due to ever-tightening surveillance and a dwindling number of Tibetan refugees making it out of China. This has resulted in far less media coverage and helped initially conceal policies such as the boarding school system, which has expanded dramatically in recent years and now encompasses more than a million children on the Tibetan plateau, according to United Nations experts.
“We are very disturbed that in recent years the residential school system for Tibetan children appears to act as a mandatory large-scale program intended to assimilate Tibetans into majority Han culture, contrary to international human-rights standards,” three UN special rapporteurs on education, culture and minority rights said in February, after the release of multiple reports drawing on Chinese government documents and witness testimony by the Tibet Action Institute.
The CECC, a bipartisan and influential body on China policy, said Tuesday’s hearing would “explore the diplomatic and policy options for the United States and other like-minded countries to help preserve Tibetan cultural heritage and to defend against threats and intimidation targeting Tibetans in the United States and around the world.” Among those expected to testify is Uzra Zeya, the State Department’s special co-ordinator for Tibetan issues.
Speaking last month, Ms. Zeya said she was “committed to working closely across the U.S. government and with our congressional allies to devise innovative policy and programming solutions to support our Tibetan friends.”
“We will continue to use all the tools at our disposal to promote accountability” for China’s human-rights abuses, she added.
The situation in Tibet is coming under increased scrutiny because of heightened suspicion of China and a push to call out Beijing’s human-rights abuses wherever they occur, as well as concerns about what will happen upon the death of the spiritual leader of Tibet, the 87-year-old Dalai Lama.
Since 2007, Beijing has said it must approve all reincarnations of the Dalai Lama, and it seems certain there will be a contested recognition of the next, the 16th, as there was with the Panchen Lama, the second-most important figure in Tibetan Buddhism. After the current Dalai Lama recognized Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as the 11th Panchen Lama in 1995, the six-year-old disappeared, and Beijing put forward its own candidate, Gyaincain Norbu, who now exercises the title inside China and sits on various government bodies. Mr. Norbu is not recognized by Tibetans overseas.
Lawmakers in Washington are expected to soon approve a bipartisan bill introduced last month that would make it official U.S. policy “that the Tibetan people are a people entitled to the right of self-determination under international law … and that the legal status of Tibet remains to be determined in accordance with international law.” Speaking Tuesday, Mr. Tsering said he “fervently hoped” the bill would become law.
Chinese officials react angrily to any criticism of their policies in Tibet, which Beijing increasingly claims was always part of China, despite its history as an independent kingdom. Speaking to reporters in Beijing the day the CECC hearing was announced, Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said the “U.S. has never given up its scheme to use Tibet-related issues to interfere in China’s internal affairs and contain China’s development.”