China?s White Paper On Tibet Is A Whitewash

Like past every year, Beijing once again ‘celebrated’ its colonial occupation of Tibet this year too. But this time it was a special anniversary as China completed 70 years of its rule over Tibet. To mark it as a special day this time, the State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) issued a ‘White Paper’, titled “Tibet Since 1951: Liberation, Development and Prosperity”. Though this paper makes big claims about how the people of Tibet have benefited under the Chinese, yet in reality it is nothing less than an act of whitewash over the inhuman acts and excesses, committed by the Communist government of China, against the people of its colony Tibet since the first day of occupation.

The choice of subjects and claims made on each subject in this ‘White Paper’ only exposes the guilty conscience of China’s communist rulers of Tibet. It’s a challenge to the conscience of the free world that this Chinese White Paper shamelessly attempts to interpret and present all its colonial policies and exploitation of Tibet as an ‘act of favour’ to the people of Tibet over the past seven decades.

It was on 23rd May 1951 when Chairman Mao’s ‘Radio Peking’ stunned the world by announcing that the delegation of the government of Tibet had signed a ’17-Point Agreement’ with the Chinese government under which it had ‘agreed’ to merge Tibet with China. The stunned audience included the Dalai Lama too. When this announcement was made for the first time on ‘Radio Peking’, the 16-year-old Dalai Lama, the ruler and supreme spiritual leader of Tibet, was himself listening to this Chinese broadcast about 4000 km away from Beijing on his personal old Bush radio. He had been shifted to a monastery near the Indian border in Southern Tibet following threats of blood bath by the Chinese army.

Narrating his experience of that fateful evening in his autobiography Freedom in Exile, the Dalai Lama says, “I could not believe my ears. I wanted to rush out and call everybody in, but I sat transfixed…. I felt physically ill as I listened to this unbelievable mixture of lies and fanciful clichés.” Referring to what some members of the Tibetan delegation narrated later, he says, “They were forced to sign the ‘Agreement’ under duress and to use counterfeit seals of the Tibetan state.”

The White Paper repeats China’s much touted claims about Tibet being an ‘integral part of Chinese territory.’ As a proof it refers to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and says that the “central government (it) exercised sound governance over Tibet.” Beijing rulers forget that it was the Qing Dynasty who ruled over the Han Chinese for three Centuries. The Qing Dynasty were the Manchu rulers of Manchurian origin and not Chinese origin. The Qing rule lasted in Lhasa only for two years between 1910 and 1911. Also that the first ever ‘Republic of China’ was established only in 1912 after the fall of Qing Dynasty. It was in 1935 that the ‘Republic of China’ of the Han Chinese race occupied Manchuria to make it a part of ‘Republic of China’. Even before the Qing Dynasty, the Mongols ruled over the Han Chinese for another three Centuries. Xi Jinping and his fellow Han communists today don’t want to remember that it was Tibetan Dalai Lama’s influence over Kublai Khan as his Guru which helped the Han Chinese to be saved from racial genocide at the hands of Mongol kings in China.

The Paper tries to paint the traditional Tibetan system as one of ‘serfdom’ and to justify all the socialist and communist ‘reforms’ brought into Tibetan system as a “fulfillment of desire of ‘local’ Tibetan populations”. But it very smartly hides the fact that more than 1.2 million Tibetans have died because of Chinese atrocities in Tibet. Even Beijing’s own collaborator – the 10th Panchen Lama had publicly announced that Chinese rule in Tibet had brought more atrocities than the benefits they claimed to have brought to Tibet. This Paper tries to present all atrocities of the PLA and Communist Party of China in Tibet as a part of ‘democratic reforms.’ It justifies crushing Tibetan voices of dissent as the Party’s steps to defeat the ‘rebellion’ of the Tibetan ruling class “who wanted to maintain the old feudal system, based on serfdom.”

The ‘White Paper’ completely blacks out China’s consistent and massive efforts towards developing Tibet into China’s major military outpost. It white washes the development of military infrastructure over the past seven decades as an effort in the direction of “long term development of the region and the living standard of the people.” It presents all expenditures on developing this military infrastructure as “Central government’s fiscal transfer to Tibet every year..”

It boldly speaks of retail sales of consumer goods reaching at RMB 74.6 billion in 2020 as ‘2000 times larger than in 1959’ but escapes from mentioning those millions of Han Chinese settlers who occupy almost the entire business, industry and townships of Tibet who are the real consumers in today’s TAR. China refuses to accept that it is practicing ‘demographic colonialism’ by settling millions of Han Chinese into Tibet. The official population of TAR still remains at about 3 million. But this ‘White Paper’ fails to justify how can China spend maddening amounts of money on such a small population; or how can they consume 2000 times above the 1959 levels; or how the digital part of the local economy itself has ‘surpassed’ RMB 33 billion as claimed in the White-Paper? By this paper’s claims the “central government invested RMB 224 billion in Tibet’s education system.” But it nowhere mentions why Tibetan language has been banned in schools and Tibetan students are arrested for protesting against imposing Chinese language as the only medium of education?

Taking pride in converting today’s Tibet as a “part of the information expressway” China claims in this ‘White-Paper’ that the mobile phones have reached all administrative villages of TAR and that optical cable broadband has reached 99 percent of TAR. But it smartly skips the fact that mobile and broadband in Tibet today are helping Chinese communist party bosses to install and run millions of CCTV cameras to monitor each movement of Tibetan people. Also that a compulsory smart card on each Tibetan’s person and use of artificial intelligence technology has made it impossible for even a crowd of two Tibetans to plan and hold a public demonstration. That is why Tibetans have started taking to self-immolation (156 self-immolations so far) which can be monitored or stopped only after it has been committed by an individual.

The White Paper makes tall claims about ‘marked improvement’ in living standards, basic public services and a ‘complete victory’ over poverty but it nowhere mentions who are the real beneficiaries of all this ‘improvement’? Truth is that all this development has been done with those millions of Han Chinese citizens in mind whose number has far surpassed the local Tibetan population in most of the cities and towns. This paper especially talks of “protection and development of traditional culture” which, in the light of facts regularly pouring out of Tibet, sounds only as typical Marxist propaganda. It camouflages China’s agenda of cultural genocide and replacing Tibetan national identity with the Han identity as already achieved in almost all ‘National Minorities’ out of the total 56-Sisters which present day Peoples Republic China is made of. According to official Chinese census statistics, the Hans occupy over 82 percent of Chinese population today while the other 55 account for less than 8 percent. The best example is the Manchurians who once ruled over China for centuries. But today the total number of Manchurian speaking people is less than 1000 in a country of over 1.4 billion.

The paper boasts of “developing border areas and improving people’s lives” along 4000 km long borders with India, Nepal and Bhutan. It proudly mentions China’s new plan of “Construction of Villages of Moderate Prosperity in Border Areas” during 2017-2020 years and connecting each of these villages with highways. But it does not mention developing these new towns and villages on the strength of a large share of Han Chinese settlers. Most of these Han settlers have been brought in from mainland China or other parts of Tibet to replace the local Tibetans and are being used to work as new tools of intrusion and occupying border lands of these neighboring countries. This section of this Chinese White Paper should be seriously noticed by the government of India and state governments of Himalayan border states because utter economic and developmental negligence of Indian villages along this border has resulted into near emptying of these villages and resulting loss of India’s ‘first line of defence’ on our Himalayan borders.

Dedicating a special section of the White Paper to Tibet’s environment, the Chinese rulers of Tibet have only exposed their own guilty conscience and gone out of the way to whitewash their image on all such accounts where world opinion has been severely critical of China’s colonial activities in Tibet. Underlining Tibet as “the roof of the world” and “the water tower of Asia”, it unwittingly starts with the statement that “Tibet is an important guarantor of China’s environmental security.” It smartly skirts the issue of stealing billions of dollars’ worth timber from Tibet by China’s communist leaders in the past; ruthless exploitation of valuable minerals from Tibet; and damming and diverting Tibetan rivers to meet China’s water demands at the cost of riparian countries.

Contrary to international concerns about receding glaciers in Tibet due to China’s ruthless exploitation, the Paper claims that “Tibet’s ecosystems are now generally stable.” It sounds ridiculous that the White Paper justifies wanton destruction of monastic communities in Larung Gar and Yarchen Gar as an ‘outstanding performance’ for “cleanup campaign initiated in 2018 to regulate illegal riverside occupation, construction, and mining and waste…”

As expected, the White Paper is profusely critical of the Dalai Lama, the Government of India and Western countries who have been supporting Tibet and the Dalai Lama in their own ways. Rather than admitting that China’s colonial exploitation of Tibet and inhuman treatment of Tibetan people have led to numerous uprisings of Tibetan people against the Chinese rule in the past, it squarely blames the ‘Western forces’ saying, “Western forces have played an active role in all the outbreaks of unrest that have taken place in Tibet.” However, it is one of the rare admissions of Beijing that there have been anti-China uprisings in Tibet in the past. It severely criticises the US government for enacting the recent ‘Tibet Policy and Support Act of 2020” to “interfere in China’s domestic affairs.”

Although the Dalai Lama and his ‘government in exile’ in Dharamshala have been keen on patching up with the Chinese government by agreeing to what the Dalai Lama calls the “Middle Way”, the White-Paper out rightly and contemptuously rejects every single point of this proposal.

The ‘White Paper’ makes loud claims about the “remarkable results in ethnic and religious work” which include regional ethnic autonomy, sense of national identity and freedom of religious belief.” It smartly mentions that these are implemented “in accordance with the law” but nowhere mentions what exactly these laws are. For example the laws related to ‘freedom of religion’ bar the parents, teachers or anyone else to promote religion among children and minors. In practice, the Chinese Communist Party has always made it clear that freedom of religion means that everyone has freedom to oppose religion.

Under the heading “Freedom of religious belief is fully protected”, the paper refers especially to the “Measures of the Tibet Autonomous Region on the Management of Major Religious Activities, and Detailed Rules of the Tibet Autonomous Region for the Implementation of the Measures on the Management of Living Buddha Reincarnation of Tibetan Buddhism.” This refers to the much talked about ‘Order-5’ of the Chinese government in 2007 which was made into a national law the same year. This law puts the Communist Party of China as the final and supreme authority to certify and install incarnate Tibetan Lamas who are known as ‘Tulku’ in Tibetan and as ‘Living Buddha’ in Chinese parlance.

The White Paper makes it public that by 2020 China has certified 92 reincarnated ‘Living Buddhas’ who include the 11th Panchen Lama. But it nowhere mentions 6-year old Gedhun Choeky Nyima who was certified as the 11th Panchen Lama by the exiled Dalai Lama in 1995. The boy and his parents were immediately arrested and remained under the Chinese custody since then. The Paper talks about “more than 1,700 sites for Tibetan Buddhist activities with 46,000 monks and nuns, 4 mosques serving 12,000 native Muslims, and a Catholic church with more than 700 followers.” It clearly says that “in order to adapt religions to the Chinese context” the state has formulated measures. It goes into details of how China’s Tibetan Buddhist Institute and its 10 branches have more than 3000 monks and nuns who are engaged in monastic studies and activities.

This special emphasis on controlling the reincarnation system of Tibet and other religious Buddhist activities in this report card of past 70 years of Chinese colonialism in Tibet proves that the original policy of Mao and subsequent Chinese leaders to tame people of Tibet by destroying faith and religious institutions has failed. The new policy of the communist rulers of Tibet is to occupy Tibetan Buddhism from within and use it as a tool to perpetuate their colonial rule over Tibet.

In conclusion, the White Paper makes it abundantly clear that it is President Xi Jinping’s “Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” which is going to be the basic tune of China’s colonial rule over Tibet in coming years. By giving a clear message and warning to India the White Paper concludes with some key declarations which include the one saying, “We must uphold Xi Jinping’s strategy on governing the frontiers and ensuring stability in Tibet.” It means that it is China’s strong presence in Tibet which will ensure stability for China by keeping India unstable and under threat from the Tibetan borders.