Ottawa, December 13, 2023 – At the International Conference on Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity organized by Northern Justice Watch at the University of Toronto Scarborough on December 2, 2023, Sherap Therchin, Director of the Canada Tibet Committee, delivered a speech emphasizing the critical state of Tibetan culture, language, and religion under China’s assimilation policies, drawing attention to the plight of Tibetan children in state-run residential schools and the broader issue of cultural erasure. Therchin paralleled Tibet’s situation with Canadian efforts to preserve indigenous languages and highlighted China’s diversion tactics of focusing on economic growth to overshadow human rights abuses in Tibet.
Here is a complete transcript of the presentation by Sherap Therchin:
“Thank you the Northern Justice Watch for organizing this conference on genocide and crimes against humanity. And I am honoured to share the panel with the two incredible individuals who have contributed immensely in advocating for an end to the ongoing genocide of the Uyghur people.
I will be speaking on the state of human rights in Tibet, in context to the China’s ongoing campaign of assimilating Tibetan language, culture and religion.
Tibetan culture has survived for thousands of years and thrived even when under foreign occupation of Mongols in 13thcentury and Manchu in 17th century. In fact, the influence of Tibetan culture was such that Mongol rulers adopted Tibetan Buddhism. Unfortunately, today the Tibetan culture under the People’s Republic of China is under a great threat of being erased completely and the Tibetan language is right at the centre of this threat.
The human rights to education is protected in both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In fact, both of these treaties explicitly guarantee that minority groups must not be denied use of their own language either in community or otherwise.
Further, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights states that all peoples have the rights to self-determination including social and cultural development. The UN Convention against Discrimination in Education protects the rights of minorities to determine their own educational policy.
Here in Canada, the federal government has supported efforts by Indigenous Peoples to reclaim and revitalize their linguistic heritage, in part by adopting the Indigenous Languages Act in 2019. In the province of Quebec, more than 40 years have passed since provincial legislation required all children in that province be educated in the French language until the end of their secondary studies while also protecting the rights of English-speaking students to attend English-language schools.
It’s also interesting to note that the Government of China itself has adopted a “Regional National Autonomy Law” which clearly states in Article 37 that, the organs of self-government of national autonomous areas shall independently develop education for their nationalities… and shall, whenever possible, use textbooks in their own languages and use their languages as the medium of instruction.
Despite such guarantees, however, a suite of policies imposed across Tibet by the central government under the pretext of poverty alleviation or ecological protection have reinforced the pervasive assault on Tibet’s language and cultural traditions.
Residential School: Nearly a million children live in state-run residential schools on the Tibetan plateau. Chinese authorities subject these children to a highly politicized curriculum designed to strip them of their mother tongue, sever their ties to their religion and culture. Children as young as four have been separated from their parents and enrolled in boarding kindergartens under recruitment strategy based largely on coercion.
I wanted share here that there has been strong interest and support from the Canadian government and parliament on this issue. Earlier this year, the Parliamentary Subcommittee on International Human Rights, that is chaired by MP Sameer Zuberi, conducted a study on the residential school system in Tibet and published a report with 18 different recommendations to the government. And the Global Affairs Canada last month called on the Chinese government to end the practice of the residential school systems in Tibet, citing its own human rights and experience.
Mass relocation and trainings: The Chinese government has announced plans to forcibly relocate more than one hundred thousand Tibetans from their homes on the Tibetan Plateau in the next eight years. This announcement comes in addition to the forced displacement of 2 million Tibetans—representing more than two-thirds of the entire population of the Tibet Autonomous Region—without sufficient consultation or compensation since 2006.
The employment schemes for resettled residents appear to be designed to push individuals into becoming migrant labourers. On April 27, 2023, UN human rights experts expressed concern over labour programmes threatening Tibetan identity and stated “Hundreds of thousands of Tibetans have reportedly been ‘transferred’ from their traditional rural lives to low-skilled and low-paid employment since 2015, through a programme described as voluntary, but in practice their participation has reportedly been coerced,”. They noted that the labour transfer programme is facilitated by a network of ‘vocational training centres’, which focus less on developing professional skills and more on cultural and political indoctrination in a militarised environment.
Religious control: The Chinese government exercises strict control over religious institutions and practices in Tibet. Monasteries are closely monitored, and restrictions are imposed on the number of monks and nuns allowed to join. Furthermore, religious leaders, including His Holiness the Dalai Lama, are often portrayed negatively in state propaganda, while the government seeks to control the selection and education of important religious figures.
Upon any kind of questions on human rights in Tibet, China usually tries to counter the questions with talks about economic growth in Tibet, with examples focusing on GDP growth rate. Although China’s development continues to improve, Tibet remains at the bottom of all Chinese provinces with a Human Development Indicator of only .561 in a country with an overall ranking of .768 according to the UNDP. Tibet ranks lowest also in a living standard index which looks at social and economic indicators. Literacy indicators also remain low in Tibetan regions. Maternal mortality rate, according to 2009 Census, was 8 times higher in Tibet than in other parts of China.
Almost no passports have been issued to ordinary Tibetans since 2012. Meanwhile, the number of passports issued to Chinese nationals has risen by 20% each year in the same period of time. For those few Tibetans who have obtained travel documents, strict new regulations limit their activities outside of China and they are required to report for questioning by authorities upon return to Tibet.
Such heavy assault on the Tibetan identity and their rights is exacerbated by dystopian style surveillance. Last year, Citizen Lab from the University of Toronto published a report stating that approximately 1.2 million Tibetans have had their DNA samples extracted to construct extensive genetic database.
Also, China often dismisses such calls from the international community as interference in the state’s internal affairs. And such dismissive behaviour is partly based on claims that Tibet had always been part of China – a notion that has been successfully implanted in the minds of Chinese and international community through a psychological phenomenon developed by Soviet as disinformation tool called reflexive control where a state feeds manufactured information to the target people for so long that people begin to perceive it as true. And the world seems to have complied with this strategy because today we no longer talk about Tibet as an unresolved international conflict but limit to referring Tibet as issues of ethnic minority and human rights issues in China. We no longer talk about Tibet as the illegal annexation of Tibet by the Chinese military but limit to few components that are less objectionable to China. “
By Sherap Therchin