Today marks the 53rd anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule, an anniversary that, sadly, will go unnoticed in most parts of the world.
More than 30 Tibetans have set themselves alight in the past year in protest against Beijing’s repressive and destructive rule in the so-called Tibetan Autonomous Region and other areas.
Many of these immolations and protests have occurred in Aba prefecture, Sichuan Province, in what is euphemistically referred to as “predominantly Tibetan areas.” What most wire agency reports fail to say is that these areas were traditionally part of the Kham region, whose people, the Khampas, started armed resistance against Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule in 1956, after their region was merged into Sichuan Province in 1955.
Free Tibet, the International Campaign for Tibet and other rights groups say the escalation in self-immolations shows the growing desperation and despair of the Khampas and other ethnic Tibetans under Chinese rule. That rule became even more draconian after the huge anti-Han, anti-Beijing riots of 2008, in which hundreds of Han-owned establishments and government offices were torched and hundreds of people killed.
Beijing tried for decades to suppress Tibetan Buddhism, barring Tibetans from practicing their faith. This prohibition was gradually eased in the 1980s, as Beijing realized how profitable it was to let foreign tourists into Lhasa and some other areas of the Tibetan Autonomous Region. However, many Tibetan areas, especially in Sichuan, continue to remain off-limits.
When suppressing religious practices failed to quench the Tibetans’ support for Buddhism, the Dalai Lama and preserving their way of life, Beijing turned to another method — flooding Lhasa and the Kham regions of Sichuan with Han migrants — just as it has done in Xinjiang to make Uighurs a minority in their homeland.
It has also continued its campaign to break Tibetans’ ties with their culture through pro-Mandarin policies. As Free Tibet noted on its Web site on Sunday, up to 700 Tibetan students protested upon discovering that their history, biology, chemistry, math and other textbooks, which had been in Tibetan, had been replaced by Chinese-language texts.
The CCP recently launched a “patriotic education campaign” for temples, which have been asked to display the portraits of former leaders Mao Zedong (毛澤東) and Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), and Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), instead of the Dalai and Panchen lamas and other religious leaders.
Beijing has not only tried to demoralize and dehumanize the Tibetans by claiming to have “liberated” them from the oppressive policies of Tibetan rule, it has also done all it can to destroy the natural environment of Tibet through deforestation, strip-mining and the dumping of nuclear waste, turning much of the Tibetan plateau into an arid wasteland.
China’s rule over Tibet has made a mockery of its protests against Western imperialism and the destruction and looting of Chinese treasures by Western forces.
There will be a parade in Taipei today, starting at 2pm at the Zhongxiao Fuxing MRT station, to mark the 53rd anniversary of the uprising. Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission Minister Luo Ying-shay (羅瑩雪) has declined to take part because she is a government official, but anyone who values human rights and humanity should turn out for the march, or at least take time out from their busy day to spare a thought — and a prayer — for the Tibetans and their increasingly beleaguered existence.
The plight of the Tibetans — and the Uighurs — today could well be that of the Taiwanese tomorrow. If we don’t show we care about them, who will care about us?
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long been expansionist and contemptuous of international law. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), the CCP regime has become more despotic, coercive and punitive. As part of its strategy to annex Taiwan, Beijing has sought to erase the island democracy’s international identity by bribing countries to sever diplomatic ties with Taipei. One by one, China has peeled away Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic partners, leaving just 12 countries (mostly small developing states) and the Vatican recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation. Taiwan’s formal international space has shrunk dramatically. Yet even as Beijing has scored diplomatic successes, its overreach
After more than a year of review, the National Security Bureau on Monday said it has completed a sweeping declassification of political archives from the Martial Law period, transferring the full collection to the National Archives Administration under the National Development Council. The move marks another significant step in Taiwan’s long journey toward transitional justice. The newly opened files span the architecture of authoritarian control: internal security and loyalty investigations, intelligence and counterintelligence operations, exit and entry controls, overseas surveillance of Taiwan independence activists, and case materials related to sedition and rebellion charges. For academics of Taiwan’s White Terror era —
After 37 US lawmakers wrote to express concern over legislators’ stalling of critical budgets, Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) pledged to make the Executive Yuan’s proposed NT$1.25 trillion (US$39.7 billion) special defense budget a top priority for legislative review. On Tuesday, it was finally listed on the legislator’s plenary agenda for Friday next week. The special defense budget was proposed by President William Lai’s (賴清德) administration in November last year to enhance the nation’s defense capabilities against external threats from China. However, the legislature, dominated by the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), repeatedly blocked its review. The
In her article in Foreign Affairs, “A Perfect Storm for Taiwan in 2026?,” Yun Sun (孫韻), director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington, said that the US has grown indifferent to Taiwan, contending that, since it has long been the fear of US intervention — and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) inability to prevail against US forces — that has deterred China from using force against Taiwan, this perceived indifference from the US could lead China to conclude that a window of opportunity for a Taiwan invasion has opened this year. Most notably, she observes that
RSS