The grim spectacle of young monks, nuns and lay people setting themselves on fire to protest conditions in their homeland is a stark reminder of the gloom and despair that now prevails on the Tibetan Plateau. These acts of self-immolation — at least 36 since March last year — have been staged to protest the increasingly heavy controls that China’s government in Beijing has imposed on Buddhist religious practices. At the end of last month, a self-immolation occurred for the first time in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, which may be a powerful portent of new turmoil in Tibet.
The self-immolations are a stark rebuke to the Chinese government’s claims that the lives of many in Tibet have been improving. These singular acts of desperation, irrespective of their motives, should be viewed in the wider context of ongoing religious and political problems in Tibet. Current official Chinese policies threaten the existence of the Tibetan language, culture, religion, heritage and environment.
Simmering tensions have been fueled largely by the lengthy “re-education” campaigns imposed on the Tibetans, who are forced to publicly renounce their spiritual leader and profess patriotism and loyalty to China. The escalating situation in the Aba/Ngaba region, a heavily Tibetan area in Sichuan Province where tensions have led to the imposition of unprecedented security measures, is particularly worrisome.
Aba has long had one of the densest concentrations of Buddhist monks and monasteries anywhere in the world. The security crackdown to stem protests there and the virtual sealing off of the Kirti Monastery in Ngaba, where the first of the current wave of self-immolations occurred, appears merely to have spread protest farther afield. Article 36 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China guarantees all citizens the right to freedom of religion; therefore, religious freedom in Tibet should be respected.
In April, a group of 12 Nobel Peace Prize laureates sent a letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) urging him to “respect the dignity of the Tibetan people” and open “meaningful dialogue” with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan leaders. The US Senate and the European Parliament have adopted resolutions expressing their frustration over Chinese policies. There should be no doubt that the rest of the world is well aware of the gross violation of the Tibetan people’s fundamental rights and dignity.
China has legitimate aspirations to be accepted as a responsible stakeholder in global affairs. The best way for its government to achieve this goal is to demonstrate that it can care for the needs of all of the people living in China, including Tibetans, in a responsible manner. The Chinese government should contemplate the merits of greater openness in Tibet and put a stop to intimidation and harassment, which merely breed further frustration and resentment.
The fate of people arbitrarily imprisoned due to their religious beliefs and participation in recent protests adds to the growing worries about stability in Tibet. To ensure greater transparency, the Chinese authorities should lift restrictions on visits by independent international media and human rights monitors to provide as accurate a picture of the situation on the ground as possible.
The international community ought to initiate an open and honest dialogue with China at all levels, urging it to guarantee freedom of religion to all of its citizens in accordance with its international obligations — and its own laws.
Andre Glucksmann is a philosopher and essayist. Karel Schwarzenberg is foreign minister of the Czech Republic. Desmond Tutu is archbishop emeritus of Cape Town and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Richard von Weizsacker is a former president of Germany. H.R.H. Prince El Hassan bin Talal is the chairman and founder of the Arab Thought Forum and the West Asia-North Africa Forum. Vartan Gregorian is the president of Carnegie Corporation of New York. Michael Novak is a former US ambassador to the UN Commission on Human Rights. All signatories are members of the Shared Concern Initiative.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Jan. 1 marks a decade since China repealed its one-child policy. Just 10 days before, Peng Peiyun (彭珮雲), who long oversaw the often-brutal enforcement of China’s family-planning rules, died at the age of 96, having never been held accountable for her actions. Obituaries praised Peng for being “reform-minded,” even though, in practice, she only perpetuated an utterly inhumane policy, whose consequences have barely begun to materialize. It was Vice Premier Chen Muhua (陳慕華) who first proposed the one-child policy in 1979, with the endorsement of China’s then-top leaders, Chen Yun (陳雲) and Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), as a means of avoiding the
The last foreign delegation Nicolas Maduro met before he went to bed Friday night (January 2) was led by China’s top Latin America diplomat. “I had a pleasant meeting with Qiu Xiaoqi (邱小琪), Special Envoy of President Xi Jinping (習近平),” Venezuela’s soon-to-be ex-president tweeted on Telegram, “and we reaffirmed our commitment to the strategic relationship that is progressing and strengthening in various areas for building a multipolar world of development and peace.” Judging by how minutely the Central Intelligence Agency was monitoring Maduro’s every move on Friday, President Trump himself was certainly aware of Maduro’s felicitations to his Chinese guest. Just
A recent piece of international news has drawn surprisingly little attention, yet it deserves far closer scrutiny. German industrial heavyweight Siemens Mobility has reportedly outmaneuvered long-entrenched Chinese competitors in Southeast Asian infrastructure to secure a strategic partnership with Vietnam’s largest private conglomerate, Vingroup. The agreement positions Siemens to participate in the construction of a high-speed rail link between Hanoi and Ha Long Bay. German media were blunt in their assessment: This was not merely a commercial win, but has symbolic significance in “reshaping geopolitical influence.” At first glance, this might look like a routine outcome of corporate bidding. However, placed in
China often describes itself as the natural leader of the global south: a power that respects sovereignty, rejects coercion and offers developing countries an alternative to Western pressure. For years, Venezuela was held up — implicitly and sometimes explicitly — as proof that this model worked. Today, Venezuela is exposing the limits of that claim. Beijing’s response to the latest crisis in Venezuela has been striking not only for its content, but for its tone. Chinese officials have abandoned their usual restrained diplomatic phrasing and adopted language that is unusually direct by Beijing’s standards. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs described the
RSS