Civic groups commemorating the 1959 Tibetan uprising in Taipei yesterday called for an end to China’s use of state-run residential schools to “exterminate” Tibet’s culture and language.
Kelsang Gyaltsen Bawa, representative to Taiwan of the Tibetan government in exile, one of the organizers of yesterday’s event, said that students at the schools are taught exclusively in Mandarin and forbidden from learning about Tibet’s history.
The Chinese government should cease its attempts to “exterminate” Tibet’s religious and cultural traditions by forcing people to study a Han-centric curriculum, Bawa said.
Photo: CNA
The UN said that as of last year, nearly 1 million Tibetan students attended state-run residential schools, which have been described as a form of “abduction and forced assimilation” by the European Parliament.
Tibetan Youth Association in Taiwan president Kunchok Lhakpa called on China to stop construction of a hydroelectric dam in Sichuan Province, which opponents say would submerge several ancient Tibetan monasteries.
Chinese police last month arrested more than 1,000 people protesting against the dam, nearly all of whom are still in detention, Lhakpa said.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
Since the Tibetan uprising against Chinese communist rule on March 10, 1959, Tibetans have had no freedom and no human rights, Lhakpa said.
“The Chinese communists claim Tibet has become more open these past decades, and that Tibetans are living a great life. These claims are not true — no matter how beautiful Tibetans are on the outside, nothing compares to a lack of freedom on the inside,” Lhakpa said.
Li Wen (李問), who represented the Democratic Progressive Party at the commemoration, said that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army “forced” Tibetans to agree to the Seventeen-Point Agreement a year after invading in 1950.
Yet within less than a decade, Beijing breached the clauses in the agreement that said religion and customs should be respected, leading to the uprising in March 1959.
Following a violent crackdown by the Chinese government, the Dalai Lama fled to India, where he later formed a Tibetan government in exile.
An annual commemoration of the uprising has been held in Taipei since 2004.
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