China’s other water war – of rivers that originate in Tibet
January 15, 2018
By Brahma Chellaney
Globe and Mail, January 12, 2018 – While international attention remains on China’s recidivist activities in the South China Sea’s disputed waters, Beijing is also focusing quietly on other waters – of rivers that originate in Chinese-controlled territory such as Tibet and flow to other countries. As part of its broader strategy to corner natural resources, China’s new obsession is freshwater, a life-creating and life-supporting resource whose growing shortages are casting a cloud over Asia’s economic future.
By building cascades of large dams on international rivers just before they leave its territory, China is re-engineering cross-border natural flows. Among the rivers it has targeted are the Mekong, the lifeline of Southeast Asia, and the Brahmaputra, the lifeblood for Bangladesh and northeastern India.
With the world’s most resource-hungry economy, China has gone into overdrive to appropriate natural resources. On the most essential resource, freshwater, it is seeking to become the upstream controller by manipulating transboundary flows through dams and other structures.
Just as the Persian Gulf states sit over immense reserves of oil and gas, China controls vast transnational water resources. By forcibly absorbing Asia’s “water tower,” the Tibetan Plateau, in 1951, it gained a throttlehold on the headwaters of Asia’s major river systems. Its actions in more recent years have sought to build water leverage over its downstream neighbours.
For example, China has erected eight mega-dams on the Mekong just before the river leaves its territory, and is building or planning another 20. The dams give China control over the flow of water and nutrient-rich sediment essential to the livelihoods of 60 million people in Southeast Asia. With its clout, Beijing has rejected the treaty-linked Mekong River Commission and instead co-opted the vulnerable downstream nations in its own Lancang-Mekong Cooperation initiative, which lacks binding rules.
Similar unilateralism by China has fostered increasing water-related tensions with India, many of whose important rivers originate in Tibet.
In 2017, in violation of two legally binding bilateral accords, China refused to supply hydrological data to India, underscoring how it is weaponizing the sharing of water data on upstream river flows. The data denial was apparently intended to punish India for boycotting China’s Belt and Road summit and for last summer’s border standoff on the remote Himalayan plateau of Doklam.
The monsoon-swollen Brahmaputra River last year caused record flooding that left a major trail of death and destruction, especially in India’s Assam state. Some of these deaths might have been prevented had China’s data denial not crimped India’s flood early-warning systems.
Even as Beijing has yet to indicate if it would resume sharing data this year, a major new issue has cropped up in its relations with India – the water in the main artery of the Brahmaputra river system, the Siang, has turned dirty and grey when the stream enters India from Tibet. This has spurred downstream concern in India and elsewhere that China’s upstream activities could be threatening the ecosystem health of the cross-border rivers in the way it has polluted its own domestic rivers, including the Yellow, the cradle of the Chinese civilization.
After staying quiet over the Siang’s contamination for many weeks, Beijing claimed on Dec. 27 that an earthquake that struck southeastern Tibet in mid-November “might have led to the turbidity” in the river waters. But the flows of the Siang, one of the world’s most pristine rivers, had turned blackish grey before the quake struck.
China has been engaged in major mining and dam-building activities in southeastern Tibet. The Tibetan Plateau is rich in both water and minerals.
As China quietly works on a series of hydro-projects in Tibet that could affect the quality and quantity of downstream flows in South and Southeast Asia, it is apparently still toying with the idea of rerouting the upper Brahmaputra river system. An officially blessed book published in 2005 championed the Brahmaputra’s rerouting to the Han heartland. Recently, a Hong Kong newspaper reported that China now plans to divert the Brahmaputra waters to Xinjiang by building the world’s longest tunnel.
Beijing has denied such a plan – just as President Xi Jinping denied in 2015 that China had any plan to turn its seven man-made islands in the South China Sea into military bases.
China is already home to more than half of the globe’s large dams. To deflect attention from its continuing dam-building frenzy and its refusal to enter into a water-sharing treaty with any neighbour, China has bragged about its hydrological-data sharing accords.
Yet it showed in 2017 that it can breach these accords at will. The denial of hydrological data to India actually underscores how China is using transboundary water as a tool of coercive diplomacy.
Such is China’s defiant unilateralism that, to complete a major dam project, it cut off the flow of a Brahmaputra tributary, the Xiabuqu, in 2016 and is currently damming another such tributary, the Lhasa River, into a series of artificial lakes.
The cause of the Siang River’s contamination can be known only if China agrees to a joint probe with India, including a scientific survey of the river’s upper reaches in Tibet. That is the only way to get to the bottom of this contamination that has choked aquatic life.
Make no mistake: China, by building increasing control over cross-border water resources through hydro-engineering structures, is dragging its riparian neighbours into high-stakes games of geopolitical poker over water-related issues. In waging water wars by stealth, China seeks to hew to the central principle enunciated by the ancient military theorist Sun Tzu – “all wars are based on deception.”

How China Used a Times Documentary as Evidence Against Its Subject
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/insider/tashi-wangchuk-documentary-china.html?
by JONAH M. KESSEL JAN. 10, 2018
During the eight years I lived in China, people would often say they felt as if they had no voice under Communist Party rule. This was especially true for minorities.
So when Tashi Wangchuk, a Tibetan herder turned shopkeeper, showed up at my apartment in Beijing in the spring of 2015, I of course wanted to listen to his story.
He told me the Chinese authorities on the Tibetan Plateau had been slowly eradicating the Tibetan language from schools and the business world. Mr. Tashi believed prohibiting the study of the Tibetan language went against China’s constitution.
The New York Times was not Mr. Tashi’s first stop in his attempt to raise this issue, I learned. Chinese state-controlled media had refused to listen to him. And years earlier, the Chinese authorities had briefly jailed him for expressing his opinions on social media. Foreign media were his last resort to be heard.
Last week, more than two years after our first meeting, Mr. Tashi was tried in court for “inciting separatism,” a criminal charge that largely amounts to seeking independence from the Chinese state. No verdict has come down yet, but the sentence could hold a punishment of 15 years in prison. (For those hoping for an acquittal, it’s important to note that China’s courts have a 99 percent conviction rate.)
But the root of his crime, it seems, was talking to me.
In 2015, after I met Mr. Tashi, I made a nine-minute film for The Times about his efforts to raise the issue of Tibetan education to the central government and Chinese state media. Last week, that documentary was shown in court as the main evidence that Mr. Tashi was inciting separatism.
The use of my film as evidence against Mr. Tashi gets at the heart of one of the thorniest issues that can plague foreign journalists: How do we justify instances when our work — aimed at giving voice to the voiceless and holding the powerful to account — ends up putting its subjects at risk or in danger?
Before I made this documentary, Edward Wong — then The Times’s Beijing bureau chief — and I talked at length with Mr. Tashi about the risks he assumed in speaking with us and appearing on video.
Mr. Tashi thought that people wouldn’t believe his story if they couldn’t see him. I agreed that it wouldn’t hold the same power. He believed he was acting within the guidelines of the law. I believed in giving him the agency the Chinese government and state media had refused him. He believed his voice must be heard at all costs.
But for Mr. Tashi, speaking out has come at a price.
In early 2016, Mr. Tashi — who specifically told me that he was not advocating Tibetan independence — was kidnapped and held in secret detention, without contact with lawyers and family members for months on end. He was subjected to constant interrogation. For two years, he has waited in jail, silenced.
But along with his struggles came renewed hope in a story long plagued by news fatigue: The international community began speaking up for Mr. Tashi and his cause.
United Nations officials, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, PEN America and the United States Embassy in Beijing have all publicly criticized the Chinese government over the case. Last March, the European Union and Germany voiced concerns at the United Nations Human Rights Council over Mr. Tashi’s arrest. His case has been covered by countless publications around the world, and his arrest has transformed him from an ordinary shopkeeper with a fifth-grade education into a cultural icon of both justice and oppression.
One of Mr. Tashi’s lawyers told us that community members in Yushu, his hometown, had said that Mr. Tashi had “made a big impact on local Tibetans” and that “people admire him.”
The International Tibet Network awarded him the Tenzin Delek Rinpoche Medal of Courage, recognizing his “courage and dedication to promoting Tibetan human rights and justice for the Tibetan people.”
Meanwhile, some have asked me if I regret making my film. I’ve fielded a variety of queries on the topic — from Tibetan advocacy groups, journalists, students, press freedom groups and social media. Some have been critical, saying I shouldn’t have made the documentary. A former State Department official raised the question of whether I am “complicit in exposing a person vulnerable for his ethnicity.”
I’ve struggled with some of these issues on my own. I’ve wondered: Is our discussion of Tibetan rights worth more than a decade of one man’s freedom? Has Mr. Tashi’s arrest ultimately furthered his cause?
These are important and difficult questions. And while I don’t have definite answers, I do know this: Mr. Tashi and his concerns are now being acknowledged throughout the world. On Monday, protesters gathered outside the Chinese consulate in New York City to demand language rights for all Chinese — as well as the release of Mr. Tashi. Similar gatherings have happened in London. A political cartoonist in Australia has turned his message into pop art. His voice, at last, is resonating on an international stage.
I know, too, that Mr. Tashi has asked these kinds of questions himself and that he came to his own conclusions: that language rights are human rights, that they are protected by both China’s constitution and international human rights law, and that it was his duty to help protect his culture, no matter the cost.

Confidential report reveals how Chinese officials harass human rights activists in Canada
January 8, 2018
By Tom Blackwell
National Post, January 5, 2018 – At home in Ontario, his activism barely raised an eyebrow.
But when a quiet-spoken Chinese dissident travelled to the country of his birth last year, security officers shadowed him for weeks, booking hotel rooms next to his, even following him to breakfast.
Before he left, they also had a disturbingly direct message: Stop condemning the Chinese government to Canadian media, or the family he had come to visit would face the consequences. “They said if this (critical) story comes out in the Canadian press, then you are responsible for the life of your relatives,” he recalls.
According to a confidential report submitted to the federal government earlier this year — not yet released to the public — it’s just one example of a sweeping intimidation campaign by Chinese officials against activists here in Canada.
The product of a coalition led by Amnesty International Canada, the report catalogues harassment ranging from digital disinformation campaigns to direct threats.
Targets include Canadian representatives of what the Chinese sometimes call the five “poisons”: the Uyghur Muslim minority, independence-minded Tibetans, Taiwanese, democracy advocates and, especially, the Falun Gong.
A Uyghur shaves a customer at an outdoor stall before the Eid holiday on July 28, 2014 in old Kashgar, Xinjiang Province, China.
“This is not just a matter of occasional and sporadic incidents,” said Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty Canada, one of the organizations behind the report, along with groups representing Chinese religious, human-rights and ethnic minorities in this country. “There is a consistent pattern … a troubling example of a foreign government being very active in Canada in ways that are undermining human rights.”
The threats also seem to be working. The report, which comes just as the Liberal government and business leaders strive for closer economic ties with China, notes a “significant chilling effect” on human-rights activism among Chinese-Canadians.
That includes the Ontario dissident interviewed for this story, who agreed to speak only on condition of total anonymity, and has ceased activism since his trip.
A group of Toronto-based Falun Gong practitioners speaks in front of city hall as they protested the alleged harvesting of organs from and persecution and mass killing of Falun Gong practitioners in China on Thursday, July 28, 2016 in Peterborough, Ont.
Among those who continue to speak out are Falun Gong organizers. And as recently as last month, emails making grandiose claims about the group — that their leader was “the greatest God in this world, exceeding any others including Jesus Christ” — were sent to members of Parliament. The missives also claimed that MPs such as Liberal Judy Sgro were being featured in the group’s posters.
The emails were purportedly from Falun Gong practitioners themselves, but according to organizer Grace Wollensak, they had nothing to do with the group, and clearly echo Beijing’s propaganda campaign against it.
Seen as a threat to communist party control, China banned the Falun Gong in 1999, and has allegedly jailed, tortured and killed countless practitioners since. Although Chinese authorities often call it an “evil cult,” Canadian experts have described Falun Gong as a new, loosely organized religion emphasizing meditation and “profoundly moral” teachings.
When the fake emails began to arrive a few years ago, says Wollensak, they were easily traced to accounts in China. They’re harder to track now, and some politicians are unaware they are not from Falun Gong.
“It’s really an attempt to disparage the Falun Gong’s followers,” says Sgro, who chairs a parliamentary “friendship” committee with the organization (and keeps getting the emails).
Over the last decade or so, city councilors, mayors and other politicians have certainly tried to quash Falun Gong commemorative events or protests, often under pressure from local Chinese consulates. The former mayor of Vancouver, for instance, publicly ordered the group to stop protesting outside the local consulate in 2006.
Protestors outside the Alberta Legislature wave East Turkestan and Canadian flags as they call on the Canadian government to stop what they say is the oppression and slaughter of their people in the Xingijang province of China, once known as East Turkestan. David Bloom/Sun Media
Uyghurs in Canada, who number about 2,000, have faced more insidious intimidation, says community leader Mehmet Tohti.
The Muslim ethnic group is at the centre of unrest in China’s Xinjiang region, with human-rights groups accusing Beijing of repressive crackdowns in response to calls for independence and alleged terrorist acts.
Tohti, who founded the Uyghur Canadian Association, believes he too has been shadowed by Chinese agents in Toronto. And he says telephoning kin back home can land them in prison.
When he rang a distant relative two years ago, for example, “immediately she was put in police custody.” “It was in February and she was put outside for two hours,” says Tohti. “They’re punishing me and forcing me to stop doing what I’m doing.”
Experts say such tactics form part of a larger push to influence and monitor Chinese-Canadians, Chinese citizens who study here and Canadian society as a whole — a project active in many other countries, too — that has reportedly swelled under leader Xi Jinping.
The groups behind the report — presented to Global Affairs Canada, RCMP and CSIS officials at meetings in September — want Canadian authorities to take a more coordinated, aggressive approach to the harassment.
Adam Austen, a spokesman for Global Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, declined to comment on the broad-ranging report, saying the department does not talk about “specific cases.”
But he says any attempt by a foreign government to improperly influence or harass Canadians is taken seriously. “In instances where unacceptable activities by foreign diplomats do occur, appropriate action is taken, up to and including rendering the diplomat ‘persona non grata.’”
One Chinese official accused of harassing Falun Gong was blocked from renewing Canadian credentials. Another was successfully sued for libelling the group. But activists say they are unaware of any Chinese diplomat actually declared persona non grata.
Anastasia Lin, a 25-year-old actress crowned Miss World Canada, gives a press conference in Hong Kong on November 27, 2015 after China blocked her from travelling to the seaside resort city of Sanya.
The Chinese embassy in Ottawa did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, activists suggest the long arm of China continues to punish dissents in Canada. Former Miss Canada Anastasia Lin is acutely aware of the collateral damage from criticizing China: After speaking to Canadian media about China’s oppression of the Falun Gong, she was barred from the 2015 Miss World contest in Sanya, and says her father, still living in China, has been intimidated repeatedly by police.
Lin also revealed to the Post that her pageant sponsor — a Toronto dress shop owned by a Chinese-Canadian — dropped her after receiving an admonishing email from the local consulate.
“Most of the Chinese here would have business ties or family back in China, and that itself is holding everything they have in China hostage,” she says. “So people here don’t step out of line.”

Former Tibetan political prisoner questioned, put under house arrest
January 8, 2018
Radio Free Asia, January 2, 2018 – A former Tibetan political prisoner weakened by beatings and torture suffered in detention has been placed under house arrest by Chinese authorities angered over his contacts with rights groups and media outlets outside the region, Tibetan sources say.
Shonu Palden, 40, was summoned by police in Gansu province’s Machu (in Chinese, Maqu) county on Dec. 27 and was questioned for hours about a report published by the Dharamsala, India-based Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD) earlier in the month.
The report detailed the hardships faced by Palden’s eight-year-old daughter Namgyal Dolma, who has been barred from attending school because of her father’s previous involvement in protests calling for Tibetan freedom from Chinese rule.
Chinese police have now “criticized him for spreading word of his case outside the area, and have scolded him severely,” TCHRD staff member Trisong Dorje told RFA’s Tibetan Service, adding that Palden was accused of harboring “political motives” for discussing his case with others.
“Shonu Palden’s family, relatives, and friends are worried that the authorities may now arrest him again, and that if this happens, his failing health may grow even worse,” Dorje said.
Palden now lives in poor health at his home in Machu after being released in 2013 by prison authorities who feared he might die behind bars as a result of the beatings and torture he endured while detained, TCHRD said in a Dec. 18 report.
He now suffers from blocked arteries, failing eyesight, and breathing and hearing problems, and his family is struggling to meet the costs of his medical care, the rights group said.
Local authorities are meanwhile refusing to admit Palden’s daughter to school, saying that her birth date was entered improperly on an application.
But similar cases have been quickly and easily resolved, TCHRD said in its report, adding that local authorities have told Dolma’s parents the real reason she has not been admitted is her father’s participation in the protests for which he had been sent to prison.
Reported by Sangye Dorje for RFA’s Tibetan Service. Translated by Benpa Topgyal. Written in English by Richard Finney.

Tibetan filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen escapes China after six years in jail
January 8, 2018
By Sui-Lee Wee
The New York Times, December 28, 2017 – A prominent Tibetan filmmaker, who was jailed for making a documentary about Tibetans living under Chinese rule and had been under police surveillance since his release three years ago, has fled to the United States after an “arduous and risky escape” from China, according to his supporters.
Dhondup Wangchen, 43, arrived in San Francisco on Dec. 25 and was reunited with his wife and children, who were granted political asylum in the United States in 2012, according to Filming for Tibet, a group set up by Mr. Wangchen’s cousin to push for his release.
“After many years, this is the first time I’m enjoying the feeling of safety and freedom,” Mr. Wangchen said in the statement issued by the group. “I would like to thank everyone who made it possible for me to hold my wife and children in my arms again. However, I also feel the pain of having left behind my country, Tibet.”
Mr. Wangchen was a self-taught filmmaker from China’s western province of Qinghai who had spent five months in 2007 interviewing Tibetans about their hopes and frustrations living under Chinese rule. In his documentary, “Leaving Fear Behind” many Tibetans talked about their love for the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and how they thought the 2008 Beijing Olympics would do little to improve their lives.
Mr. Wangchen was detained in 2008 after his footage was smuggled out and shown at film festivals around the world and shown in secret to a group of foreign reporters ahead of the Olympics. He was later sentenced to six years in prison for “inciting subversion.”
During Mr. Wangchen’s time in prison, many rights groups, including Amnesty International, campaigned for his release, saying that he was denied medical care after contracting hepatitis B in jail, was forced to do manual labor and was kept in solitary confinement for six months. The United States raised Mr. Wangchen’s case with Beijing “at the highest level,” according to the International Campaign for Tibet, a Tibetan rights group.
Mr. Wangchen’s flight from China comes at a time of growing authoritarianism in the country under President Xi Jinping. Two rights activists have been tried and one more is expected to go on trial on subversion charges this week. Since Mr. Xi came to power in 2013, his administration has imprisoned human rights lawyers and cracked down on civil society.
Mr. Wangchen’s supporters did not provide details of his escape and he could not be reached for comment. Police officials from Xining, the capital of Qinghai, and the Qinghai government did not answer multiple telephone calls seeking comment.
After his release from prison, Mr. Wangchen remained under heavy surveillance and his communications were monitored, according to Filming for Tibet. Mr. Wangchen’s fellow filmmaker, Golog Jigme, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, fled China to India in 2014 and was granted political asylum in Switzerland a year later.
Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, whose district covers San Francisco, said on Twitter on Wednesday that it was an honor to welcome Mr. Wangchen to “our San Francisco community.”
Many Tibetans have complained about repressive conditions under China, which has ruled Tibet since 1950. Among their list of complaints: They are barred from publicly worshiping the Dalai Lama, who Beijing reviles as “a wolf in monk’s clothing”, and say that their language and culture have been suppressed. After widespread protests by Tibetans in 2008, China imposed a security clampdown.
More than 150 Tibetans have set themselves on fire since 2009 in protest against Chinese rule, according to the International Campaign for Tibet. On Wednesday, a young Tibetan man set himself on fire in the southwestern province of Sichuan, the group said. China has called the self-immolators “terrorists” and blamed exiled Tibetan rights groups and the Dalai Lama for inciting them.
“The six years Dhondup Wangchen had to spend in jail are a stark reminder of the human costs that China’s policies continue to have on the Tibetan people,” Matteo Mecacci, president of International Campaign for Tibet, said in a statement. “Dhondup Wangchen should have never had to pay such a high personal price for exercising his freedom of expression.”

Tibetan language advocate battles separatism in Chinese court – faces 15 years
January 8, 2018
By Chris Buckley
New York Times, January 4, 2018 – A Tibetan businessman who tried to protect his native language, and spoke to The New York Times about his efforts, defended himself in a Chinese court on Thursday against a criminal charge that his one-man campaign had fanned resistance to Chinese rule.
The one-day trial of the businessman, Tashi Wangchuk, 32, was held in his hometown, Yushu, a heavily Tibetan area in the northwestern Chinese province of Qinghai, two years after he was detained by the police.
Mr. Tashi was charged with inciting separatism, which can bring up to 15 years in prison, after appearing in a news report and a video documentary by The Times in 2015. His defense lawyers said the prosecution’s case rested largely on the video, which was shown during the trial.
The trial lasted just a few hours, and the presiding judge told the courtroom that a verdict would be announced at a later, unspecified, date. China’s Communist Party-run courts rarely find defendants not guilty, especially in politically contentious cases.
His lawyers said that Mr. Tashi, speaking in Chinese, used the hearing to reject the idea that his efforts to revive Tibetan language and culture were a crime. Mr. Tashi has insisted that he does not advocate independence for Tibet, but wants the rights for ethnic minorities that are promised by Chinese law.
“Tashi argued that his idea was to use litigation to force local governments to stop ignoring Tibetan language education, and he was exercising his right as a citizen to criticize,” Liang Xiaojun, one of Mr. Tashi’s two defense attorneys, said outside the courthouse after the trial.
“He said that he wasn’t trying to split the country,” Mr. Liang added, “but exercising his rights as a citizen of the People’s Republic of China, which includes Tibetan citizens.”
Court officials refused to allow a Times reporter into the trial, despite several requests. The trial received international attention, with diplomats from the United States, Germany, Britain, Canada and the European Union also showing up in unsuccessful efforts to attend.
“This action by the Chinese government sends a chilling message meant to silence its critics,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for The New York Times, said by email.
Before the trial, a dozen or so of Mr. Tashi’s relatives gathered outside the courthouse. They had been told that 15 of them could attend his trial, but in the end only three were let in.
“The main thing they said against him was the video,” his brother-in-law, Sonam Tsering, said after the trial, referring to The Times’s documentary about Mr. Tashi. “They said that issuing those comments abroad was the biggest problem, that it insulted China.”
Mr. Tashi’s long captivity has been condemned by human rights organizations, exiled Tibetan groups and foreign governments, including the previous United States ambassador to Beijing. His case has also renewed focus on his warnings that the Tibetan language and culture are threatened by Chinese government policies to restrict education in the language and its use, even in Yushu, a remote town 12,000 feet above sea level on the highlands of western China.
The western part of Qinghai and other heavily Tibetan areas nearby form a rim around the Tibet Autonomous Region, the heartland of historic Tibet. Critics warn that the Chinese government is stifling local culture across these areas by making Mandarin Chinese the dominant, or sole, language used in education, official business and the media.
Since protests and riots against the Chinese government across Tibetan areas in 2008, Beijing has imposed smothering security, placing a heavy hand on Tibetan religious and cultural life.
The pressures have magnified under President Xi Jinping, whose policies toward ethnic minorities reflect a belief that they can be pulled out of poverty and made loyal to Beijing by encouraging their assimilation into Chinese society, including education in Mandarin.
But Mr. Tashi, a merchant who studied for three years in a Buddhist monastery, taught himself to write Tibetan with the help of a brother, and joined a ferment of Tibetan teachers, monks, singers, artists and businesspeople who have fought to defend the language and culture.
“There’s quite a lot of activity to protect and promote the Tibetan language,” said Gerald Roche, an anthropologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia who studies cultural and linguistic diversity in Tibetan regions of China. “It’s hard to get a real grasp of exactly what’s going on because a lot of it is below the radar.”
Mr. Tashi made a living selling Tibetan products online, including caterpillar fungus, an herbal remedy from the highlands that many Chinese believe has medicinal powers. But he also began his one-man campaign to advocate the protection of his own culture.
“In politics, it’s said that if one nation wants to eliminate another nation, first they need to eliminate their spoken and written language,” he said in the nine-minute video documentary for The Times. “In effect, there is a systematic slaughter of our culture.”
The documentary showed Mr. Tashi visiting Beijing, where he tried in vain to win support from courts, lawyers and China’s main television network, CCTV.
Two months after the documentary and accompanying article appeared, Mr. Tashi disappeared. His family learned after nearly two more months that he had been detained.
On Thursday, few supporters appeared outside the court apart from Mr. Tashi’s relatives. When asked, some residents nearby, especially Buddhist monks, said they had heard about his case. But most said they had not.
Still, tensions over the future of Tibetan culture were visible in Yushu, which in Tibetan is called Gyegu.
The day before Mr. Tashi’s trial, the town bustled with ethnic Tibetans, most speaking in their own language: Buddhist monks played on smartphones; wizened herders haggled in a crowded market; young people strolled around in tracksuits despite the biting cold.
Some residents said they worried about the declining ability of young people to read and write Tibetan; others said their children needed to grow up knowing both Tibetan and Mandarin Chinese.
“We have to study Chinese and Tibetan, both are important,” said Tsering Dorje, a garment trader, who added that his three children were learning both languages. “The problem now is that the main exams are all in Chinese, and Tibetan isn’t so important, so of course families focus on Chinese.”

Opinion: China’s emerging empire is more the result of force than anything else
January 8, 2018
New York Times, January 5, 2018 – I am the son of two empires, the United States and China. I was born in and raised around Washington in the Nixon-to-Reagan era, but my parents grew up in villages in southern China. My father was a member of the People’s Liberation Army in the 1950s, the first decade of Communist rule, before he soured on the revolution and left for Hong Kong.
So it was with excitement that I landed in Beijing in April 2008 to start an assignment with The New York Times that stretched to almost a decade. I had just spent nearly four years reporting on the bloody failure of the American imperial project in Iraq, and now I was in the metropole that was building a new world order.
China had entered a honeymoon phase with other nations. For years, anticipation had built for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Though China had suppressed a Tibetan uprising that spring, it earned international good will after a devastating earthquake.
People flocked to Beijing for China’s “coming out” party. Foreign leaders gawked at gleaming architecture and opening ceremonies that signaled the nation’s ambitions. After the festivities ended, the world arrived at another inflection point — the implosion of the American financial system and the global economic crisis. China’s growth buttressed both the world economy and a belief among its officials that its economic and political systems could rival those of the United States.
Though unabashedly authoritarian, China was a magnet. I was among many who thought it might forge a confident and more open identity while ushering in a vibrant era of new ideas, values and culture, one befitting its superpower status. When I ended my China assignment last year, I no longer had such expectations.
From trade to the internet, from higher education to Hollywood, China is shaping the world in ways that people have only begun to grasp. Yet the emerging imperium is more a result of the Communist Party’s exercise of hard power, including economic coercion, than the product of a gravitational pull of Chinese ideas or contemporary culture.
Of the global powers that dominated the 19th century, China alone is a rejuvenated empire. The Communist Party commands a vast territory that the ethnic-Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty cobbled together through war and diplomacy. And the dominion could grow: China is using its military to test potential control of disputed borderlands from the South China Sea to the Himalayas, while firing up nationalism at home. Once again, states around the world pay homage to the court, as in 2015 during a huge military parade.
For decades, the United States was a global beacon for those who embraced certain values — the rule of law, free speech, clean government and human rights. Even if policy often fell short of those stated ideals, American “soft power” remained as potent as its armed forces. In the post-Soviet era, political figures and scholars regarded that American way of amassing power through attraction as a central element of forging a modern empire.
China’s rise is a blunt counterpoint. From 2009 onward, Chinese power in domestic and international realms has become synonymous with brute strength, bribery and browbeating — and the Communist Party’s empire is getting stronger.
At home, the party has imprisoned rights lawyers, strangled the internet, compelled companies and universities to install party cells, and planned for a potentially Orwellian “social credit” system. Abroad, it is building military installations on disputed Pacific reefs and infiltrating cybernetworks. It pushes the “One Belt, One Road” infrastructure initiative across Eurasia, which will have benefits for other nations but will also allow China to pressure them to do business with Chinese state-owned enterprises, as it has done in recent years throughout Asia and Africa.
So far, Chinese soft power plays a minor role. For one thing, the party insists on tight control of cultural production, so Chinese popular culture has little global appeal next to that of the United States or even South Korea.
No nation knows China’s hard ways better than Norway. China punished it by breaking diplomatic and economic ties for six years after the independent Nobel committee in 2010 gave the Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, a pro-democracy writer imprisoned in China (he died of cancer in July).
President Xi Jinping is the avatar of the new imperium. The 19th Party Congress in October was his victory lap. Party officials enshrined “Xi Jinping Thought” in the party constitution, putting him on par with Mao Zedong. Mr. Xi said China had entered a “new era” of strength and the party would be the arbiter of public life. Mr. Xi holds appeal for foreign leaders aspiring to strongman status — President Trump openly admires him.
Many Chinese people told me they still believed the country’s top leaders looked out for ordinary people, even if the party was rotting. This belief was rooted in abstract hope rather than empirical evidence. It was like peering through the toxic air enveloping Chinese cities in search of blue sky.
The culture of hard power goes from top to bottom. In the provinces, party officials move quickly to suppress any challenges to their authority. When they sense rising mass resistance, they buy off or imprison the leaders.
I saw this in my first year in China, when officials separately broke the will of parents furious over deadly tainted milk and ones grieving over thousands of children who had died in shoddily built schools during the Sichuan earthquake. I learned this was typical of the approach taken by Chinese officials. Most Chinese do not run afoul of the party, but those who do pay a high price.
The abuse of power is frequent, and many Chinese say corruption is their top concern. All other issues, from environmental degradation to wealth inequality, are linked to it. Mr. Xi is canny enough to capitalize on the discontent: He leads an anticorruption drive that allows him to oust rivals and enforce party discipline.
None of that results in the rule of law. And China’s domestic security budget has exceeded that of its military in recent years, even as both grow rapidly, highlighting the nation’s investment in hard power.
I learned in 2016 that Tashi Wangchuk, a young entrepreneur who had spoken to me about his advocacy for broader Tibetan language education, had been detained in his hometown, Yushu, by police officers. In microblog posts, Mr. Tashi had asked local officials to promote true bilingual education, and he had appeared in 2015 in Times articles and video.
Mr. Tashi is the kind of citizen China should value — someone working within the law to recommend policies that would benefit ordinary people and ease tensions. But two years later, Mr. Tashi remains imprisoned. A court tried him on Thursday for “inciting separatism” despite criticism from Western diplomats and human rights groups.
The party’s style of rule threatens to turn sentiments against China even as the empire grows in stature. History teaches us about an inevitable dialectic: Power creates resistance. While the state can bend people to its will, those people meet it with fear and suspicion. The United States learns this lesson each time it over-relies on hard power.
I traveled often to the frontier regions because it was there that the dynamic of power and resistance was most evident, and that I got the clearest look at how China treats its most vulnerable citizens, those outside mainstream ethnic Han culture. No other areas better embody the idea of imperial China. Conquered by the Manchus and reabsorbed by Mao, these lands make up at least one-quarter of Chinese territory. Party officials fear they are like the Central Asian regions under Soviet rule — always on the verge of rebellion and eager to break free.
In October 2016, I quietly entered the sprawling Tibetan Buddhist settlement of Larung Gar and watched the government-ordered demolition of homes of monks and nuns. In parts of Xinjiang populated by ethnic Uighurs, the tension is even greater, fueled by cycles of violence and repression. Uighurs speak in hushed tones of restrictions on Islam and mass detentions. Signs across Xinjiang forbid long beards and full veils, and surveillance cameras are everywhere. On my last reporting trip in China, to the Silk Road oasis of Kashgar, I saw police patrols in riot gear rounding up young men.
An important bellwether is Hong Kong, the former British colony from which my parents emigrated to the United States. On this southern frontier, as in the west, the party works to silence the voices of students, politicians and other residents critical of its rule. Agents have even abducted booksellers. But those moves have actually led to more resistance and strengthened Hong Kong and Cantonese identity. They have also stoked greater fears of Beijing among citizens of Taiwan, the self-governing island that the party longs to rule.
It is not a stretch to say the party’s ways of governance perpetuate a lack of trust by the Chinese in their institutions and fellow citizens. And its international policies light the kindling of resistance overseas, from Australia to Ghana.
Chinese citizens and the world would benefit if China turns out to be an empire whose power is based as much on ideas, values and culture as on military and economic might. It was more enlightened under its most glorious dynasties. But for now, the Communist Party embraces hard power and coercion, and this could well be what replaces the fading liberal hegemony of the United States on the global stage.
It will not lead to a grand vision of world order. Instead, before us looms a void.

Tibet’s incredible linguistic diversity is disappearing
December 18, 2017
By Ryan P. Smith
Smithsonian Magazine, December 12, 2017 – In a recent presentation held at the National Museum of Natural History, University of Melbourne researcher Gerald Roche called attention to 21 minority languages spoken in villages across Tibet.
Tibet may be best known for its bounty of ancient Buddhist monasteries and stark natural beauty—but it’s also blessed with a vast diversity of languages. The Tibetan Plateau is home to more than a dozen distinct local tongues, many of which come with their own elaborate character systems. Unfortunately, thanks to the growth of internet infrastructure and state-sponsored education, many of these lesser-spoken languages are now on the brink of extinction, says University of Melbourne anthropologist Gerald Roche.
As part of ongoing research conducted by the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage on issues of language diversity and cultural sustainability, Roche delivered a presentation last Monday on Tibetan language and his research on its decline. In a 2014 paper titled “The Vitality of Tibet’s Minority Languages in the 21st Century,” Roche notes that dozens of languages are spoken on the Plateau but that only “230,000 of the 6.2 million Tibetans in China do not speak Tibetan.” He finds that the minority languages in Tibet are generally spoken by very few people, while Tibetan is known to nearly everyone.
From a language preservationist’s perspective, this is a precarious situation. The findings Roche laid out, which synthesized the work of several linguists with expertise in disparate areas of the Plateau, reveal the vibrant tapestry of language in Tibet while also highlighting its fragility.
The danger of the minority languages of Tibet disappearing completely is not merely speculative. In 2014, the BBC reported that “over the past century alone, about 400 languages—one every three months—have gone extinct, and most linguists estimate that 50 percent of the world’s remaining 6,500 languages will be gone by the end of this century.” These languages are tied to the histories of peoples, and their loss serves to erase time-honored traditions, says Roche.
By the conservative assessment of the Chinese government, 14 languages beyond standardized Tibetan are spoken within Tibet—one language for each official ethnic minority region. A holistic survey of pertinent English-language academic literature, however, yields a much larger estimate. In a study published this May, Roche concludes that as many as 52 linguistically distinct languages may be spoken on the Plateau.
In general, a language can be thought of as encompassing both grammatical elements and a lexicon of words. It may be spoken or written, and in the modern world is almost always both (though a few of the Tibetan minority languages Roche has studied were historically spoken only). Yet Roche says there is a strong case to be made that even “Tibetan” itself is, in actuality, not a single language—its three major branches, which locals call “dialects,” are not mutually intelligible when spoken, despite relying on the same written character.
Even more striking are the differences between minority languages and Tibetan. Minority languages are also often dismissed within Tibet as bizarre “dialects,” but Roche notes that this is often tantamount to calling “Italian a dialect of Swedish.” These include what Roche terms “enclaved languages,” which are officially recognized by the Chinese government within narrow geographical limits in Tibet, “extraterritorial languages,” which are officially recognized only in locations outside of Tibet, and myriad “unrecognized languages,” whose existence is ignored by the Chinese establishment.
In his remarks, Roche homed in on a sample set of 21 languages spoken within Tibetan villages. A dozen of these are endangered, meaning they are steadily losing speakers. “The [speaker] population is declining,” Roche says, “and it’s declining because people are no longer speaking those languages to their children.” This is largely the result of pressures to rally behind standardized Tibetan as a source of Tibetan pride in response to the encroachment of Chinese beginning during the reign of Mao Zedong.
A handful of the languages in Roche’s dataset are “moribund”—very nearly forgotten, with no real hope for salvation. Roche notes that, in the case of one of these languages, “there is an argument between the two linguists studying it as to whether the language has nine or zero fluent speakers remaining. That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about moribund languages.”
Roche has personal experience with the Manikacha language, which is spoken by approximately 8,000 individuals across four villages in a valley on the northeastern Plateau. According to his unpublished survey data, roughly one third of are no longer transmitting the language to their children. He traces this back to the late 1950s, when Mao’s China began forcibly instructing the Manikacha speakers in standardized Tibetan. Even the Chairman’s famous Little Red Book was distributed in Tibetan.
In the subsequent years, Tibetan has further asserted itself in popular media and local state- sponsored schools. “Given that the Manikacha speakers consider themselves Tibetan,” Roche says, “now they are under a lot of pressure to prove that by speaking ‘good Tibetan’ like all the other Tibetans in their region.”
Andrew Frankel, a researcher at the University of Virginia’s Tibet Center who spent three years teaching English in the same general part of the Plateau, has firsthand experience with this sort of assimilation. Though several of his students were raised in homes that favored minority languages, in between classes the children would invariably speak Tibetan. The decision was a practical one: After all, most of their peers would not recognize Manikacha or the like.
“For the majority of their friends,” says Frankel, “Tibetan would have been the lingua franca they would have spoken together.”
State schools tend to smooth over differences between communities and encourage allegiance to a single mother tongue, says Frankel. “Schooling has become ever more pervasive,” he says, a shift that in its earlier stages caused significant alarm in households whose primary language was not Tibetan. Even among families where standard Tibetan was spoken at home, many were skeptical of the pressures at school to communicate in Chinese.
Ten years ago, it was common for parents to resist sending their children to school. “There was a widespread perception that state schools were problematic—you didn’t really learn your native language there,” says Frankel. A decade later, though, most have given in: “The amount of time kids spend in state schools has increased exponentially. And in those state institutions, they are not speaking their village languages with any regularity.”
This situation is unlikely to change, Frankel says, adding that “state schooling has become a gatekeeper for employment, especially in western areas of China.”
How, then, can we hope to preserve Tibet’s linguistic richness for future generations? For Roche, the answer lies in large part in the behavior of powerful international allies of the Tibetan people—including the United States. Our country’s stance towards Tibet emphasizes the preservation of standard Tibetan but fails to address the numerous other languages spoken on the Plateau, he says.
Tibet is not a land of a single language, or even of the 14 whose existence is acknowledged by China. The myriad minority languages of Tibet need help to have a fighting chance at survival. Roche believes it is incumbent on the United States and other friends of Tibet to “use whatever means possible to gain recognition for these languages: recognition of the fact they exist, that they have unique needs, that they have value, and that they deserve respect.”

Tibetan leader confirms Dalai Lama emissary visited China last month
December 18, 2017
By Ajay Banerjee
The Tribune, December 14, 2017 – The Sikyong (head) of the elected Central Tibetan Administration, Dr Lobsang Sangay, in New Delhi confirmed that his predecessor Prof Samdhang Rimpoche did visit China recently. He, however, warned, “Don’t read too much into it. At most it’s a private visit and it’s too early to say anything.”
He was answering a question by former Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal on the sidelines of the Third ML Sondhi Memorial Lecture. Sangay delivered the lecture on ‘Tibet holds the key to Beijing’.
Sondhi was an IFS officer who quit and won a Lok Sabha election in 1967 from Delhi on a Jana Sangh ticket.
Sangay said India should make Tibet the lynchpin in changing Beijing, saying Tibet must be declared the “core issue”.
“Either you transform China into a liberal democracy or it transforms you,” he said. Citing Norway and Denmark as examples of the transformation, he said the two nations had abandoned the cause of Tibetans to mend ties with China.
Sangay, who spoke at the United Nations two days ago, warned India, saying: “China is already in Nepal. They have come to Doklam.” He repeated Mao’s words on Tibet being the “palm of China” and Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and North East Frontier Agency (NEFA, modern Indian province of Arunachal Pradesh) its five fingers. Mao, former Chairman of the Communist Party of China, had asserted it is China’s responsibility to “liberate” them all.
On being asked if he agreed with the recent book, ‘China’s India War — Collision Course on the Roof of the World’, by Bertil Lintner, which said China had prepared for war in 1959, Sangay aid: “China prepared for the 1962 India-China war in 1954 when it agreed to only a five-year renewal of the India-Tibet trade pact. In 1959, Tibet was attacked.”
Sangay said: “China is worried as it now has the largest Buddhist community of 300 million — more than the 82 million strong Communist Party.”
BJP national general secretary Ram Madhav, who was the chief guest at the memorial lecture, said: “Maintaining good relations with China is the government’s priority. At present, negotiations are on between Tibet and China. Whenever required, India and its people will stand by them (Tibetans).” On the India-China standoff, he said: “Doklam is not over yet.

U.S. Congressman calls on China to affirm right of the Dalai Lama to return home to Tibet
December 18, 2017
Central Tibetan Administration, December 15, 2017 – U.S. Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA), a senior House Democrat and co-chair of the bipartisan Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, on Thursday called on China to “affirm the right of the 14th Dalai Lama to return to his homeland, whether to visit or to stay.”
Speaking on the Dalai Lama and Tibet during a special order period in the House of Representatives yesterday, Representative McGovern said, “Today, I call on China to follow a different path. I call on the Chinese authorities to affirm the right of the 14th Dalai Lama to return to his homeland, whether to visit or to stay. I call on them to welcome him home, afford him the respect he deserves as a man of peace, and sit down with him to resolve Tibetan grievances so as to prevent the deepening of tensions and eruption of conflict.”
He strongly asserted His Holiness as integral part of the solution to Tibetan grievances and his “undeniable legitimacy” as “the spiritual leader of Tibetans worldwide would be of great benefit were China willing to restart the dialogue that has been suspended since 2010.”
“They (China) seem to believe that with his eventual, inevitable death, they will be assured of consolidating their hold on Tibet. I would not be so sure. Today, all around the world, we are seeing the consequences of the repression of religious and ethnic minorities.
“For the Chinese, there is still time to recognize that inclusion and respect for the human rights of Tibetans offer the best path to security,” he said sternly.
He averred that the international reaction would be very positive if China did take such a step. “I would be among the first to recognize and congratulate such an important gesture.”
The statement was delivered under the subject of “Let His Holiness the Dalai Lama Go Home”.
The house proceeding was also witnessed by Speaker of Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile, Khenpo Sonam Tenphel and Representative Ngodup Tsering, Office of Tibet, DC. The two Tibetan leaders were received at the House of Representative gallery by Congressman Jim McGovern.