Recommendations of Five-Fifty Youth Forum: Shaping Tibet’s Future
17 to 20 August 2018
The Five-Fifty Youth Forum concluded with a total of 34 recommendations for the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA).
Theme 1: Tibet and PRC: Importance of Historical Ties and Establishing Constructive Engagement and Negotiation
Recommendations:
- Support initiatives taken by Tibetan students overseas for endeavors such as reaching out to Chinese students/intellectuals and for creating awareness about Tibet through workshops, seminars, conferences, etc.
- Utilize technology for creating awareness on Tibet e.g. online platform for history education through podcast, videos, e-books, virtual discussion, etc.
- Broaden historical framework e.g. history shouldn’t start from 1959.
- Adopt latest pedagogy/methodologies in updating history textbooks.
- Record databases of prominent Tibetan human resources by CTA and reaching out to intellectuals/academicians in various fields of studies both in Tibet and exile.
- Provide academic freedom to intellectuals, scholars, academicians and experts no matter how deviant their discourse/narratives are to that of the official stand.
- Encourage history education as an integral part of Sunday schools or similar types of programs.
Theme 2: Inclusion of and Responsiveness to Tibetans inside Tibet and Diaspora
Recommendations:
- Sikyong’s monthly radio address to Tibetans in Tibet contextualized and carefully crafted so that it could bring Tibetans inside Tibet closer to CTA. The address should also be translated into regional dialects.
- Strengthen Tibetan national pride through targeted storytelling on Tibetan digital medium such as TibetTV.
- Create a secure space for Tibetans to share information about Tibet and encourage that by ensuring utmost security of the information providers; CTA should be accountable to the information providers, and carefully utilize information received from them.
- Collect detailed information about every political/social/economic events from Tibet and carefully document and analyze current events for future record. The information should be publically available.
- Build an accessible report on socio-economic conditions and pathways inside Tibet by evaluating Chinese development policy and work by Tibetan (and non-Tibetan) individuals, NGOs and local communities. This can facilitate potential individual engagement between Tibetans in Tibet and those in exile.
- Facilitate avenues for relationship building with Tibetans working on the ground in Tibet e.g. desertification, afforestation and other environmental issues.
- Provide economic empowerment by way of coaching instructions that are carefully compiled and analyzed.
Theme 3: Young Voices in the Tibetan Freedom Movement: Communications, Advocacy and International Relations
Recommendations:
Advocacy and International Relations:
- Incubate young professionals through scholarships, incentives and fellowship programs and enlist students to work in CTA upon graduation.
- Create a program to recognize our young brilliant Tibetan – CTA 30 under 30 or 40 under 40. This recognition will serve as a source of great encouragement to them, as well as inspiration to other Tibetan youth.
Communications:
- Empower next generation of Tibetan storytellers by providing mentorship and training in digital media.
- Broadcast successful mentees via Tibet TV or develop a pilot podcast program by partnering with international media outlets.
- Digitize Tibetan archival research, journals and documents and make them accessible to public via Tibet.net or other online archive platforms.
- Promote media independence/investigative journalism by creating a non-governmental media platform.
Campaigns and Activism:
- Establish proper protocol for engagement with youth, responsiveness to Chinese propaganda and other related urgent issues by regularly updating the list of campaign, dates in a calendar format.
- Offices of Tibet need to create spaces for resource/information exchange, support youth to organize events and conferences, provide training to youth so that they can educate Tibetans around the world on better and more open political discourse and engagement. The training should be available in different languages used in Tibetan diaspora communities.
- Promote community associations and groups as soft power centers to counter Chinese soft power centers such as Confucius Institutes. CTA should issue clear directives to student organizations and Tibetan associations around the world to encourage political engagement of Tibetans.
Theme 4: CTA’s Leadership Towards the Five-Fifty Vision: Visionary Leadership and Resource Mobilization:
Recommendations:
- Department of Education should develop a civic education curriculum for all schools including Sunday schools in the west.
- Incorporate secular ethics training in school curriculum.
- Harness Tibetan soft power through workshops for CTA civil servants and leaders, in particular, the staff of the Office of Tibet.
- Build a Tibet institute of leadership and governance to incubate trained leaders and entrepreneurs that will serve the government.
- Build better feedback mechanisms for CTA.
- Create a virtual marketplace for human resources that is linked with the Workflow Information System.
- Revise CTA recruitment because professionals find it difficult to join CTA. Tailor question paper based on the need of the job rather than having a uniform question paper for all the position. For example, IT staff have the same Tibetan language requirements as other CTA staff.
- Establish Human Resource Division run by professionals with Human Resource Management qualification. Also, review promotion system within CTA.
- Drive a campaign to increase number of Green book holders and consider a tiered model so that professionals and businessmen can contribute a greater amount.
- Incubate profit industries for generating employment opportunity and revenue.
- Establish a new school especially for Tibetan students from abroad by utilizing existing schools that are empty. The cost of running these schools will be borne by the students in the form of tuition fees. Furthermore, any Tibetan student from India could also join this school provided they are willing to pay the tuition fees.