-By International Campaign for Tibet
The State Department’s 2021 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices say the Chinese government committed significant human rights violations against the Tibetan people last year, including credible reports of unlawful or arbitrary killings, extrajudicial killings, torture, and cases of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.
The reports became public April 12, 2022.
Highlighting “Sinicization” policy
The report on Tibet highlights the Chinese Communist Party’s intent to “Sinicize” Tibetans—a term for a Chinese government policy to force Tibetans to assimilate into Chinese society by eroding their culture and language and replacing them with Chinese culture.
The report says monasteries throughout Tibetan areas were required to insert CCP members into their governance structures, where they exercised control over monastic admission, education, security and finances. Similarly, the report says authorities in the Tibet Autonomous Region—which spans nearly half of Tibet—carried out numerous propaganda campaigns to encourage pro-Communist Party speech, thought and conduct.
Additional controls on Tibetan Buddhism noted by the report include geographic residency limitations on who could attend each monastery, which undermined the traditional Tibetan Buddhist practice of seeking advanced religious instruction from a select number of senior teachers based at monasteries across the Tibetan Plateau.
Similarly, the state-run College of Buddhism in Tibet’s capital of Lhasa spent approximately 40% of its study program teaching political and cultural education, according to the report.
In April 2021, the TAR Religious Affairs Bureau in Ngari Prefecture held a training course where they told clergy to “lead the religion in the direction of better compatibility with Socialism,” and the CCP cadres promised to manage the monasteries and convents “in accordance with the law and continue to promote Sinicization of Tibetan Buddhism with firm determination.” Click here to read more.