Erasing History
CCP’s brutal campaign of ethnic assimilation gathers pace in Tibet, Inner Mongolia
FORUM Staff
In early March 2021, as democracies worldwide raised their voices in unison against the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) genocide of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, exiled Tibetans around the globe gathered again to commemorate their homeland’s own long plight under Chinese oppression.
On the 62nd National Uprising Day — the anniversary of a 1959 revolt by Tibetans against the occupying Chinese forces that invaded their nation in 1950 — the exile community called anew for independence for their ancestral homeland. Tens of thousands of Tibetans are estimated to have died at the hands of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) during the weekslong uprising, and many more fled the country but not before ensuring that their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, reached safe haven in neighboring India.
The rebellion was crushed; the Tibetan spirit was not. “Over a million Tibetans have lost their lives in the past six decades under Chinese rule. Today, we have come together to collectively mourn this loss,” Lobsang Sangay, then president of the Central Tibetan Administration, the India-based government in exile, said in a March 10, 2021, statement. “But we are also here to mark the undaunted resilience of Tibetans in Tibet. Even under the threat of losing their lives, they continue to protest by protecting and preserving our language, our religion, our land and our identity.”
Days before the remembrance events, and 2,500 kilometers northeast of the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping was focusing on suppressing an uprising by another of China’s ethnic minorities, one that began six months earlier in the classrooms of Inner Mongolia. In unprecedented scenes, thousands of students and parents demonstrated on the streets and boycotted schools in defiance of a CCP mandate to replace Mongolian language teaching with Mandarin Chinese. “Mongolians feel that language, the last stronghold of their national identity, is about to be wiped out by this new policy,” Enghebatu Togochog, director of the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center in New York, told the Los Angeles Times newspaper. “That’s why Mongolians feel urgency: If we lose this, we lose everything. We cease to exist.”
By March 2021, Xi was warning party leaders in Beijing that local officials must “persist in taking the correct path of solving ethnic problems with Chinese characteristics” and rectify “wrong ideas” on nationality and culture, the Agence France-Presse news agency reported. The implication of Xi’s directive — and the nature of those “Chinese characteristics” — will be unmistakable to the Indigenous populations of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) so-called autonomous regions. From the schoolhouses of Inner Mongolia, a land of vast steppes and endless horizons, to the monasteries of the Tibetan plateau, where the mountains seem to pierce the sky, the CCP is waging a campaign of forced assimilation and cultural eradication.
Conducted somewhat in the shadow of the party’s brutal repression in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the accelerating crackdown in Tibet and Inner Mongolia is widely seen as an attempt to wipe away culture, mute language and rub out religious tradition — in short, to erase millennia of national heritage and history. The CCP “is determined to stamp out the unrest that has flared repeatedly over the past two decades, from Xinjiang to Tibet,” noted a March 2021 article in Bloomberg Opinion. “Ensuring ethnic unity, long a preoccupation among China’s leaders, is now a top priority.”
A Stream of Suppression
The COVID-19 pandemic first detected in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 continued to provide a pretext for the CCP’s assimilation push into 2021. Party functionaries in Tibet prohibited travel and public gatherings during the Lunar New Year, or Losar, in February 2021. Buddhist monasteries and other religious sites were ordered closed over purported coronavirus concerns, and punishment was promised for violators, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported.
Residents and analysts alike dismissed the sincerity of the CCP’s stated motives, noting the central role monasteries play in upholding Tibetan culture. “Monastic institutions attract more legitimacy than local communist authorities in Tibet, and reverence for Buddhist leaders, especially the Dalai Lama, is palpable,” Apa Lhamo, a doctoral student at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of International Studies in New Delhi, wrote in The Diplomat magazine in March 2021. “For many Tibetans, even those under CCP rule, religion and Tibetan national identity are inextricable.”
To many, the true impetus behind the CCP’s forced assimilation is as clear as the meltwaters flowing from the Himalayas. By virtue of location, topography and natural resources, Tibet is of immense strategic value. It shares external borders with Bhutan, India, Myanmar (Burma) and Nepal, as well as an internal border with Xinjiang. Home to some of the world’s highest peaks, it is the wellspring of many of the great rivers of East, South and Southeast Asia, including the Mekong, providing sustenance and livelihoods for more than 1 billion people, as well as water for the CCP’s voracious megadams. The plateau holds deposits of precious metals such as gold and uranium and rare earth elements essential to the manufacture of everything from electric cars and wind turbines to missiles and fighter jets. (The PRC produces more than 60% of rare earth minerals globally each year, according to the nonprofit Institute for Energy Research. That’s a national security concern for many democracies.)
For centuries, Chinese and Tibetan armies fought for control of the land and Central Asia’s trade routes. Since the CCP annexed their nation seven decades ago, ethnic Tibetans, who account for more than 90% of Tibet’s estimated population of 3.2 million, have been subjected to a steady stream of suppression, including surveillance, arbitrary detention and torture, according to the exile community and human rights organizations.
In January 2021, a 19-year-old Buddhist monk died in custody, five months after being jailed on charges related to shouting slogans and distributing leaflets in support of Tibet’s independence. The following month, a Tibetan serving 21 years in prison died after being transferred to a Lhasa hospital with a brain injury. Kunchok Jinpa, 51, was among hundreds of Tibetans detained in 2013 for peacefully protesting a CCP order to fly the Chinese flag from their homes, according to Human Rights Watch. Many of the detainees are still unaccounted for. “Kunchok Jinpa’s death is yet another grim case of a wrongfully imprisoned Tibetan dying from mistreatment,” Sophie Richardson, the international nongovernmental organization’s China director, said in a statement. “Chinese authorities responsible for arbitrary detention, torture or ill-treatment and the death of people in their custody should be held accountable.”
Splitting the Nation
Even infrastructure investments designed to speed assimilation through economic integration favor Han Chinese workers and companies at the expense of ethnic Tibetans, according to the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy. Although a minority in Tibet, Han Chinese account for 92% of the PRC’s 1.4 billion people. “Because China’s development policy has succeeded in urbanizing rural Tibetans and erasing their land rights, it has succeeded in creating pristine wilderness through depopulation, sinicizing economic centers in towns and cities ensuring investments and profits flow back to China,” the India-based center reported in February 2021.
Much of the CCP’s assimilation campaign continues to revolve around religion, according to The Economist magazine. That includes denigrating the 14th Dalai Lama, now 86 and still in exile in India more than 60 years after his escape from Chinese forces. Since Xi assumed control in 2012, the CCP increasingly has sought to displace Buddhism from the heart of Tibetan culture. Using bribes and threats, party officials force Tibetans to display images of Xi and Mao Zedong, among other communist leaders, rather than those of the Dalai Lama in their homes. In December 2020, a Tibetan herdsman was sentenced to a year in prison after he posted a Losar greeting from the Dalai Lama on the CCP-surveilled social media platform WeChat, according to media reports. His crime: splitting the nation.
“As in Xinjiang, however, sinicization — though officially limited to religious affairs — involves a much broader effort to make ethnic-minority residents feel they belong to China,” The Economist noted in February 2021. “In schools, ‘patriotic education’ is emphasized. Mandarin has replaced Tibetan in most classes. Surveillance has been stepped up. Networks of informers relay information to the state; smartphones are tapped.”
For Tibetans, the stakes are as high as their land. “We usually consider human rights to be an issue of an individual’s own rights and freedoms, but in the case of Tibet, this has come to involve the survival of the Tibetan people themselves,” Tsering Tsomo, director of the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, told RFA. “This is about protecting the human rights of an entire race.”
It is a cry that echoes across thousands of kilometers.
A Brewing Storm
A week after Xi directed party officials to correct ethnic problems in Inner Mongolia, a monstrous sandstorm enveloped Beijing, turning day to dusk, choking commuters and forcing schools to cancel outdoor activities. The biggest storm to hit the city of 22 million in almost a decade had swirled to life in the Gobi Desert on the Mongolian plateau — an atmospheric omen, perhaps, that turbulence in Inner Mongolia would not easily be calmed despite Xi’s wishes.
At nearly 1.2 million square kilometers, Inner Mongolia accounts for about 13% of China’s landmass and, if independent, would rank among the world’s 25 largest nations by area. Home to about 25 million people, it scythes across northern China, bordering the independent nation of Mongolia and Russia along its 2,400 kilometers. Like Tibet, the largely arid region is blessed with abundant natural resources — the city of Baotou on the edge of the Gobi, for example, is a mining hub, accounting for an estimated 70% of the planet’s reserves of rare earth elements, according to the BBC.
After World War II ended more than a decade of Japanese occupation, the region came under Chinese dominion in 1947 when the CCP carved out the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Since then, Inner Mongolia has become overwhelmingly Han Chinese, with ethnic Mongolians numbering about 4.2 million, or less than 20% of the populace. Mongolian identity is potent, however, with a vibrant history that encompasses nomadic pastoralists, masterful horse riders and the warrior-ruler Genghis Khan, who in the 13th century established what would become one of history’s largest empires.
Inner Mongolia still uses traditional Mongolian script, a unique alphabet of 26 letters written vertically that was adapted from the old Uyghur alphabet and traces its lineage to the reign of Genghis Khan. So, when the CCP ordered in August 2020 that use of the mother tongue in schools would be cut back, the ensuing uproar was unsurprising. “We Mongolians are all against it,” Angba, a herder whose 8-year-old son joined the widescale classroom boycotts, told CNN. The father, fearing retribution for speaking out, used a pseudonym. “When the Mongolian language dies,” he said, “our Mongolian ethnicity will also disappear.”
Authorities contended that learning Mandarin is the obligation of all Chinese citizens — a lesson in national devotion. “It is a concrete manifestation of love for the party and country,” the state-run Inner Mongolia Daily said. Rewards were offered for the capture of protest leaders.
Observers say silencing the Mongolian language is the latest piece in a pattern of CCP persecution that, as in Tibet, includes party indoctrination and forced clearances of pastureland for lucrative but environmentally destructive mining operations. In 2011, thousands of people protested the death of a herder killed by a coal truck he tried to block from encroaching on his land, CNN reported. The party responded with paramilitary police and a clampdown on social media sites. “PRC authorities have spent the past 70 years slowly chipping away at the rights of ethnic minorities, in what appears to be a sweeping attempt at ethnic and national homogenization,” noted a September 2020 article in The Diplomat.
Parents and others, however, pledge that their cultural passion will not be dimmed. “As long as we’re Mongolians,” Qiqige, a mother of two, told CNN, “we’ll resist to the end.”
Standing in Solidarity
Under cover of a pandemic that has claimed more than 3 million lives globally and consumed the world’s attention and resources for nearly two years, the CCP has hastened its ethnic suppression. For the peoples of Inner Mongolia, Tibet and Xinjiang, it seems ever clearer that the party’s designation of their homelands as “autonomous” grants them only the freedom to do as the party dictates.
The global community continues to highlight their plight. Dismissing CCP demands to stay out of China’s internal affairs, democratic governments, international entities and human rights organizations are calling for greater access to oppressed populations and protections for ethnic cultural traditions. “The Chinese government’s authoritarianism was on full display in 2020 as it grappled with the deadly coronavirus outbreak first reported in Wuhan,” the New York-based Human Rights Watch noted in its 2021 annual report. “Beijing’s repression — insisting on political loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party — deepened across the country.”
Following the CCP’s ban on Lunar New Year events in Tibet, the U.S. Department of State held a virtual Losar celebration and reiterated the United States’ commitment to working with allies and partners to preserve Tibetan heritage. “We will not tolerate the Chinese government’s relentless assault on the dignity and human rights of Tibetans and other minority groups,” State Department senior official Lisa Peterson said in February 2021. A week later, on UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day, protesters in Japan, Mongolia and Sweden, among other nations, decried the CCP’s assault on Inner Mongolians’ language traditions.
Meanwhile, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights directed the PRC to address concerns ranging from: the representation of ethnic groups in public administration, including military and police, in Inner Mongolia, Tibet and Xinjiang; expropriation of Tibetan herders’ land and “environmental degradation on the Tibetan plateau” caused by infrastructure projects; and abuse and forced labor of Tibetans, Uyghurs and other minorities. The committee’s March 2021 report also called for China’s response “on reports that the State party has … attempted to eradicate the culture, religion and language of Uyghurs and Tibetans through massive destruction of sacred cultural and religious sites and bans on the practice of religious rituals and on the use of Uyghur and Tibetan languages in schools.”
Only such a unified response can halt further spread of the CCP’s forced assimilation, exile community leaders say. “Standing against China in relation to its record on human rights violations of minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang is not in the control of one country or a small group of countries, but the whole world community needs to stand in solidarity,” Lobsang, then Tibet’s president in exile, said at an April 2021 event hosted by the New Delhi-based Centre for Democracy, Pluralism and Human Rights, according to The Times of India newspaper. “Not authoritarian policies of China but democratic policies for development that respect diversity is what the world needs.”
