Chinese officials take over the administration of the largest Tibetan Buddhist institute Larung Gar
January 29, 2018
Voice of America, January 27, 2018 – Chinese authorities are placing tighter administrative controls over Larung Gar, a Buddhist study center, according to a report released by Human Rights Watch (HRW).
About 200 Communist Party cadres and lay officials “are taking over all management, finances, security, admissions, and even the choice of textbooks at the center, following demolitions and expulsions in 2017,” according to the HRW report, which outlines the “micromanagement” of the monks, nuns and visitors to the institute founded in 1980.
“We think the latest developments at Larung Gar really are unprecedented,” Sophie Richardson, the HRW China director, told VOA’s Tibetan service, adding the controls are an “intrusion into the management security and even the textbooks of the community.”
VOA emailed a request for comment on the HRW report to the Chinese Embassy in Washington but received no reply.
Larung Gar was founded by Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok, a highly regarded Tibetan Buddhist master. At one point, it was home to at least 10,000 monks, nuns, lay students and elderly people, although some tourism websites estimated there were closer to 40,000 people. The center has long been targeted by Beijing, which planned to reduce the Larung Gar population to 5,000 by September 2017.
The brochure, A Simplified Program for the Separation of the Institute and Monastery at Larung Monastery Five Sciences Buddhist Institute, was apparently issued by local Chinese Communist Party authorities, according to HRW.
Authorities will split Larung Gar into two sections — an academy and a monastery — divided by a wall, according to an English-language translation of the document provided by HRW. The human rights group said it had received it in August 2017.
The academy will have no more than 1,500 residents, most of them monks, according to the HRW report, and the monastery with have a maximum of 3,500 nuns.
The monks and nuns at Larung Gar will be subject to “increased security and heightened control,” including restrictions on how many of them will be allowed to stay there, according to the HRW report. Ongoing surveillance will be tightened with the use of a “grid management” system, the report says, and visitors, as well as the nuns and monks, will be required to have identifying tags — red for monks, yellow for nuns and green for lay people.
“The new government controls over Larung Gar fly in the face of party claims that China respects constitutionally protected religious beliefs,” Richardson said in an HRW release.
Since 2008, the number of monks across the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) has fallen, leaving most monasteries with only a handful of monks, who are overseen by Chinese Communist Party members in charge of the facilities.
Many monks in the region decamped to Larung Gar in order to continue their studies.
In 2014, however, TAR-based Chinese officials ordered families in Driru County to bring monks back from Larung Gar and other monasteries in Ganze prefecture.
In August 2017, six members of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, all of them Tibetan, were appointed to manage the day-to-day affairs of Larung Gar, according to Radio Free Asia, which also reported on the establishment of checkpoints on the main road leading to the complex.
Relations between China and Tibetans have been uneasy since the Chinese army marched into Tibetan territory in 1950, land China contends had been in its orbit since the 13th century.
Many Tibetans believe Beijing is trying to suppress Tibet’s language, freedom of expression and religion while allowing migration of Chinese citizens and the construction of major infrastructure projects in the region. Chinese authorities say their presence has raised the local living standards while allowing the Tibetans much autonomy.

Opinion: How China forces Western companies to do its political bidding
January 22, 2018
The Washington Post, January 21, 2018 – As China’s economic might grows, Beijing is leveraging that power to coerce foreign companies to advance its political narrative and punish them when they step out of line. The Chinese Communist Party’s treatment this month of hotel giant Marriott after a minor website error takes the effort to a new and dangerous level.
In Washington, the Chinese government’s overreaction to Marriott listing Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong and Macau as “countries” on an emailed questionnaire has sparked alarm. Trump administration officials, lawmakers and experts said the Communist Party is escalating how far it is willing to go in enforcing strict adherence to its political positions among foreign actors.
After a Marriott Rewards employee “liked” a Jan. 9 tweet by the “Friends of Tibet” group praising the questionnaire, Chinese authorities called in Marriott officials for questioning, shut down their Chinese website and mobile apps, and demanded an apology. The Jan. 11 apology from Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson parroted the language the Communist Party uses to describe groups that stand opposed to Chinese repression or advocate for Tibetan autonomy.
“We don’t support anyone who subverts the sovereignty and territorial integrity of China and we do not intend in any way to encourage or incite any such people or groups,” Sorenson wrote.
Marriott has more than 300 hotels in China, its second-largest single market, after the United States. While it began disciplinary proceedings against the employee who “liked” the offending tweet, Chinese netizens scoured the Internet and found dozens more foreign corporations that had listed as countries territories that are claimed by China. Chinese Internet bots fueled the purportedly popular outrage.
Corporations including Delta Air Lines and Zara rushed out apologies of their own. But the Chinese government didn’t stop there. Dozens of companies were told to scrub their websites for any related content or face severe consequences. The state-run media organ China Daily piled on with an op-ed headlined “No flouting of China’s core interests will be tolerated.” Chinese government officials even threatened the family of a Chinese student in Canada who responded favorably to the Friends of Tibet tweet.
By combining government power, manufactured public outrage and negative state-sponsored media coverage, the Chinese government can place massive pressure on American companies to tow the party’s political line. That aggressiveness is now becoming an issue in the U.S.-China relationship.
“Everyone should be deeply concerned by the PRC’s growing comprehensive campaign to exploit trade and commerce to advance its global Communist agenda,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) told me. “For decades the Communist Party has limited speech within China on topics and opinions that threaten their one-party rule, and we are now seeing this form of information warfare influence the way American companies conduct business.”
For example, by parroting the Communist Party line on Tibet, Marriott helps the Chinese government whitewash its systematic and brutal repression of Tibetans. As the International Campaign for Tibet wrote in a letter to Sorenson, Marriott could have changed the emailed questionnaire without endorsing China’s political position on Tibet.
“China has been continually attempting to silence international public debates on the issue of Tibet, and your statement unfortunately furthers their efforts,” the group wrote, pointing out that the Chinese propaganda machine can use Marriott’s statement to further undermine Tibetan human rights.
The question for Washington policymakers is: Where does this end? What if a Tibetan group wanted to hold a conference at a Marriott hotel in Washington? Would Marriott be within its rights to prevent that? Does official Washington have a role to play?
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) told me that as China becomes more brazen in its efforts to coerce or control American businesses, the United States must devise a comprehensive public-private effort to push back.
“This is only the latest in a long pattern of the Chinese government leveraging access to its marketplace to extract painful concessions from foreign businesses,” he said. “Our actions, or lack thereof, can influence their behavior. To this end, we need to stand firm in defense of American interests, both security and economic.”

Tibet raised in US House of Representatives debate on China’s Strategy to Accrue Global Power
January 22, 2018
International Campaign for Tibet, January 19, 2018 – The US House of Representatives saw a discussion on the night of January 18, 2018 under the Special Order session that highlighted the situation in Tibet and the need to pass pending legislations relating to it as a way to China’s onslaught on American society.
The discussion was at the initiative of Representative Ted Yoho, Chairman of the Asia and the Pacific Subcommittee on House Foreign Affairs Committee. The subcommittee had organized a hearing on Tibet on December 6, 2017.
While Members of Congress wanted good relations with China the discussion saw them expressing concern at China’s increasing attempt to subvert American society. As Mr. Yoho said in his remarks, “…China has grown to become a revisionist power—not rising within the current order, but seeking to change, subvert, or coerce it to suit China’s end—not playing by the rules, but rewriting the rules to suit the needs of China.”
During the discussion, three Members of Congress – Mr. Ted Yoho (Republican from Florida), Mr. Ted Poe (Republican from Texas), and Mr. Jim McGovern (Democrat from Massachusetts) – made reference to the situation in Tibet.
Mr. Yoho highlighted the issue of lack of access to Tibet and the need for freedom to the Tibetan people to follow their religious tradition, including in the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.
Mr. McGovern spoke about Chinese interference in the physical and spiritual lives of Tibetans and the Dalai Lama’s nonviolent effort to resolve the issue of Tibet through the Middle Way Approach. He urged for the passage of H.R. 1872, the Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act, and H. Con. Res. 89, expressing the sense of Congress that the treatment of the Tibetan people should be an important factor in the conduct of United States relations with China. He also called for the full implementation of the Tibetan Policy Act of 2002.
Mr. Poe spoke about Chinese persecution of the Tibetan people in the context of it being an atheistic regime.
The relevant excerpts of their remarks are given below. The full proceeding of the Special Order session on China is found here.
Mr. YOHO: If we look at the Tibetan people, the Tibetan are probably one of the most peaceful populations on Earth, but yet I can’t travel there as a U.S. dignitary or as a U.S. Member of Congress. They can’t come here and be recognized. The Dalai Lama can’t come here and be recognized because China gets mad. Beijing gets mad. The Tibetan people have a way to pass on the Dalai Lama to the next generation. China kidnapped the Panchen child and said: We will replace it with who we think should be the next leader, and it is somebody they are going to groom.
Mr. McGOVERN: I have often stood on the floor of this House to call for respect for the human rights of the Tibetan people in China.
Just a few months ago the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, which I co-chair, held a hearing on the repression of religious freedom in Tibet.
Tibetan Buddhists face extensive controls on their religious life—an intrusive official presence in monasteries, pervasive surveillance, limits on travel and communications, and ideological re-education campaigns. Religious expression and activism have been met with violent repression, imprisonment and torture.
As of last August, 69 monks, nuns or Tibetan reincarnate teachers were known to be serving sentences in Chinese prisons—although the real number is likely much higher.
And the Chinese government continues to claim the prerogative to decide who will succeed His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, who is now 82 years old.
This extreme Chinese interference in the physical and spiritual lives of Tibetans occurs even though the Tibetans seek only to fully exercise the autonomy guaranteed them by the Chinese constitution and China’s ‘‘Law on Regional Ethnic Autonomy.’’ In the late 1980s the Dalai Lama proposed the Middle Way Approach as a path toward Tibetan autonomy within China, and he has pursued that path through non-violence ever since.
I urge us to start by passing two pieces of legislation on Tibet that have been introduced in the House: H.R. 1872, the Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act, and H. Con. Res. 89, expressing the sense of Congress that the treatment of the Tibetan people should be an important factor in the conduct of United States relations with the People’s Republic of China. I urge the full and robust implementation of the Tibet Policy Act of 2002—including the designation of the Special Coordinator for Tibetan Policy, a statutory position that the Administration has yet to fill. I urge the robust use of the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act to sanction Chinese officials responsible for grave violations of the human rights of Tibetans, Uyghurs, and the many other loyal opposition activists who have been targeted in recent years—human rights lawyers, religious practitioners, writers, artists.
Mr. POE: So when you have an atheistic regime in charge, you can see why they persecute their own people and torture not only Christians and Muslims, but Tibetans and other people who don’t agree with their atheistic philosophy.

The Guardian view on China’s spreading influence: look in the gift horse’s mouth

Editorial, Wednesday 17 January 2018
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/17/the-guardian-view-on-chinas-spreading-influence-look-in-the-gift-horses-mouth
There is growing concern about Beijing’s attempts to shape the thinking of politicians and the public overseas.
The arrest of a former CIA agent this week is the stuff of a classic murky spy tale. Though he is charged with unlawfully retaining national defence information, the US reportedly suspects that he leaked the names of informants. An earlier report alleged that China imprisoned or killed multiple US sources between 2010 and 2012. Both countries have plans for tackling espionage. But analysts, intelligence agencies and politicians are now debating how to handle the subtler challenge of Chinese influence activities: a “magic weapon” neither cloak-and-dagger nor transparent.
China says it does not interfere in other countries’ domestic affairs. Yet all nations seek to sway foreign governments and citizens towards their own priorities, interests and perspectives. The question is how they do so, and how far they go. (No one should pretend that western nations always act above board.)
China’s influence work is strategic and multifaceted. Some of it is distinctive mainly for lavish resourcing. The National Endowment for Democracy recently described other aspects as “sharp power”: the effort by authoritarian states not just to attract support but to determine and control attitudes abroad. It seeks to “guide” the diaspora and enlist it for political activity. It embraces foreigners, appointing those with political influence to high-profile roles in Chinese companies. Chinese-language media overseas have been bought by entrepreneurs with ties to Beijing. Partnerships with universities shape research and limit debate.
Last month, Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, introduced a bill banning foreign donations as he warned of “unprecedented and increasingly sophisticated” attempts to influence politics. It follows a senator’s resignation after allegations that he tipped off a Chinese donor that his phone was probably tapped by security agencies; the case has reportedly prompted the Trump administration to open an investigation into Beijing’s covert influence operations in the US. In New Zealand, a Chinese-born MP denied being a spy after it emerged that he had spent years at top Chinese military colleges. A leading scholar on China has alleged that its “covert, corrupting and coercive political influence activities in New Zealand are now at a critical level”.
Chinese state media has complained of “hysterical paranoia” with racist undertones in Australia. In an era of populism, there is good reason to worry that members of the diaspora, in particular, could face unfair suspicion. Citizens have the right to listen to the views of a foreign government, be persuaded and share them. But to speak for them, on their order, is different. Is someone acting spontaneously, or have they been prodded, coerced or bought? What links or leverage does Beijing enjoy? Establishing the answers is hard – and proving self-censorship even tougher. But it is essential to at least attempt to distinguish between legitimate, improper and illegal activities.
Casting light on the issue is by far the most important step. Democracies must delve into areas that may prove embarrassing. They need the capability to do so – starting with language skills. Working together would help. In places, laws may need to be tightened, though with care: banning foreign political donations is a basic step. For this issue says as much about the west as China. Beijing’s keenness to control speech is manifest, while influential figures and institutions in democracies proclaim lofty ideals – then fall prey to gullibility or greed. China’s influence would not go very far without the western hunger for its cash.

Western retailers kowtow to China over Tibet
January 15, 2018
By Didi Tang
The Times, January 15, 2018 – Foreign companies operating in China are rushing to pull from their websites and mobile apps any list that identifies Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong or Macau as countries, fearing a clampdown.
The fashion retailer Zara removed an app page that identified Taiwan as a country and apologised. Delta Air Lines has changed its country list and apologised, and the Chinese website for Bulgari underwent maintenance as Chinese consumers took it upon themselves to check foreign companies’ websites and apps.
Last week Beijing shut down the Marriott’s Chinese app after the US hotel chain listed Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau as separate countries. Arne Sorenson, the chief executive, apologised but it is yet to appease patriotic Chinese consumers who are boycotting it. Clients are cancelling events and popular travel apps are removing Marriott products and services.
Taiwan is a self-governing island but Beijing sees it as a renegade province and has threatened to take it by force. Hong Kong and Macau, both former colonies, have returned to Chinese rule. Tibet is seeking autonomy and wants the return of its spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who is in exile in India.

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.”