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.

Beijing Hinders Free Speech in America (op-ed by Wang Dan)
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/opinion/beijing-free-speech-america.html
I spent nearly seven years in a Chinese prison for being a leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. I was freed in 1998, and the Chinese government let me leave the country. I chose to go to the United States, where I could freely speak my mind without fear of being thrown in prison. I earned a doctorate in history in 2009 and took a teaching position in Taiwan. I taught contemporary Chinese history and led a weekly seminar — a “China salon” — of open discussions about Chinese society and politics. Many of the seminar topics, like the 1989 protest movement and political reform, were taboo in the mainland but safe for public discussion in Taiwan. The salons drew large numbers of mainland students attending Taiwanese universities on exchange programs who were hungry for the truth about China’s past. Many of them wondered about the Tiananmen Square crackdown, for example, because there is little mention of it in China’s history books.
I returned to the United States earlier this year and brought the salons to American universities. Given the long tradition of free speech in the United States, I assumed that the forums would fare even better in America, where some 329,000 Chinese students attend college. I hoped that public discussions of topics off-limits in China might challenge visiting Chinese students and encourage them to embrace Western democratic values. But instead, over the past three months, my efforts on American campuses have been stymied. The Chinese Communist Party is extending its surveillance of critics abroad, reaching into Western academic communities and silencing visiting Chinese students. Through a campaign of fear and intimidation, Beijing is hindering free speech in the United States and in other Western countries.
The Chinese government, or people sympathetic to it, encourage like-minded Chinese students and scholars in the West to report on Chinese students who participate in politically sensitive activities — like my salons, but also other public forums and protests against Beijing. Members of the China Students and Scholars Association, which has chapters at many American universities, maintain ties with the Chinese consulates and keep tabs on “unpatriotic” people and activities on campuses. Agents or sympathizers of the Chinese government show up at public events videotaping and snapping pictures of speakers, participants and organizers. Chinese students who are seen with political dissidents like me or dare to publicly challenge Chinese government policies can be put on a blacklist. Their families in China can be threatened or punished. When these students return to China, members of the public security bureau may “invite” them to “tea,” where they are interrogated and sometimes threatened. Their passport may not be renewed. One student told me that during one of his home visits to China he was pressured to spy on others in the United States.
And in one egregious example of intimidation, in March 2016, the police in China abducted the relatives of the Chinese journalist Chang Ping, who lives in exile in Germany, after he published an article in a German publication that was critical of President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on free speech. Chinese students abroad hear these stories and, with good reason, tread carefully. Many have become too afraid to attend open forums like my salon, and those who do show up mostly keep a low profile.
Not all Chinese students in the West condemn their government. Many, in fact, actively support Beijing, often by shaming their fellow students who criticize Beijing. Nationalism is rampant in China and many students, who grew up subjected to the full force of the Chinese government’s “patriotic education program,” carry it abroad. They blame Western powers for causing a “century of humiliation” before the Communist takeover in 1949 and for instigating trouble and constraining China’s growth as a global power. These “patriotic” students and scholars team up with the Chinese consulates to sabotage protests critical of the Chinese government. Many resort to online harassment of Beijing’s critics.
In a typical example, Shuping Yang, a Chinese student at the University of Maryland in May praised the “fresh air of free speech” in the United States during her commencement address and then faced a barrage of threats online from Chinese citizens and the state media for “insulting the motherland.” The China Students and Scholars Association encouraged people to rebut Ms. Yang’s views. Under the pressure, Ms. Yang issued a public apology, asking for forgiveness and declaring that she did not intend to belittle her country. Even Western educational institutions that have benefited from Chinese government funding, student enrollment and Chinese private donations have succumbed to pressure from Beijing. Some have canceled activities or programs, and others have resorted to self-censorship. Springer Nature, which publishes prestigious science magazines like Nature, recently blocked access to some articles from China to avoid being banned in the country.
The country’s growing influence abroad has received a lot of attention in Australia, where journalists have detailed how Chinese money has infiltrated the political process. Chinese students in Australia can come under heavy pressure and shaming from other nationalist Chinese students for criticizing Beijing. Recently, Clive Hamilton, a professor of public ethics in Australia, said that his publisher delayed the release of a book of his that investigates the rising influence of the Chinese Communist Party in Australia for fear that the Chinese government may sue for defamation. We can be certain that Mr. Hamilton’s name has been added to a list of Western scholars who are banned from China, another common tactic used against outspoken China scholars whose work the Chinese government dislikes.
These threats to free speech should prompt Western politicians to stand up to China. I’m disappointed that President Trump chose to focus mainly on trade, rather than human rights, during his recent trip to China. There appear to have been no attempts to push back against Beijing’s increasing proclivity to commit rights abuses beyond its borders. Such appeasement will only embolden Mr. Xi, further threatening Western democratic institutions. In recent months, the Trump administration has restarted talks with its allies in Asia about how to counter China’s growing assertiveness in the region. It is equally important for the United States to shore up its policies at home to stop China from undermining core democratic values — both on campus and beyond.

US lawmakers slam China for ‘repression, rights violations’ in Tibet
December 11, 2017
Press Trust of India, December 7, 2017 – Top American lawmakers, across the aisle, joined by eminent experts on Thursday slammed China for the “continued repression and human rights violations” in Tibet, even as they praised India for accommodating Tibetan refugees. “Tibetans inside Tibet continue to live in very, very challenging times indeed,” top Hollywood star Richard Gere, chair of the International Campaign for Tibet, said in his testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific. During the hearing, lawmakers and experts testifying before the subcommittee called for reciprocal access, religious freedom and human rights in Tibet. Congressman Ted Yoho, who chaired the hearing, supported the Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act of 2017 which proposes to deny US visas to Chinese government officials involved in restricting access to Tibet. Alleging that human rights and personal freedoms in Tibet were “already in a poor and worsening state”, Yoho said the government of China engages in “severe repression” of Tibet’s unique religious, cultural and linguistic heritage by and “strictly curtailing” the civil rights of the Tibetan population, including the freedom of speech, religion, association, assembly and movement.
The authorities have used “heavy-handed and violent tactics” to maintain control in Tibet, especially in response to unrest, including “extra-judicial killings, torture, arbitrary arrests, extra-judicial detentions and house arrest”, he said, he said. “Tibet remains extremely isolated. The flow of information in and out of Tibet is tightly restricted. Tibetans are prevented from obtaining passports and moving freely, and foreigners, especially journalists and officials are frequently denied access,” he said. Congressman Brad Sherman demanded that Congress must act quickly to counter China’s “repressive tactics and policies” toward Tibet. “This is important for our own standing as leaders in world human rights,” he said, as he praised India for accommodating Tibetan refugees.
“We’re trying to build a strategic relationship and partnership with India, and we’ve got to commend India for providing refuge to over 90,000 Tibetans, including the Dalai Lama himself, who have had to flee Chinese repression,” he said. According to Congressman Steve Chabot, China’s “decades- long oppression of Tibet is a constant example of its total disregard for religious freedom and human decency”. “Just this past weekend, another Tibetan monk set himself on fire to protest China’s ongoing tyranny. China has systematically marginalised Tibet for over 50 years now,” he said. America’s own national security interests dictate that it oppose China’s “increasingly repressive policies” on Tibet and that the US work toward a negotiated solution and start making the treatment of the people of Tibet an important factor in our relations with Beijing, asserted Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Congressman Jim McGovern, author of the Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act of 2017, said the Dalai Lama can play a constructive role in negotiating a better future for the Tibetan people, but China “clearly doesn’t see it that way”. “China is waiting him out and counting on his eventual departure to remove Tibet from the international agenda, so we need to move now, and we need some leverage, and that is why earlier this year, along with a bipartisan group of members, I introduce HR1872, the Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act,” he said. “If China wants its citizens and officials to travel freely in the United States, Americans must be able to travel freely in China, including Tibet. “But allowing travel to Tibet is only one step China needs to take, and there are others. Most especially, China should permit His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, to return to Tibet for a visit if he so desires,” McGovern said. Gere told lawmakers that reciprocity is an important principle in diplomatic relations that should be implemented not only when it comes to trade, but also to freedom of movement and freedom of information. “If they (Chinese) want to be the superpower they claim to be and the world leader they claim to be, these norms are to be followed,” he said. Gere said another important part of the Tibet Policy Act was to encourage the negotiations between the Dalai Lama and his representatives and the Chinese government. “We have not done that recently, and this needs to be the forefront of what our policy is with China. It’s not unreasonable, and it’s actually good for China. To resolve this Tibetan issue is good for everyone, especially the Chinese,” he said.

Lithuanian MPs establish a support group for Tibet
December 11, 2017
The Baltic Times, December 09, 2017 – Chonpel Tsering, representative of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in Northern Europe, the Baltic states and Poland, has thanked Lithuanian parliamentarians for establishing a group of support to Tibet. “Merely setting such a group is an act of solidarity itself. I think Tibetans in exile and in Tibet will get to hear of this that itself gives them comfort, reassurance that their fight was not forgotten, even in a county far far away in Europe, many Tibetans not necessarily have heard of. For Tibetans to learn that there is a parliamentary group in the Lithuanian parliament will be a great source of strength to them,” Tsering told a news conference at the Lithuanian parliament on Friday. Andrius Navickas, conservative MP who heads the group of solidarity with Tibet, said the main objective was to keep the Tibetan issue on the agenda. Lithuania’s parliamentarians intended to set up a group for parliamentary relations with Tibet, however, did not get a green light from the Seimas leadership, as Vilnius considers the Tibetan region in the Himalaya Mountains part of China. An ad hoc group of support was established, as it does not need an official go-ahead from leaders of the parliament. Leaders of the group said the situation resembled the Soviet era, however, the representative of Tibet said the group’s statute did not matter, all that matters was the determination to demonstrate solidarity with the people of Tibet. “The name is irrelevant, what is important is will, determination and the support of the parliamentarians,” said Tsering, the envoy of the Tibetan government in exile. At the same time, he emphasized Tibet did not seek to separate from China, adding it only wanted an operating autonomy that would ensure freedom of culture, religion and speech. The Tibetan envoy said that even possession of the Dalai Lama’s photograph could put Tibetans in prison for years. Lithuania fell into China’s disfavor after President Dalia Grybauskaite met with the Dalai Lama in Vilnius in 2013. Negotiations with China on various issues stalled until Beijing issued a statement in February 2015, stating its willingness to develop good ties.

Future of electric cars is at the bottom of Tibetan salt lake
December 11, 2017
Nikkei Asian Review, December 10, 2017 — The world is on the brink of an electric vehicle revolution. The widespread use of electric cars will depend on the availability of lithium, which is crucial for electric vehicle batteries. China is the world’s second-richest country in lithium reserves, after Chile. Countries are now scrambling to secure supplies of the valuable metal, but where is it found? I visited a remote area of China, about 3,000 meters above sea level, that is one of the world’s largest lithium-producing areas and which the Chinese government considers a strategic region. “Huge amounts of capital are rapidly flowing into the town,” a local resident said. In late November, I took a full day to travel from Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, in southern China, to Golmud in the country’s inland province of Qinghai. The air is thin in the area, located high in the mountains between the Tibet Autonomous Region and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, and I could walk only a little way before I was short of breath. “This airport was completed only a little over a month ago. It’s brand-new,” said an official. I assumed it had been built in anticipation of rapidly growing lithium demand. I got into the four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser that had come to pick me up, and, soon after leaving the airport, I saw a vast expanse of salt marsh extending as far as the eye could see. “The elevation here is high, but in ancient times all this area was under the sea. Crustal movements lifted it up,” the driver, a local man, told me. While I marveled at the grand scale of the landscape, we traveled about an hour and a half to Chaerhan Salt Lake, which takes its name from a Mongolian word meaning “world of salt.” At an elevation of nearly 3,000 meters, in the freezing cold and clear air, the vast lake sparkled in the sunlight. Surrounded by large volumes of dried salt, it looked like it was wearing snow makeup. The locals call the lake the “mirror of the sky.” The area centering on Chaerhan Salt Lake, is home to 83% of China’s lithium deposits, found within several meters of salt sediment on the lake floor. No living things inhabit the lake or its surroundings, so silence reigned. However, soon 10-ton trucks loaded with heaps of salt recovered from the lake began rumbling by, and the lithium-producing area appeared to suddenly come to life. After traveling a little farther along a bumpy road built of pressed salt, I spoke to a man named Li Jingwei, 47. He said he had worked for a plant of a state-owned company by the lake since he was 16, and called himself an experienced old hand. “The salt lake provides lots of precious resources. Attention is now on lithium, which is used in electric vehicles,” he said. “Small developers have been driven out, and over the past three years, state-owned enterprises have come in and investment has become active. This is such a remote place, but many dignitaries come here.” I wondered which dignitaries visited such a remote place, and was surprised to see the photographs on a wall of the plant where Li was working. The photos showed Wen Jiabao, Zhang Dejiang, Li Changchun, Zhao Leji, Li Keqiang and other high-level dignitaries. They even included one that showed President Xi Jinping encouraging the employees during his visit in August last year. “Jiang Zemin also came, though there is no photograph of him here. This is a front-line base for China’s resources,” Li said proudly. The auto industry is already ramping up for what is expected to be a rapid shift from gasoline to electric vehicles, and as a result, lithium prices have already soared. On Shanghai’s metals market, lithium carbonate is trading at around 170,000 yuan ($25,700) per ton, more than three times the level two years ago. “The price of lithium has risen, and business is good. We expect even better times,” said a factory worker of BYD, China’s biggest electric vehicle manufacturer. BYD moved into the area a year ago, realizing that Chaerhan Salt Lake holds the key to electric vehicle growth, and has succeeded in securing a concession for recovering lithium. It jointly set up the factory with a local state-owned enterprise, and is hurriedly preparing to start production. In China, the world’s biggest automobile market, electric vehicles still account for only about 2% of new car sales. However, the country’s electric car market is expected to grow rapidly and reach 5 million vehicles by 2025 — comparable to Japan’s entire market for new cars. Preparations are already underway in this remote area of China. A massive wave of business activity that will influence the world is about to spread from the quiet city of Golmud.

Pakistan, Nepal, Myanmar Back Away From Chinese Projects
4 December 2017, https://www.voanews.com/a/three-countries-withdraw-from-chinese-projects/4148094.html
BEIJING — In the short space of just a few weeks, Pakistan, Nepal and Myanmar have canceled or sidelined three major hydroelectricity projects planned by Chinese companies. The rejection of the three projects, worth nearly $20 billion, comes as a serious jolt to China’s ambitious trade-linking project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Pakistan cited tough financing terms imposed by China as its reason for canceling the $14 billion Diamer-Bhasha Dam project.
Nepal’s deputy Prime Minister recently announced a decision to scrap a $2.5 billion contract for a hydroelectricity project, accusing the Chinese company of financial irregularities. And Myanmar, which halted a $3.6 billion Chinese-backed dam three years ago, declared last month that it no longer is interested in big hydro-electric power projects.
The decisions by China’s neighbors could mean a serious loss of image for BRI, which involves plans to build infrastructure across the globe, including in developed countries like the United States and those in Europe.
While there are also diverse local political and economic reasons behind the three decisions, there is a growing realization among poorer countries that Chinese proposals to build massive infrastructure projects come at an extremely high price, analysts said.
Asked about these decisions by Pakistan and Nepal, the Chinese foreign ministry said it was not aware of it. “I am not aware of this information,” Geng Shuang, foreign ministry spokesman, said at a media briefing. “China and Nepal have sound relations and bilateral cooperation covers a wide range of areas.”
“Against our Intehttp:
According to the local media accounts, Muzammil Hussain, chairman of Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda) in Pakistan told the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of parliament that the Chinese company involved in the project there had imposed very difficult financing conditions, which included pledging the new dam, as well as an existing dam, as loan security.
“Chinese conditions for financing the Diamer-Bhasha Dam were not doable and against our interests,” Hussain said.
Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator at the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers & People, a New Delhi based NGO, said, “For Pakistan, the biggest ally has been China. …They [Pakistanis] would not take out this project without consulting them [the Chinese].”
Indeed, China and Pakistan frequently describe their relationship as “all-weather” and “iron brothers.”
“As far as Pakistan is concerned, they really want financing for this project,” Zorawar Daulet Singh, an analyst at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi said. Singh said he would not take the Pakistani official’s statement at face value. Islamabad had approached the World Bank and Asian Development Bank for funding but was turned down, he pointed out.
It is the Chinese, which do not want to go ahead with the project in the face of Indian protests, he said. India has been objecting to the Chinese constructing projects in the sensitive Kashmir area, which it claims as its own, because that amounts to backing Islamabad’s view of the Kashmir issue.
“They are probably wanting to sort of put this on the backburner for the moment,” Singh said adding, “I think there is some sort of policy debate within the Beijing establishment on how can they modify feedback to make it somewhat more acceptable to rest of the subcontinent, particularly India, of course.”
China even tried to save face for Pakistan he said.
“They [Chinese] gave the Pakistanis sort of face-saver, that okay, ‘we let you withdraw this but we actually don’t want to get into this now’,” Singh said.
Salvo from the Himalayas
In Nepal, deputy prime minister Kamal Thapa recently took to Twitter to announce, “The agreement [with China], marred by irregularities with the Chinese company – Gejuwa Group regarding the construction of Budhi Gandaki hydropower project, has been scrapped in a cabinet meeting as directed by the parliamentary committee.”
Thapa said the agreement had been signed with the Chinese company “illegally and haphazardly.”
Both the awarding and cancellation has resulted in political controversies in Nepal. The cancellation came immediately ahead of an election, which will take another two weeks to complete.
“The contract for 1200 MW dam project was awarded to a Chinese company some six months ago by the coalition government comprising [the] Maoist Party and the Nepali Congress, but in a manner that was not clearly transparent,” said Yubaraj Ghimire, an analysts of the Nepal political scene.
“There were questions raised about the transparency. You know it was quite a controversial deal. That was six months ago. Then, a parliamentary committee recommended that this deal be scrapped, but nothing happened.”
Talking about the latest decision to scrap the contract, Ghimire said, “What has caused controversy now is that this is a election [time] government which is not expected to take major decisions. It has generated debate and criticism.”
One of Nepal’s political leaders and a contender for prime ministership has even said he would reverse the decision if he comes to power.
China’s Reasons
Some analysts said there is also some rethinking in Beijing in favor of scrapping projects that offer a poor return on investments. China has come a long way with its BRI plans since it tried to sell projects to neighbors like Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan.
It is now looking at a large part of Europe and the Americas as potential markets.
China is also keen on exporting its hydroelectricity related machines and construction services across the globe. But it is taking a different view in the case of projects in neighboring countries which are mired in political conflicts and instead focusing on other markets like Latin America and Africa.
“They [Chinese] are looking for markets in Africa, Latin America and South East Asia, those regions where neighboring considerations are not very strong, they are looking for industry and machine [exports],” Thakkar said.
Incidentally, it is the same Chinese company, Gezhouba Water and Power (Group) Co Ltd. (CGGC), which won the contracts and was consequently rejected by Pakistan, Nepal and Myanmar.
“I am not sure we can blame the company for this. They are more [due to] investment and political considerations,” Thakkar said.
The recent project cancellations also show a growing realization among governments that the cost of per unit electricity produced in hydropower projects is a lot more than those coming from other sources of renewable energies like solar and wind power, Thakkar said.
In the case of Myanmar, the country’s Construction Minister told Reuters in an interview last month that big hydropower projects are no longer a priority in tackling the problem of power shortages.
Instead, Construction Minister Win Khaing said Myanmar is looking to LNG and smaller dams as an alternative solution.