Tibet and Xinjiang becoming tax havens for China’s wealthy
March 6, 2017
South China Morning Post, March 1, 2017 – Tibet and Xinjiang have become China’s answer to the British Virgin Islands, as celebrities such as Zhao Wei and Fan Bingbing as well as tycoons scramble to set up companies in areas with preferential tax terms.
The practise has come under the spotlight after actress Zhao Wei raised eyebrows with her 3 billion yuan (US$440 million) bid for a Shanghai-listed animation company. The venture involved in the later-abandoned takeover, called Longwei Culture & Media, was based in Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet.
Renowned as the spiritual centre at the foot of Himalayas, Lhasa, however, is seen as one of the lowest-income places in China with its economy heavily dependent on agriculture. For decades, few of the country’s affluent would consider investing in the remote inland city isolated from China’s cosmopolitan centre on the east coast.
But as Beijing struggles to lift Tibet and Xinjiang, two inner areas occasionally troubled by acts of ethnic violence, out of poverty, the regions have been assigned preferential tax policies in an effort to entice affluent investors.
In Tibet, religious freedom comes with Chinese characteristics
“They have virtually become China’s version of British Virgin Islands,” said Shen Meng, executive director with boutique investment bank Chanson & Co. in Beijing, referring to the Caribbean tax haven.
Thanks to a package of tax breaks, companies registered in Tibet are subject to a corporate tax rate of 15 per cent, well below the national standard rate of 25 per cent. The overall tax rate can drop to as low as 9 per cent as a result of other incentives granted by local governments.
Liu Yonghao, China’s 36th richest man who controls agricultural group New Hope Group, has a number of business based in Tibet, including Southern Hoper Industry Co and Tibet Hengye Feng Industrial Co that hold stakes in Hong Kong-listed Hua Xia Healthcare and TVB.
“Today, you can easily find an agent making money out of helping people register companies in Tibet or Xinjiang. The approval process does not take long,” Shen said.
Most recently, the Chinese border town Khorgos city in Xinjiang has drawn attention from celebrities such as Fan Bingbin.
Chinese dominate list of people and firms hiding money in tax havens, Panama Papers reveal
The northwestern city, at the doorstep to Kazakhstan, is home to the production companies behind top-grossing blockbusters Chongqing Hotpot and Buddies in India. Both films were backed by Khorgos Youth Enlight Pictures Co, a unit of Chinese media giant Beijing Enlight Pictures.
In August, actress Fan Bingbing set up her own media vehicle Khorgos Ai-mei-shen Film & TV Cultural in the city. Others launching Khorgos vehicles include actress Yang Mi, company registration records showed.
Khorgos offers an even more favourable raft of polices and sweeteners than Lhasa, making it the most favourable territory in terms of preferential taxes, according to industry experts.
Khorgos, which is designated a “National Special Economic Development Zone,” can provide companies income tax-free waivers for the first five years following registration, in addition to concessions on employee income tax and VAT bills.
“A different company address can save you millions of dollars,” Shen said.
However, it remains a question how the economies in Tibet and Xinjiang will benefit from their special tax regime, as companies in labour-intensive industries such as manufacturing are reluctant to relocate due to transportation costs.
“You can set up a firm there, but you don’t have to hire people there,”Shen said. “So the influx of such companies is not likely to improve local employment,” Shen said.

India to host Dalai Lama in disputed territory, defying China
March 6, 2017
By Sanjeev Maglani and Tommy Wilkes
Reuters, March 4, 2017 – Indian federal government representatives will meet the Dalai Lama when he visits a sensitive border region controlled by India but claimed by China, officials said, despite a warning from Beijing that it would damage ties.
India says the Tibetan spiritual leader will make a religious trip to Arunachal Pradesh next month, and as a secular democracy it would not stop him from travelling to any part of the country.
China claims the state in the eastern Himalayas as “South Tibet”, and has denounced foreign and even Indian leaders’ visits to the region as attempts to bolster New Delhi’s territorial claims.
A trip by the Dalai Lama, whom the Chinese regard as a dangerous separatist, would ratchet up tensions at a time when New Delhi is at odds with China on strategic and security issues and unnerved by Beijing’s growing ties with arch-rival Pakistan.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration is raising its public engagement with the Tibetan leader, a change from earlier governments’ reluctance to anger Beijing by sharing a public platform with him.
“It’s a behavioural change you are seeing. India is more assertive,” junior home minister Kiren Rijiju told Reuters in an interview.
Rijiju, who is from Arunachal and is Modi’s point man on Tibetan issues, said he would meet the Dalai Lama, who is visiting the Buddhist Tawang monastery after an eight-year interval.
“He is going there as a religious leader, there is no reason to stop him. His devotees are demanding he should come, what harm can he do? He is a lama.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Friday the Dalai Lama’s trip would cause serious damage to India-China ties, and warned New Delhi not to provide him a platform for anti-China activities.
“The Dalai clique has for a long time carried out anti-China separatist activities and on the issue of the China-India border has a history of disgraceful performances,” spokesman Geng Shuang told a daily news briefing.
Visits of the Dalai Lama are initiated months, if not years in advance, and approval for the April 4-13 trip predates recent disagreements between the neighbours.
But the decision to go ahead at a time of strained relations signals Modi’s readiness to use diplomatic tools at a time when China’s economic and political clout across South Asia is growing.
China is helping to fund a new trade corridor across India’s neighbour and arch-foe Pakistan, and has also invested in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, raising fears of strategic encirclement.
Last month a Taiwanese parliamentary delegation visited Delhi, angering Beijing, which regards Taiwan as an integral part of China.
In December, President Pranab Mukherjee hosted the Dalai Lama at his official residence with other Nobel prize winners, the first public meeting with an Indian head of state in 60 years.
Some officials said India’s approach to the Tibetan issue remained cautious, reflecting a gradual evolution in policy rather than a sudden shift, and Modi appears reluctant to go too far for fear of upsetting its large northern neighbour.
India’s foreign secretary, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, was in Beijing last week on a visit that analysts said was aimed at stabilising relations between the world’s most populous countries.
That said, Modi’s desire to pursue a more assertive foreign policy since his election in 2014 was quickly felt in contacts with China.
At one bilateral meeting early in his tenure, Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj asked her Chinese counterpart whether Beijing had a “one India” policy, according to a source familiar with India-China talks, a pointed reference to Beijing’s demand that countries recognise its “one China” policy.
“One India” would imply that China recognise India’s claims to Kashmir, contested by Pakistan, as well as border regions like Arunachal Pradesh.
India’s hosting of the Dalai Lama since he fled to India in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule has long irritated Beijing. But government ministers often shied away from regular public meetings with the Buddhist monk.
“These meetings were happening before. Now it is public,” Lobsang Sangay, head of the Tibetan government-in-exile based in the Indian town of Dharamsala, said in an interview.
“I notice a tangible shift. With all the Chinese investments in all the neighbouring countries, that has generated debate within India,” he said.
The chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh, a member of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, met the Dalai Lama in New Delhi in October and officially invited him to visit the state.
On the Dalai Lama’s last visit in 2009, the state’s chief minister met him. This time he will be joined by federal minister Rijiju, a move the Chinese may see as giving the trip an official imprimatur.
New Delhi has been hurt by China’s refusal to let it join the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the global cartel that controls nuclear commerce.
India has also criticised Beijing for stonewalling its request to add the head of a banned Pakistani militant group to a U.N. Security Council blacklist.
Rory Medcalf, Head of the National Security College at the Australian National University, said New Delhi appeared to have been surprised by China’s inflexibility since Modi came to power, fuelling distrust in the Indian security establishment.
“India does feel that the cards are stacked against it and that it should retain and play the cards that it does have,” he said. “The Dalai Lama and Tibetan exile community is clearly one of those cards.”
(Additional reporting by Abhishek Madhukar in DHARAMSALA and Ben Blanchard in BEIJING; Editing by Mike Collett-White)

No access to justice for Tibetans, says new report on human rights in Tibet
February 27, 2017
Tibetan Centre for Human Rights & Democracy, February 23, 2017 – The party-state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) continued its egregious human rights violations and abuses in Tibet by criminalizing basic human rights and freedoms, and engaging in arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearance, collective punishment and environmental destruction to name a few, according to the 2016 Annual Report on human rights situation in Tibet released by the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD). Repressive laws and regulations were introduced and intensified to enable widespread and systematic human rights violations. Despite the extremely deplorable situation in Tibet, the PRC made no effort to change its policy of repression, authoritarianism and state-sponsored violence.
The report highlights tightened controls over the right to freedom of expression, privacy, religion, and assembly. In addition, it focuses on the substantial barriers faced by Tibetans in accessing the Chinese justice system due to PRC’s politicized and emasculated judiciary. The fate and future of Tibet’s environment remains a pressing issue in light of PRC’s continued practice of using Tibetan land and resources primarily for resource extraction and economic exploitation while forcing local Tibetans to lead impoverished and wasted lives, dependent on government handouts, on the margins of the Chinese economic boom.
The PRC’s paramilitary troops engaged in brutal and ruthless attacks on Tibetans exercising their right to freedom of peaceful assembly. Chinese authorities used excessive force to suppress and detain Tibetans protesting against mining operations, land grab, environmental destruction, and arbitrary demolition drives. Tibetans continued to die in detention due to torture and inhumane treatment for merely exercising their human rights.
TCHRD’s Political Prisoners Desk has noted a decline in the number of average detention in the last two years (2015 and 2016) due to extreme communication clampdown and use of collective punishment against those sharing information or maintaining contacts with outsiders. But the number was still high at 70. The average monthly breakdown for 2015 was approximately nine per month and in 2016, the number stood at 3.27 persons per month.
Over the years, the PRC has introduced new policies and practices to censor and control information it wants to hide from the international community. In addition, its sheer avoidance of cooperation with international investigatory bodies, the stringent communication blockade, and the violation of privacy rights and censorship have made it harder to access complete information from inside Tibet. Accessing information from outside Tibet has become more difficult as well as ethically challenging due to the routine persecution and imprisonment of information sources in Tibet. Even if this report cannot fully represent the grave situation inside Tibet under Chinese occupation, it can surely be taken as an indicator of the great extent of human rights violations and repression faced by Tibetans inside Tibet.

UN experts call upon China to explain Larung Gar demolitions
February 27, 2017
Canada Tibet Committee, February 24, 2017 – In a joint inquiry to the Government of China, released this week during the 34th session of the UN Human Rights Council, a group of six UN Special Rapporteurs have requested a formal response from China about “severe restrictions” on religious freedom in the Tibet Autonomous Region. The inquiry had been sent to Chinese authorities in November 2016.
The rapporteurs, who are independent experts appointed by the Human Rights Council, represent mandates in the fields of cultural rights; the right to enjoy a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment; the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association; the right to adequate housing; the rights of minorities; and the right to freedom of religion or belief.
In their report, the UN Special Rapporteurs highlight the mass expulsion of religious practitioners from Larung Gar and Yachen Gar Buddhist centres. They also bring attention to the “cultural and environmental” impacts of mining activities at Gong-ngon Lari mountain in Amchok township, including the arbitrary arrest and detention of peaceful protesters.
As is standard UN procedure in such matters, the rapporteurs have requested additional information from China’s delegation in Geneva to clarify the legal grounds for the Larung Gar demolitions and evictions, and what efforts have been made by authorities to avoid negative environmental impacts of mining in Amchok township.
The full text of the rapporteurs’ letter of inquiry can be viewed here: https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=22816

Chinese security forces swarm religious festival at Tibetan monastery
February 20, 2017
Radio Free Asia, February 14, 2017 – For the second year in a row, large numbers of Chinese security forces have been deployed during a major religious festival at a Tibetan monastery in Qinghai province in an apparent bid to intimidate worshippers, sources in the region say.
The prayer gathering, called Chotrul Monlam, is held each year at Kumbum monastery in Qinghai’s Tsoshar (in Chinese, Haidong) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, and features the display of large and colorful sculptures made of butter, sources said.
“But on Feb. 11, the Chinese government sent a large number of uniformed paramilitary police to Kumbum in a show of intimidation,” one source told RFA’s Tibetan Service.
“It is really inappropriate for such a show of force to be made during a religious gathering,” the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“This has made the Tibetan pilgrims very uncomfortable, and has provoked anxiety and fear in the daily lives of ordinary Tibetans,” he added.
Also speaking to RFA, a second local source said that many Tibetans attending the event are now blocked by surging crowds from seeing the display of butter sculptures, with children and the elderly especially pushed aside.
“The security presence here is pervasive,” the source said.
Chinese visitors paying 100 yuan (U.S.$14.54) for tickets are meanwhile being allowed to view the display without waiting, “while Tibetan pilgrims are being held further down the road and have to wait in long lines,” one source said.
Similar scenes last year
Similar scenes took place at Kumbum last year after Chinese authorities deployed large numbers of armed police and conducted exercises “to intimidate the monks and other Tibetans in the area,” sources said in earlier reports.
“And on the last day of the Chotrul Monlam festival on Feb. 22, police carrying weapons merged with the crowd,” one source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“This caused great inconvenience to the devotees who had gathered at the monastery,” he said.
Buddhist monasteries in Tibetan-populated regions of China have frequently become the focus of efforts to promote not just religion but Tibetan cultural values, and Chinese security forces often monitor and sometimes close down events involving large crowds.
Annual public assemblies at the monasteries have greatly increased in size in recent years, as thousands of Tibetans gather to assert their national identity in the face of Beijing’s cultural and political domination.
Reported by Kunsang Tenzin and Lhuboom for RFA’s Tibetan Service. Translated by Dorjee Damdul. Written in English by Richard Finney.

Freed Tibetan singer barred from travel, public performance
February 20, 2017
Radio Free Asia, February 17, 2017 – A popular Tibetan singer freed after serving a four-year term for writing songs describing the hardships of Tibetans’ lives under Chinese rule has been barred by authorities from singing in public or from leaving his home town, sources say.
Amchok Phuljung, whose musical recordings before his arrest were widely popular in Tibetan areas of China, was released from Sichuan’s Mianyang prison on Feb. 2 after serving his full sentence.
Authorities have now forbidden him for one year from performing songs in public, a local source told RFA’s Tibetan Service.
“He is banned from singing at popular concerts, and he is also prohibited from releasing any recordings of his music for one year,” RFA’s source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“Chinese authorities have also told him that if he ever sings illegal or politically sensitive songs again, he will never be pardoned,” the source said.
Before Phuljung’s Aug. 3, 2012 detention after a short period spent in hiding, he had released an album of songs praising Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and exile prime minister Lobsang Sangay, one source told RFA in an earlier report.
Chinese authorities regularly revile the Dalai Lama and Lobsang Sangay as dangerous separatists and harshly punish expressions of support for both men by Tibetans living under Beijing’s rule.
Forbidden to leave
Phuljung has also been forbidden from leaving Amchok township in Marthang (in Chinese, Hongyuan) county, RFA’s source said, adding, “If he has to leave for any reason, he must first obtain permission from the local authorities.”
Chinese police had escorted Phuljung to his home town following Feb. 2 release from Mianyang, preventing receptions and other displays of public welcome along the way, the source said.
“But when he arrived home that evening, he was greeted warmly with songs and offerings of traditional ceremonial scarves.”
“Over the next two days, at least a thousand local Tibetans and residents of nearby areas, including Tibetan writers and singers, came to welcome him and celebrate his release,” he said.
Singers, writers, and artists promoting Tibetan national identity and culture have frequently been detained by Chinese authorities, with many handed long jail terms, following region-wide protests against Chinese rule that swept Tibetan areas of China in 2008.
Reported by Lhuboom for RFA’s Tibetan Service. Translated by Dorjee Damdul. Written in English by Richard Finney.

We must all stand with Tibet
February 20, 2017
By Ty Cary, Max Honigmann and Khando Langry
McGill Daily, February 20, 2017 – The present North American political context is defined by the perpetuation of deep fear, factual inaccuracy, and the subordination of Otherness. It is one characterized by the struggles of neoliberalism and the politics of greed and fracture which accompany it. In the wake of the recent American election, radical right-wing political projects to limit migrant and refugee rights, and complete destructive pipeline projects such as the Dakota Access Pipeline have made this social reality unquestionably explicit. Even if today’s situation may seem unique in recent Canadian and American memories, the projects of the present are mere contributions to a much broader global trend towards unrestrained growth and private ownership. Tibet seems perhaps an unlikely place from which to understand the challenges afflicting today’s North American context, though the sustained struggle of its traditional inhabitants offers a model for resilience in the face of powerful oppressive institutions.
In 1950, The People’s Republic of China invaded Tibet and by the end of 1951 had annexed the entire Tibetan Plateau. The young Dalai Lama, who serves as the spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetan nation, sought common ground with the occupying power to no avail. On March 10, 1959, tensions culminated in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, leading to massive uprisings, during which more than 10,000 people are believed to have been killed. Following these uprisings, the Dalai Lama fled his ancestral homeland to exile in India, followed by around 80,000 Tibetans. The Indian city of Dharamsala is now home to both the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration: the governing authority which Tibetans consider legitimate. Due to its significance in the collective Tibetan memory, March 10 now serves as an international day of resistance against China’s abusive colonialism.
Lhasa, the historical religious and political capital of Tibet, lies in an area designated by the Chinese as the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). Despite what the name suggests, the region’s government largely advances Chinese Communist Party (CPC) directives through a local “people’s congress” designed by and answering to the CPC. In order to have any real influence in local politics, Tibetans must join their local Communist Party branch, where the atheism required for membership effectively prohibits representation for the Buddhist majority. International labor and human rights organizations are categorically banned from working in the region, while access for foreign journalists and diplomats is extremely limited and restricted only to government-approved areas.
Despite the façade of modernization propagated by the Chinese government, Tibet is one of the most severely repressed places in the world. The region ranks at the bottom of Freedom House’s 2016 ‘Freedom in the World index,’ second only to Syria. Acts as harmless as possessing a photo of the Dalai Lama are met with arrest and beatings, while political dissidents are routinely silenced with lengthy prison sentences and torture. This has led to a frustrating tension within Tibetan society: while the Dalai Lama’s pacifist message emphasizes nonviolent resistance, avenues for such resistance have been blocked off by the Chinese regime.
Both culturally and naturally, Tibet is under profound threat. At three miles above sea level, Tibet is the source of several of Asia’s major rivers, which leads to its popular characterization as the ‘roof of the world.’ The detrimental effects of climate change are often first and most intensely experienced within the region through droughts, which devastate local agricultural practices, melting of permafrost grounds which form the foundations for countless communities, and the loss of a myriad of keystone species which provide a crucial source of food in the harsh environment. More directly, Chinese presence within the region has radically disrupted environmental autonomy through the development of invasive damming projects and by way of pollution via mining industries and nuclear waste disposal sites throughout remote portions of Tibet.
Such kinds of ecological domination must necessarily be conceived of as inseparable from social forms of oppression, wherein Tibetans are limited in their freedom to practice indigenous spirituality and Tibetan Buddhism. Since the Chinese Cultural Revolution from the mid-1960s to 70s, 99 per cent of Buddhist monasteries have been closed at the hands of the state. Most recently, China has begun the destruction of Larung Gar, one of the largest religious communities in the world populated by over 10,000 practicing Buddhists. Due to the nonviolent teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, a radical act of political protest has been popularized: self-immolation. In response to the desecration of their way of life, 146 Tibetans aged 16 to 64 have self-immolated since 2009.
Because of their lack of political rights and meaningful representation in formal governing structures. Tibetans have had to look to alternative forms of mobilization. Direct action such as disruptive protesting has become the norm, as the only practical way to seek change. Within Tibet, significant actions have been undertaken, not by political elites but rather by everyday Tibetans. Outside of Tibet, a transnational social movement has transpired thanks to the advances of social media. Tibetans in exile, despite being scattered across the globe, have set up various issue-oriented interest groups such as the Canada Tibet Committee and Students for a Free Tibet. Unfortunately, countries consistently disregard the situation within Tibet and continue to treat China with deference. In fact, due to Chinese pressure, South Africa has consistently refused the Dalai Lama entry, notably for fellow nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu’s 80th Birthday celebrations in 2011 as well as for the 14th World Summit of World Peace Laureates of 2014. Other countries to act as such include Mongolia and Norway.
Ultimately, globalization has acted as an empowering force for the Chinese state and has granted it considerable commercial, economic and diplomatic power on the international stage. Canada has contributed to Tibet’s contemporary challenges in the form of extractive mining developments. Companies previously financed by Canada, such as China Gold, aid the project of colonialism and environmental devastation through mining techniques involving the pollution of local water sources, resource extraction, and exploitive labor practices. Tibetans hired to work at these mines frequently face dire health consequences and become cyclically impoverished as they come to depend on the menial wages they receive from the industry.
In the early 1970s, Canada was one of only two Western nations (the other being Switzerland) to offer resettlement to Tibetan refugees. However, Canada has had a mixed record, choosing to adopt a foreign policy of “principled pragmatism” with respect to China. This has translated into a careful diplomatic balancing act aimed at appeasing the Chinese government on the one hand, while maintaining the carefully cultivated image of a country that recognizes human rights as a cornerstone of is international relations. In fact, having de-linked human rights and trade to the point of withdrawing support for a United Nations Commission on Human Rights resolution on China in 1997, Canada has effectively excused itself from putting meaningful pressure on China. The likely-impending free trade deal between our two nations will likely increase Canada’s involvement in the economic colonization of Tibet.
China’s far-reaching economic and political influence does not mean there is nothing we, as Canadian individuals, can do to sustain the resistance movement. The Chinese government is extremely sensitive about its reputation and sustained pro-Tibet movements here and elsewhere in the world have had a tremendous impact, leading to the release of numerous jailed dissidents. Showing solidarity with the struggle of Tibetans on March 10 sends an important signal to the government of China that the oppression with which they meet Tibet’s nonviolent resistance movement is not ignored by the world. Standing with Tibet means standing against injustice and colonialism everywhere. Bhod Gyalo!
All are welcome to attend this year’s March 10 rally on Parliament Hill. For more information or to find out how you can show solidarity in other ways, please contact the Canada Tibet Committee at ctcoffice AT tibet.ca.