The exiled leader of Tibet, Penpa Tsering, said in a hearing on March 28 that his people face a “slow death.”
Group death through cultural assimilation, enforced by torture and execution, is more than murder or a crime against humanity.
It is genocide, and co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) said so in the hearing.
Since 2016, China’s regime has redoubled efforts to separate Tibetan children from their parents, forcing them into boarding schools. There, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) subjects them to Mandarin-language teaching, mandatory DNA tests, and what has been called brainwashing since as early as 1991.
The CCP bans children from learning more than a token amount of the Tibetan language or practicing Tibetan Buddhism. Boarding schools start as early as age 4. Children gradually become alienated from their parents and grandparents even when they return home for visits, the director of the Tibet Action Institute, Lhadon Tethong, told the commission.
“Xi Jinping now believes the best way for China to conquer Tibet is to kill the Tibetan in the child,” she said.
Some Tibetan women are subjected to rape, forced abortion, and sterilization.
Rep. Zach Nunn (R-Iowa) noted that “the Tibetan population is put at risk of genealogical repression for future generations who are targeted on the basis of their DNA.”
Between 2016 and 2022, the CCP subjected as many as 1.2 million Tibetans to DNA harvesting, including from children without parental consent.
History of Tibet
Actor Richard Gere, who first met Tibetan refugees in 1978, sits on the board of the International Campaign for Tibet. He briefly touched on the country’s history.
U.S. actor and Chair of the International Campaign for Tibet Richard Gere (C) speaks at a bipartisan press conference to highlight the important plight of the Tibetans, on Capitol Hill on March 28, 2023. Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
Human habitation of Tibet extends back at least 4,000 years, including a powerful kingdom that emerged in the 7th century A.D. Tibet was fully independent during the Ming Dynasty from the 14th to 17th centuries. After a Mongol invasion in 1640, Tibetans built the Potala Palace, and Lhasa became the spiritual and political capital of an independent country.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the British attempted to sway Tibet away from Russia, sometimes with force, and with an illegitimate treaty with China that failed to gain the participation of Tibetans. China invaded Tibet in 1910 but was defeated within two years.
In 1949–1950, at the suggestion of Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin, the People’s Liberation Army invaded Tibet, imposing an ersatz religion under the control of Beijing. The CCP’s road and communications networks were then sliced into the country. Beijing violated trade agreements with India and Nepal to focus Tibet’s trade toward China. Communist dismantling of monasteries starting in 1956 led to an uprising that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency supported from 1957 to 1969.
Beijing Destroys Tibet
Tibet’s government-in-exile estimates 1.2 million Tibetans died up to the 1970s as a result of China’s repression of dissent.
Gere noted at the hearing that Beijing has committed recognized “acts of genocide” against Tibetans as far back as 1960, which intensified after the 2008 Tibetan uprising. More than 2 million Tibetan nomads were forcefully placed in “new socialist villages” and “contemporary forms of slavery.”
New technologies such as DNA testing give even more coercive power to the CCP. Thermo Fisher Scientific, based in Massachusetts, supplies such tests to the regime and is “equally complicit,” according to Nunn.
Smith stated there is a “mountain of evidence” that the regime uses DNA harvesting to match unwilling organ donors to recipients.
“When any CCP official gets sick, and is in need of a new liver, or a new lung, or a heart, who do they turn to?” Smith asked. “Those people they despise the most. And, the average age of those who are murdered for their organs is 28 years old.”
Today, the CCP continues its decades-long project of replacing Tibetans with fortified borders, railways, roads, airports, dams, river diversions, and military outposts, and through “unscrupulous use of natural resources,” according to Tsering. This “development” threatens all of Asia.
Defending Tibet and the World
Gere said the United States should engage our European allies “in a unified voice against this Chinese oppression.”
The destruction of Tibet is a dress rehearsal for the CCP’s hegemonic ambitions for the rest of the world. China’s Belt and Road Initiative has disturbing parallels to what Beijing did to Tibet. With its investments in trade infrastructure in the United States and Europe, including ports and e-commerce platforms, the CCP’s multiple genocides could eventually include all of us.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Anders Corr
Author
Anders Corr has a bachelor's/master's in political science from Yale University (2001) and a doctorate in government from Harvard University (2008). He is a principal at Corr Analytics Inc., publisher of the Journal of Political Risk, and has conducted extensive research in North America, Europe, and Asia. His latest books are “The Concentration of Power: Institutionalization, Hierarchy, and Hegemony” (2021) and “Great Powers, Grand Strategies: the New Game in the South China Sea" (2018).
