May 23rd of this year marks the 70th anniversary of the so-called “peaceful liberation of Tibet” by the Chinese government. In the view of many Tibetans, the Chinese government’s entry into Tibet seventy years ago was not liberation, but rather brought about oppression and cultural crisis. Nevertheless, despite the long period of suppression, Tibetan culture is still alive and well in the world. Listen to our reporter Wang Yun’s series on a seventy-year retrospective of Tibetan culture. The previous episode: Tibetan Cultural Crisis is broadcast today.
May is the season when the Tibetan Plateau gerberas are in full bloom. Bawa Kelsang, who has not seen the Tibetan gerberas everywhere for 22 years, just took over as the representative of the Central Tibetan Administration in Taiwan at the end of April.
A Tibetan who does not speak Tibetan
But what is more on his mind is the language crisis all over Tibet, “From the grassland county of Aba, and then into Malcolm, the capital of Aba Prefecture; and then from Malcolm, down along the Daxiaojin River and the Dadu River, all the Tibetans along the Dadu River basically no longer speak Tibetan and have completely Sinicized. So, there is a lot of worry about the future of this nation.”
Born in 1966, Kelsang Gyantsen was once a United Front Work cadre in the Chinese government system, and it was only in the two years before he left for India in 1999 that he had the opportunity to travel around the Tibetan region and understand the current cultural situation of the land.
Bawa Kelsang, who took over as the representative of the Central Tibetan Administration and the Dalai Lama in Taiwan on April 22, 2021 (Photo by Xia Xiaohua)
Nyima Lhamo, who fled from Tibet to India in 2016, confessed that the restrictions on the Tibetan language have greatly compressed the living space of ordinary Tibetans in Tibetan areas, “In many places, including institutions and hospitals, every place uses Chinese and not Tibetan. Obviously, they just want to eliminate the Tibetan language. In the Lhasa or Kangding area, students with Tibetan language schools have a hard time finding jobs after graduation.”
The restriction of the Tibetan language is a long-standing hidden pain for Tibetans. Kunga Tashi, a Tibetan scholar who served as the head of Chinese affairs for the Dalai Lama’s representative office in North America, reveals that one of the biggest concerns of the Central Tibetan Administration in Dharamsala, India, about Tibetan areas is the language and cultural crisis of the Tibetan people, “because in every school, except for Tibetan classes, all other languages of instruction are in Chinese conducted. And whether you are applying for a job, typing a report, or writing a letter to any organization, you also have to write in Chinese.”
The situation in Tibetan schools mentioned by Gongga Zhaxi is known as “bilingual education” in Chinese government policy, and Tibetan is only one of the language classes. In the eyes of many Tibetans, this policy is actually replacing Tibetan with Chinese. Not only is Chinese the main language taught in Tibetan secondary schools, but also in elementary school and kindergartens. Some data show that preschool education in Tibetan areas has basically popularized “bilingual education” in 2017.
Nawang Phuntso, a Tibetan professor who now teaches at California State University, Fullerton, believes that the early involvement of Chinese language teaching in Tibetan children’s education may not be beneficial to their language learning, “A Tibetan child’s ability to learn Mandarin depends on his or her ability to speak Tibetan. The stronger the Tibetan children’s Tibetan language ability, the easier it will be for them to learn Mandarin, including English.”
The Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet (Associated Press)
An empty Potala Palace
In Tibet, alongside the language crisis is a religious crisis.
After leaving the Communist system, Kelsang Gyantsen used to wander the streets of Lhasa. He often sits alone in the square in front of the Potala Palace and meditates, “I just imagine that such a magnificent building, which was built by our Tibetan ancestors, but the owner of this building, the Dalai Lama, is not here now. I have been thinking about the fate of Tibet and whether our master can return to the Dalai Lama’s throne in the Potala Palace in the future?”
After the 14th Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, was forced into exile in India in 1959, “Dalai Lama” became a politically sensitive word, and Tibetan Buddhism in Tibetan areas lost its important spiritual fulcrum.
“Every family has a picture of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, but the Chinese government won’t let them worship him. Whoever worships him will be arrested, and many Tibetans are arrested and put into study classes because of this,” Nima Ram testified to the station.
There have also been cases of people being jailed for worshipping the Dalai Lama, and in July 2020, Tibetan singers Khandro Tsetan and Tsygol were sentenced to seven years and five years respectively for “inciting subversion of state power” and “leaking state secrets” for writing and singing songs in praise of the Dalai Lama. They were sentenced to seven and three years in prison, respectively, for “inciting subversion of state power” and “divulging state secrets.
In recent years, it has become clear to the Tibetan people that the space for religious freedom and belief has been drastically reduced.
The Chinese government has continued to push for the “Sinicization of Tibetan Buddhism,” and at the Seventh Tibet Work Conference of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee in August 2020, CPC leader Xi Jinping first included the Sinicization of Tibetan Buddhism in the Chinese government’s strategy for governing Tibet.
“The main thing about the Chineseization of Tibetan Buddhism is that he believes that the main ideas of Tibetan Buddhism must be combined with the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party,” Gonga Zhaxi analyzed.
Guided by this approach, the Chinese government has in recent years increased its mandatory political education of Tibetan society, requiring monks and nuns to be “politically reliable” and “trustworthy in critical moments,” as well as requiring that in villages, communities, schools and workplaces Exhortations and pressure on ordinary Tibetans to “reject their spiritual leaders. Party members, government employees, and retired pensioners were also restricted from participating in religious activities.
Tibetan scholar Kunga Tashi (Courtesy of Kunga Tashi)
The “Tibetan problem” stems from the Chinese government’s move into Tibet
The crisis facing Tibetan culture, in the eyes of many Tibetans, stems from the official arrival of Chinese Communist troops in the Tibetan region in 1951.
“The Tibetan issue did not exist before the Chinese Communist Party came in in 1949, and it was only after the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949 and the Chinese Communist Army started to enter Tibet in 1951 that the Tibetan issue came into being,” Gonga Zhazi believes.
On May 23, 1951, the Tibetan Kashgar government and the Central People’s Government signed the “Agreement on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet”, commonly known as the “Seventeen Articles Agreement”. By the end of that year, the Chinese Communist Liberation Army was officially stationed in Lhasa, and the Chinese government proclaimed the “peaceful liberation of Tibet.
Although the agreement stated that Tibet would have regional ethnic autonomy and respect for local religious beliefs, after 1955, the Chinese government carried out “democratic reforms” in Tibet and the Tibetan areas of Sichuan, Qinghai, Yunnan, and Gansu provinces, one of the main elements of which was the reform of the religious system, including the destruction of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries. At the same time, political campaigns such as the Great Leap Forward were carried out in Tibetan areas outside Tibet to transform Tibetan society in the form of people’s communes.
In April 1956, the PLA in Ganzi, Sichuan Province, used airplanes to bomb temples, razing centuries-old temples, including the Litang Monastery where the Fifth Dalai Lama had practiced.
The radical tactics drew fierce local resistance from the Tibetan population, and armed clashes between Tibetans and other minority populations and local authorities occurred in many places and extended to Lhasa in 1959. In March of that year, the Dalai Lama was forced to lead key members of the Kashgar government into exile in India.
The Chinese government’s oppressive policy toward Tibetan Buddhism has intensified since then. Gongga Zhaxi describes, “During the Cultural Revolution, many temples, represented by the Dazhao Monastery, were destroyed in various parts of Tibet, especially in the Lhasa area.”
Along with the oppression of Tibetan Buddhism, the study of Tibetan language and Tibetan history was restricted in Tibet. Since the 1960s, Chinese has been the language of instruction in almost all secondary schools in Tibetan areas. Tibetan history, especially modern history, has also been deliberately avoided in the curricula of Tibetan primary and secondary schools.
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