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TIN News Update / 28 July, 1997 / total no of pages: 2 ISSN 1355-3313

Re-Education of Monks is a "Basic Policy", says Chen -

China's top official in Tibet has declared that the current campaign to re-educate monks and nuns is a fundamental part of the Party's policy in the region. The statement in effect outlaws any criticism of the campaign.

The announcement goes against earlier reports that leaders in Tibet had been persuaded to moderate the year-long campaign, which has led to teams of party officials visiting every monastery or nunnery in the region to demand denunciations of the exile Dalai Lama.

"Successfully engaging in the construction of spiritual civilisation and in patriotic education in the monasteries are Tibet's basic measures to carry out "Comrade Deng Xiaoping's Theory of Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics"," said Chen Kuiyuan, Party Secretary of the Tibet Autonomous Region.

The measures were "a fundamental constituent of the basic Party line", said Chen. He described criticisms of the education drive as "essentially co-ordinating actions with the Dalai clique", a phrase which implies that criticism could be considered a criminal offence.

The statement was made in the keynote speech of a crucial meeting on 18th June at which the Tibet branch of the Communist Party gathered its delegates for the 15th Party Congress due to be held in Beijing this autumn.

The speech, parts of which were published verbatim in the Tibet Daily two days later, said that "certain persons with differing motives" had "viciously attacked our region's construction of spiritual civilisation and patriotic education in the monasteries".

The Party Secretary said that criticisms of the policy had been expressed "by hostile forces at home" as well as by foreigners, apparently confirming reports of internal disapproval of the region's hard-line approach on re-education.

Chen also announced that top party cadres will be judged by their opposition to the Dalai Lama, a further indication that there has been disagreement within the Party leadership on the issue.

"For Tibet's leading cadres at all levels, the best touchstone to test their political steadfastness is the battlefield of the struggle with Dalai clique," Chen told the meeting. "This is the one basic thing in which to see a Party member's Party spirit," he said.

"If they cannot pass this barrier, then their other strengths are of no real significance," he added, referring to the Party's line that the "greatest emphasis should be on politics".

Last December there were unofficial reports from within Tibet that Secretary Chen had been criticised at a closed Party meeting that month for excessive zeal in the anti-Dalai Lama campaign waged in Tibetan monasteries since May 1996. Four weeks ago a French journalist who visited Tibet officially for the news agency AFP reported that an unnamed official in charge of the re-education drive in Tibet had been sent back to China after Beijing ruled that the campaign had been too violent.

The prominence given by the Tibet Daily to Chen's hard-line speech suggests that he has retained control over the re-education campaign and consolidated his position in the region. Although some of the views in the speech were described as his own opinions, the newspaper reinforced Chen's dominance in Tibet by printing with the extracts a centre-page portrait photograph of the leader. His photograph has rarely been published other than in group shots.

Language and Culture Become Battlefield -

Delegates from the TAR to the coming Party Congress were told by Chen to wage "a blow for blow struggle against the Dalai splittist clique" which was pursuing "sinister splittist plots under the cloak of ethnic religion" and "dreaming of restoring the feudal serf-owning system".

But Chen reserved his strongest language for Party members who argue that Tibet should be treated differently from other parts of China.

"There are those who, so as to confuse, with hostile intent emphasise the special nature of Tibet and its unfathomable mystery, still seeking to regard the Dalai as a god," he said, a reference to moderate Tibetan leaders in the 1980s who had argued for "flexible policies" on the grounds that Tibet has "special characteristics".

The "special characteristics" view in Tibet has not re-emerged in public since May 1992 when Chen assumed power in the region, and crushed the "special characteristics" faction in the Tibet branch of the Party.

Chen's 1992 attack on moderates focussed on those who resisted opening the Tibetan economy to Chinese entrepreneurs, but the 18th June speech is directed against critics of the current policy on Tibetan culture. In the speech Chen singled out Party members who are still "treating with respect those former customs and traditions of the old Tibet which were a spiritual opium that deceived the people and are incompatible with modern times", describing their motives as "very sinister".

The "spiritual civilisation" campaign, which has been going on throughout China since last September, calls for certain old customs and traditions to be eradicated, but the definition of which customs should be abolished varies in different provinces and regions of China.

This month Chen accused the pro-independence movement of using cultural issues to increase anti-Chinese feeling. "The Dalai clique and splittists are using culture and education as an opening to attack us," Chen was quoted as saying in the Tibet Daily's July 14 edition, according to an AFP report. "They try to use language and culture as an excuse to create ethnic conflict. Their aim is to separate the Tibetan nationality from the rest of [China's] nationalities ... and to make the so-called "Tibetan culture" opposed to the so-called "Han culture"," he said.

In his 18th June speech Chen indicated that there should be no distinctions between Tibet and inland China in policies or in economic and social development. "In reality the basic interests, and road by which to flourish and grow, of the Tibetan people and the people of the inland are identical," Chen told the meeting. The view corresponds with the current development plans for the region, which are geared to increasing economic linkage between Tibet and inland provinces.

The two objectives of Tibet policy are to stop the pro-independence movement and to ensure that Tibet does not fall behind the economic and social changes taking place in China, he said. "We will absolutely not allow Tibet to be split off from the great family of the motherland, nor will we allow Tibet to fall behind in the long term. These two sentences are the core content of the spirit of the Third Forum," said Chen, referring to the 1994 meeting which established long-term policy in the region. Chen called for a "a long term struggle to realise these two objectives".

Chen Kuiyuan was appointed as leader of the Communist Party in Tibet in March 1992. He was born in Liaoning in North-east China in 1941 and has always worked in nationality areas of China. He was a member of the Party Committee in Inner Mongolia from 1989 and later a vice-Governor there until his transfer to Tibet.