World Tibet Network News Wednesday, March 04, 1998

DHARAMSALA, 26 February 1998 (DIIR) -- On 24 February the Chinese government released a white paper on human rights situation in Tibet. The paper rehashes the claims made in the earlier white paper released in 1992. It is remarkable for its unabashed distortion of facts.

It says China has respected the Tibetan religious right from the time of the "liberation" of Tibet, conveniently ignoring the destruction of over 6,000 monasteries and nunneries. It also ignores the fact that China is taking out a major campaign of repression against the Tibetan religion, whereby monks and nuns have beenimprisoned or expelled from the monasteries and nunneries for refusing tocriticize His Holiness the Dalai Lama. As a part of this campaign, Chen Kuiyun, the Communist Partyboss in Tibet, said that "religion should conform to socialism and not socialism to religion".

The white paper cites a plethora of statistics to prove that the life of Tibetans have improved greatly under Chinese rule. But many foreign delegations to Tibet in 1997 have clearly reported abject poverty and discrimination in Tibet. The late Panchen Lama, in his last public statement of 1989, stated that Tibet's loss under Chinese rule outweighed the gains.

Even the late Hu Yaobang, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, was struck by the extreme poverty of Tibetans when his visit to Tibet in 1980. He recommended that immediate steps should be taken to bring the standard of living in Tibet to the pre-1959 level. This shows that the Tibetans were better off before the Chinese occupied Tibet in 1959. It also confirms the observation made by many Chinese and international experts that the Chinese government's statistics are deliberately fabricated to make a political point.

The Chinese white paper goes on to say that "guaranteeing the study and use of the Tibetan language is an important aspect of safeguarding the Tibetan people right".

In reality, the study and use of the Tibetan language is discouraged through various insidious methods. The experimental schools founded, at the recommendation of the late Panchen Lama, to teach the Tibetan language are being closed down recently and more and more subjects in other schools are being taught in Chinese. In Tibet University, Lhasa, even the Tibetan history is taught in Chinese. Furthermore, examinations for government jobs and higher education are all conducted in Chinese, giving no incentive to the Tibetans to learn their own language.

Eighty percent of programs on the Lhasa Television are in Chinese. The Tibet Daily carries the latest news in its Chinese edition, and the same news comes out in the Tibetan edition a day later.

In short, the fact that thousands of Tibetans escape every year to India shows that something is seriously wrong in Tibet.

T.C. Tethong, Minister