Thank you for the opportunity to speak here today and represent Tibetans. I am a Tibetan Canadian.
My father was born in a free and independent Tibet in 1934. My brother was born in a Tibetan refugee camp in south India. I was born on the traditional land of the Songhees and Esquimalt nations in Victoria on Vancouver Island.
As a Tibetan Canadian, I have to say that I welcomed the announcement of Canada’s Indo-Pacific strategy last year for numerous reasons, but most significantly because it brings into the light some critical truths about the People's Republic of China that Tibetans have known all along and that we need the world to recognize if we are to successfully navigate the clear and present threat that the PRC poses to peace and security in our world.
The first, of course, is that that the PRC is an expansionist power. This is something Tibetans learned the hard way a long time ago, with China’s invasion and occupation of our nation in 1950. It was the very first act of aggression and annexation carried out by the newly formed Communist government of the People's Republic of China.
The second truth is that the Chinese Communist Party does not in any way share the values that Tibetans, Canadians and so many others around the world hold dear, especially respect for human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Tibetans have lived without fundamental rights or freedom since 1959. Some years and decades have been worse than others, depending on who may have been in power at the moment in China. Ultimately, the CCP is the CCP and has been ruling Tibetan people with the most vicious iron fist for all these decades. Just these past five years alone, Tibet has been ranked as the least free place on earth in Freedom House's very high-profile global ranking on civil and political liberties.
Today at least one million Tibetan children between the ages of four and 18 are living in a system of colonial boarding schools in Tibet. This means that at least three out of every four school-aged children are living their lives separated from their parents and families in state-run residential schools that are specially designed to isolate them to erase their Tibetan identity and replace it with a hyper-nationalist Chinese identity.
The final truth that I want to talk about is that the reason the PRC government engages with the international community through the UN or through political or trade associations or agreements is not because because it wants to promote mutual prosperity for the betterment of all people or because it wants to be friends with and learn from our democratic leaders and our democratic models; rather, it engages in these ways because it wants to learn how best to dominate and control these spaces and, ultimately, how to remake them to serve its own interests and purposes for its own benefit.
This has been most obvious for Tibetans watching China at the UN all these years, where PRC leaders and delegations do nothing but lie through their teeth and paint a picture of life in Tibet in particular that's completely devoid of any on-the-ground reality. While all these truths about the nature of the PRC government paint a very bleak and distressing picture, I think it's critical to also recognize one other truth that, I believe, speaks to hope for the future.
Xi Jinping and the CCP are unelected and therefore have no real legitimacy to lead the Chinese people. They've held power until now by ruthlessly suppressing any and all opposition and dissent and also because they have delivered some measure of economic prosperity, but from what we can tell now and what many experts are saying, this is ending, and it’s not a matter of if; it’s just a matter of when.
Xi Jinping’s totalitarian rule, failing economic policies and paranoid political manoeuvring have created deep discord and division within the CCP. In particular, widespread suffering under China’s very harsh zero-COVID policies and the sudden lifting of the restrictions undermined Xi Jinping’s legitimacy and generated an understanding, especially among young people, as seen in the White Paper protests, that the CCP does not have the capability to lead and does not have what China needs now in terms of a future with freedom and democracy.
We believe that taking a strong public stand and a principled stand on Tibet, and on human rights more broadly, will tell people inside China and beyond what Canada truly values.
Although the CCP leaders won't take kindly to such messages, we recognize that Xi Jinping and the CCP are not the future; the future actually lies with young people, workers and the legions of human rights defenders who are suffering, dissatisfied and hungry for change.
The future also lies with Tibetans who share basic values with Canadians. Canada has a long history of—