The Chinese government's plan is to convert Tibet into Chinatown and through cultural assimilation make Tibetans into Chinese. That's why they are discouraging the Tibetan language in schools as a medium of instruction and so on and so forth.
Then through trains, railway lines, airports, and many of the roads, they have physical control of Tibet and Tibetan people. At the same time, the Tibetan struggle is a struggle of resilience and determination of the Tibetan people. You are absolutely right that 98% of those 6,000 plus monasteries were destroyed, and 99.9% of monks and nuns were disrobed in the 1950s and 1960s, but 60 years hence what has happened is that Buddhism is back in Tibet in private social space.
Government policy is to systematically destroy. Hence you rightfully pointed out, the Larung Gar monastery with 12,000 monks and nuns was demolished from August 2016 to August 2017 and reduced to 5,000 monks and nuns. That is further divided into two parts: one is the spiritual part and one is the academic part, as per the report of Human Rights Watch. They have stationed 200 Communist cadres to control and monitor the ins and outs of Larung Gar.
As we speak, Yarchen Gar with 5,000 plus nuns is being demolished. This is the reality. But from 98% destruction back in Tibet, Buddhist monasteries are now back. In exile, Buddhist monasteries have been rebuilt and revived and there are Buddhist centres all over the world, including in Canada. Oddly, China has become the largest Buddhist country in the world with 300 million to 400 million Chinese practising Buddhists. If there were a competition between the Dalai Lama and Mao Zedong, you can clearly see after 60 years that the Dalai Lama has won hands down.
From complete destruction, there has been a revival of Buddhism among exiled Tibetans around the world, back in Tibet, and also in China, so I am sure Mao Zedong must be thinking that he destroyed everything that was Buddhist in Tibet, but now Buddhism has come back to China in full force, so that's why it is a struggle of resilience. Tibet is non-violent and peaceful but we also have the mountain spirit of determination. Peacefully, quietly, we keep fighting step by step and we get to where we want to go.
Essentially, even though you say time might be against us, we think time is with us, because fundamentally our struggle is based on Buddhism, which is 2,600 years old and Communism is 100 years old. There is no competition between the two. If Buddhism has prevailed for 2,600 years, it will be there for another 2,500 years. With Communism gone to Cuba, with Raul Castro holding onto it, and with Kim Jong Un signing the treaty, if North Korea goes, then I think China will be the only so-called Communist country with a market economy in the whole world.
We do believe that Buddhism will again prevail and that peace will also prevail in the Tibetan Plateau, but the Chinese government's efforts at ethnocide, to essentially destroy anything Buddhist and anything Tibetan, are continuing. As well, it's also true that there is a population transfer, with of a lot of Chinese coming to the Tibetan Plateau and dominating the economy and the market. For example, in the capital city of Tibet, Lhasa, I think 80% if not 90% of shops, hotels, and restaurants are owned or run by Chinese. In fact, in the 1980s there were signboards, and the practice was also true, that they said they were hiring, and if you were Tibetan, they would give you 30 renminbi a day, and if you were Chinese they would give you 50 renminbi a day. That's essentially like having a signboard in Ottawa in a shop that said if you were Chinese they would give you $50 Canadiana day, and if you were a Tibetan or a Canadian they would give you Canadian $30 a day. That kind of blatant discrimination is still going on in Tibet.
This is in some ways a systematic effort to discourage and destroy the identity and very foundation of the Tibetan people in Tibet, but the resilience of the Tibetan people lives on and is still very strong. We have done it with the revival of Buddhism, and we will do it politically as well.
Thank you.