On the one hand, yes, Tibet is a sad story. It's a tragic story. I go to these kinds of committees and share the human rights violations in Tibet. But within Tibetan people there is a sense of resilience and perseverance, because we are a proud people with a great civilization and a long history. We can compare with any civilization, any nation. Hence I always say—I'm not trying to politicize it—Tibetans do not fear China, because nowadays there's talk about what would China do. Everybody is scared of China. We say we do not fear them it we have lived side by side with it for thousands of years.
At one time when Tibet was a great empire, we invaded China and occupied the capital Xi'an for a couple of months and imposed a puppet emperor also. This time, it's doing it to us. We have been in close proximity, so we are in some ways genetically adapted to dealing with it and confronting it. When I talk about human rights violations in Tibet, please don't take that as a sad story but rather as a reflection of our determination and resilience.
As I mentioned, in the 1960s, it destroyed 98% of monasteries and nunneries. From the time we were exiled under the leadership of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, we have rebuilt all the major monasteries in India, Nepal, and Bhutan. The Nalanda tradition—the famous Nalanda monastery of India was burnt down 300 years or so ago—was revived in India by exiled Tibetans and we educated hundreds and thousands of monks and nuns in exile. Many of them have gone back to Tibet now illegally. There's a long story of how they go back.
Now we have revived Buddhism in Tibet. The famous Nalanda-based tradition, the teaching, is alive because of exiled Tibetans. So when I say we are resilient, we are fighters. We are. We have proven it, and also in exile. I'm the political head of the Central Tibetan Administration. We run our administration like any other government. We have an education department that runs about 70 schools—primary, middle, and high school—and mostly it's subsidized and free, and we provide scholarships. Our foreign office has 13 offices around the world, including those in D.C., Geneva, Brussels, and Tokyo. We run our own settlements. We run our hospitals and clinics. So we function as does any other government even though we are in exile.
You read about the 60 million or so refugees in diaspora communities around the world, about Syrian refugees, about the 500,000 refugees in Kenya still living in tents after 20 years, but our way of thinking is very different. We are refugees for political reasons but we are human beings, capable human beings, and resilience and self-reliance are the norm and the practice. We run our own thing. We are still here after more than 50 years. I've come back to this subcommittee and I'll keep coming back until the voices are heard loud and clear from Ottawa to Beijing and basic freedom is restored to the Tibetan people.