Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on Feb. 10th, 2023

[The Chair, Liberal, Sameer Zuberi]

I call this meeting to order.

Today is February 10, 2023. This is the 24th meeting of the Subcommittee on International Human Rights. Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the House order of June 23, 2022. Members are participating by Zoom and in person.

I have just a few comments before we start. Before anybody takes the floor, you have to be recognized by the chair. For those who are participating by Zoom, there is a globe icon at the bottom of your screen. You can listen to either the original language in English and French or the interpretation.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), our subcommittee is studying the issue of the Chinese government's residential boarding schools and preschools in the Tibet Autonomous Region and all Tibetan autonomous prefectures and counties.

We have four witnesses with us, two in person and two participating by Zoom.

As individuals, we have Ms. Chemi Lhamo, community organizer and human rights activist; and Dr. Gyal Lo, academic researcher and educational sociologist. They are here in person.

From Human Rights Watch, we have Ms. Sophie Richardson; and from Tibet Action Institute, we have Ms. Lhadon Tethong, director. They are participating by video conference.

Thanks for being here today.

Each witness will have five minutes. We will begin with those here in person. I'll give hand signals at one minute and at 30 seconds, and then you'll have to conclude your remarks.

[Chemi Lhamo, Community Organizer, Human Rights Activist, As an Individual]

Chair, if you don't mind, can I make a request? Could Sophie go first, Lhadon go second, Dr. Gyal Lo go third, and I go last?

[The Chair, Liberal, Sameer Zuberi]

We can do that. Usually, I recognize you, and for other interventions let's do that.

We'll start off with Sophie Richardson on Zoom for five minutes, please.

[Dr. Sophie Richardson, China Director, Human Rights Watch]

Mr. Chair, thank you so much for having me on behalf of Human Rights Watch. We appreciate the opportunity to participate. I also want to pass our congratulations on regarding the extraordinary passage of M-62 last week, which was a wonderful effort to behold.

Human Rights Watch began tracking language-medium education issues in Tibetan areas more than a decade ago, when proposals to phase out Tibetan-medium instruction in Tibetan areas of Qinghai province prompted protests that were crushed. The January 2016 arrest of Tashi Wangchuk, a language activist, suggested that Chinese authorities were taking a harder line on the issue.

Nevertheless, it was extremely difficult to document policy shifts. However, in March 2020 we were able to publish research showing that, consistent with Chinese Communist Party Secretary General Xi Jinping's broad and aggressive assimilationist campaign of sinicization, Chinese authorities' claims that they were providing so-called bilingual education to Tibetan children were, quite simply, a lie.

Our research showed that the policy, carried out for the past decade across what Chinese authorities call the Tibet Autonomous Region and in Tibetan areas in other provinces, had actually increased Chinese-medium schooling at all levels except in the study of the Tibetan language itself.

Under the guise of improving access to education, Chinese authorities established compulsory bilingual kindergartens to immerse Tibetan children in the Chinese language and state propaganda from age three, in the name of strengthening the unity of nationalities. They also hired thousands of non-Tibetan-speaking teachers from other parts of China under the Aid-Tibet program and promoted ethnically mixed classes in which, if even one Chinese-speaking child was present, the entire class would be taught in Chinese rather than in Tibetan.

In September 2019, parents and teachers in six rural townships in the Nagchu municipality in the northern TAR told Human Rights Watch that, as of March 2019, their local primary schools had switched to using Chinese as the language of education. These are violations of international human rights law and of the Chinese constitution.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights stipulate respect for mother-tongue education. UN committees on the rights of the child; economic, social and cultural rights; and the elimination of racial discrimination have all expressed concern over the rights of Tibetans to education in their own language and culture across China.

China's constitution guarantees minority-language rights. Moreover, these policies are also in profound contention with best practices with respect to education, which strongly suggest mastery in the mother tongue prior to learning other languages. It is worth noting that many of the Tibetan parents to whom we spoke stressed that they wanted their children to learn both languages, but not at the cost of learning in just one of those. These policies are a profound threat to Tibetans' identity.

The Canadian government should not only raise its concerns about these practices at bilateral meetings and international forums, but also actively support the preservation of Tibetan-medium education, including teaching materials and teachers.

I am happy to provide more recommendations, but I want to make sure not to exceed my time.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sameer Zuberi]

You still have two minutes.

[Dr. Sophie Richardson]

I was much too efficient. My apologies. Congress is terribly strict.

Perhaps, then, I can fill in some of the details.

The Chinese government, we think, accomplished the implementation of these policies partly through some very deliberate ambiguity about what teachers and schools were meant to do, but often when faced with, for example, access to teaching materials that were Chinese-medium only, schools had no choice but to use those materials since Tibetan-medium materials simply weren't available to people.

Similarly restrictions on the languages in which the teachers who were being recruited were capable of teaching tipped the balance in many different circumstances.

I think the fact that we observed authorities persecute—not just prosecute but persecute—individuals who spoke up in defence of Tibetan-medium education makes very clear that what might be considered a not terribly incendiary academic matter in other contexts is part of a larger political campaign. It's also consistent with what we have documented with respect to other critical components of Tibetans' identity, not least the extraordinary encroachment on Tibetans' rights to religion and how it is practised.

We have seen similar changes in policy and management of religion by Chinese authorities that effectively encroach on individuals' abilities to live their identities as international human rights law guarantees them the right to do.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sameer Zuberi]

Thank you.

We'll continue with Ms. Lhadon Tethong for five minutes.

[Lhadon Tethong, Director, Tibet Action Institute]

Thank you very much.

Thank you for this opportunity and for making this happen. I will read my remarks and time myself. It's best if I help myself keep to the time.

My father was born in a free and independent Tibet in 1934. My eldest brother was born in a Tibetan refugee camp in India. I was born on the traditional land of the Songhees and Esquimalt nations in Victoria on Vancouver Island.

As a Tibetan and a Canadian, my two worlds sadly collided a couple of years ago when my organization, Tibet Action, began researching reports that Tibetan parents were being forced, coerced, to send their children, including those as young as four and five years old, away to boarding schools. In the course of our research, we found that China had been constructing a massive colonial boarding school system in Tibet, one that threatens the very survival of the Tibetan people and the nation because they so wholly and completely have targeted the future of Tibet—our children, and even the very youngest ones.

This school system is the cornerstone of a broader effort to wipe out the current and future resistance of our fiercely proud Tibetan people by eliminating our language, our religion and our way of life. The colonial boarding school system streamlines and fast-tracks this genocidal plan by ripping Tibetan children from their roots, stealing the language from their tongues and attempting to turn them into something they are not.

I have some high-level findings from our report. At least 800,000 Tibetan children across all of historical Tibet—not just the Tibet Autonomous Region, or what China calls Tibet—representing 78% of all Tibetan schoolchildren aged six to18, are now separated from their families and are living in colonial boarding schools. This number does not include the four- and five-year-olds being made to live in boarding preschools in rural areas, because China is actively trying to hide the existence of that system.

These children are forbidden from practising religion. They are cut off from authentic Tibetan culture—beyond, of course, what the Chinese Communist Party approves of and what you'll see in the propaganda, which is people wearing Tibetan clothing and doing the Tibetan circle dance.

These kids are taught almost entirely in Chinese, with maybe one Tibetan language class, by mostly Chinese teachers, or increasingly more and more Chinese teachers, and from Chinese textbooks reflecting Chinese life, history, culture and values while completely denying Tibet’s own rich ancient history and culture—our stories.

On top of this, they are subjected to intense political indoctrination. As Sophie has said in the past, even the youngest children are getting intense political indoctrination like “Xi Jinping thought”, which says they must be loyal to the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese nation first and above all else.

Of course, Tibetan parents have no choice but to send their children to live in these schools, because the authorities have closed the local village schools along with most privately run Tibetan schools or monastery schools. That's not to mention that Tibetans, having lived 70 years under Chinese occupation and facing intense violence from the state, know that you can't resist these kinds of central government directives at the grassroots level without facing severe, severe consequences. Parents who resist or refuse are threatened with fines and other serious consequences. Of course, the children have no choice.

One person from Tibet described the situation like this: “I know of children aged four to five who don’t want to be separated from their mothers. They are forced to go to boarding schools. In some cases, the children cry for days, sticking to their mother’s laps…. Both the children and the parents are unwilling.”

This insidious policy to isolate children from their families so as to erase their Tibetan identity and replace it with a Chinese identity was developed at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party. It is a blatantly racist policy.

Just as Tibetan parents don't want to have to send their children away, Chinese people don’t want to send their children away either. Actually, a backlash against school consolidation policies in China led the State Council to rule in 2012 that all levels of school should be, in principle, non-residential, especially for young children in grades 1 to 3. That very same State Council decreed in 2015 that, in so-called minority areas, officials must strengthen boarding school construction and achieve the goal that students of all ethnic minorities will study in a school, live in a school and grow up in a school.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sameer Zuberi]

Ms. Tethong, could you just wrap up, please?

[Lhadon Tethong]

Yes.

Since releasing this report, we've been asked many times from many people why the world doesn't know. How did we miss this? I just want to say that the total information blackout and lockdown of Tibet have resulted in such a dearth of information from Tibet that there's no foreign media. Tibetans can't get in or out. There is transnational repression and punitive measures against corporations who might quote the Dalai Lama, our government, and speak out in favour of Tibet.

This has resulted in this silence by design. What's happening in Tibet is a crisis that threatens our ancient civilization. It is, in a way, like a genocide 2.0, because it's happening in real time, right now, but with very few pictures, no videos and no one really able to report what's happening from the ground, unlike any other place on earth.

I would ask the Canadian government, all of you, to help us expose this system, because the Chinese government is trying to hide it, to pay extra attention to bringing Tibet up in every possible way with Beijing, and to continue to push the Chinese government for the human rights and freedoms of the Tibetan people, because they are working very hard to erase us, not just inside Tibet but in the world at large.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sameer Zuberi]

Thank you for that, Ms. Tethong.

We'll continue on with Dr. Gyal Lo for five minutes.

[Dr. Gyal Lo, Academic Researcher and Educational Sociologist, As an Individual]

Thank you, all of you, for allowing me to speak to you about the system of the colonial boarding schools in Tibet.

I am here to share my research findings and what I have personally witnessed about the boarding preschools. This is a completely hidden policy of the Chinese government. Based on the more than 50 boarding preschools that I have seen with my own eyes, I estimate that at least 100,000 Tibetan children from ages four to six are now living separately from their parents, families and communities.

After I received my Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, I returned to Tibet in 2015. I then started teaching at Yunnan Normal University. The following year, my brother called me because he was concerned about his two granddaughters' behaviour. I went home to see them. That was the first time I came into contact with the colonial boarding preschools.

I picked up my two grandnieces, one aged four and one aged five, from their boarding preschool on Friday evening and then carefully observed them while they were at home. I saw clearly they did not hug their grandparents, and they had almost no emotional exchanges with their own family members. They sat a little further away from all of us family members, almost like guests or strangers in their own home. They conversed with each other only in Mandarin, the Chinese language. This was after just three months in the new boarding preschool in our local township. Prior to this, they spoke no Mandarin and were raised in an entirely Tibetan-speaking environment.

I realized that my family's case was not unique. The Chinese government was implementing a mandatory preschool education policy over all of Tibet. For the following three years during the summer vacations, I did academic fieldwork on this topic. I visited boarding preschools across all of eastern Tibet, in what China now calls Qinghai, Gansu, Yunnan and Sichuan. I spoke to kids, parents, teachers and other village stakeholders, and my conclusion was the same as it was with my two grandnieces.

It is very important to understand that Tibetan parents have no real choice about whether to send their children away to boarding school. Even very young children in the rural areas of Tibet—just four to six years old—must attend a boarding preschool. Local village schools have been shut down in Tibetan villages. Private schools have been shut down. There are really no local options, and there is no Tibetan option left for parents who don't want to send their children away to those government boarding preschools.

This is all by design. The Chinese government invests vast amounts of resources and much careful thought into pulling Tibetan children out by their roots from our culture and their families. They do this by teaching almost entirely in Mandarin, the Chinese language, and by making the entire learning environment into a purely Chinese environment.

Even the pedagogical approach is very sophisticated. For example, students are shown Chinese cultural objects and then are told to close their eyes and imagine those objects. Then they are asked to draw what they imagined. Later on, they ask the kids to explain, in Chinese Mandarin, what they have drawn. This is a very intentional method to shift the children's entire psychological foundation from Tibetan to Chinese.

China is weaponizing the school system to intentionally commit genocide. I am deeply concerned for the well-being of those children, their parents and the future survival of the Tibetan identity and culture. If this colonial boarding school policy continues for more than 20 years—especially the boarding preschool policy—I fear that China will end our civilization and cause irreparable harm to our people.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sameer Zuberi]

Thank you, Dr. Gyal Lo, for your testimony.

Last, we have Ms. Lhamo, please, for five minutes.

Thank you.

[Chemi Lhamo]

Tashi delek.Anee. Hello, everybody. I'm Chemi Lhamo.

Before I begin, I want to acknowledge and express my gratitude to the original caretakers of this land, to the elders of the past and present and to any who should be here and may be here today physically, mentally and spiritually.

I was born stateless into a Tibetan refugee settlement camp in south India. Until I was 11 years old, I carried not a passport but an identity certificate issued by the Indian government, which I needed to renew every single year to maintain my precarious political existence as a person with no homeland.

At 11, I immigrated to Toronto to a neighbourhood called “Parkdale”. Parkdale has one of the largest Tibetan communities in exile outside of India and Nepal. It's one of the very few places where Tibetans have recreated both our national identity and our cultural community in a safe place that allows us to be who we are, where we celebrate our culture, learn our language, study our scriptures and pass on our rich ancient heritage to the next generation. Every Wednesday, we gather in “Little Tibet” to celebrate those parts of our identity and culture that are banned and criminalized inside of Tibet.

Culture is often referred to as the way of life of an entire society. It's “the collective programming of the mind”. For a community, it guides the collective actions, thoughts and feelings. It's what makes us unique—human. It's part of what dignifies our existence and gives meaning to our lives.

However, China's colonial rule over Tibet has targeted and has continuously attacked every aspect of this culture: language, faith, music, literature, our nomadic way of life and our ancestral branches of knowledge that have allowed us to live as compassionate stewards of one of the most fragile ecosystems on the planet.

The Chinese Communist Party has basically severed our entire nation into two: those on the outside, who cannot go inside because we're denied visas; and those who are inside and who cannot leave because they don't have passports. That has been a fact of Tibetan life for a long time, and now the Chinese government's assault on Tibetans has reached a breaking point. Chinese authorities are targeting the three foundational pillars of our Tibetan identity—religion, language and our nomadic way of life—for a complete elimination.

This eliminationist project is being carried out in every space: in the monasteries, workplaces, primary and nursery schools, on the grasslands and in towns, in neighbourhoods and in private homes. There is no Tibetan space that remains beyond the intrusive reach of the Chinese state today.

Millions of nomads have been relocated from the grasslands into reservation-style housing projects, which basically land them in the middle of nowhere, with little to no access to jobs, so there's no future for young people to survive or even thrive. In the monasteries, monks and nuns are being slowly strangled with rules and regulations that push them out and block new ones from joining. For those who remain, there's no time for religious studies because they're too busy studying Xi Jinping's thoughts and the latest propaganda from Beijing that is forced upon them.

For anyone who is paying attention, there's no doubt that the Chinese Communist Party is hell-bent on trying to eradicate our core identity by turning Tibetans into Chinese. That alone is the final goal of this cradle-to-grave project of forced assimilation, starting with the mandatory enrolment of four- to six-year-olds in preschool boarding, not to mention nearly one million children being stripped away from their parents and forced or coerced into learning, thinking and even imagining in Chinese instead of Tibetan.

I stand here today as a Tibetan and a Canadian to ask you to please speak out for Tibet.

Our silence emboldens the CCP. That's why we see them blatantly sending spy balloons around the world. That's why they're setting up police stations in our democratic nations, interfering with our elections and threatening and intimidating Canadians on Canadian soil. It is imperative that we take a stand and we act.

Some may say that Canada has no place speaking out because of our own legacies, yet I say this is exactly why Canada needs to speak out. This is precisely why we have an even greater duty and more of an obligation to speak out. We know from our own mistakes about the intergenerational trauma and the grief caused by these types of schools and the genocidal legacies they leave behind for generations and generations after. We need to speak out about our experiences and what could be done differently and make sure that it never happens again, neither here nor anywhere else.

There's so much that we can do to help Tibet.

One, issue a statement that echoes the concerns of the four UN special rapporteurs and call on China to shut down these colonial boarding school systems inside of Tibet. That includes in Kham and Amdo.

Two, this body can definitely undertake a study to investigate the CCP's colonial preschool boarding, which there is no information about. The Chinese government is clearly hiding it and doing everything it can to hide this policy, because even it knows that this is wrong. We need to make sure that folks like Dr. Gyal Lo and the experts who are risking their lives to be here in front of you today to tell you the truth about these hidden policies of the Chinese government are taken seriously.

Three, impose sanctions on the Chinese officials and the architects who are overseeing these colonial boarding schools under the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act.

Finally, I want to thank you and each and every single person who's listening today, because together we can do this right and make sure that it does not happen again anywhere else.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sameer Zuberi]

Thank you, Ms. Lhamo.

Now we'll move on to questions. Our first round will be seven minutes. First will be Mr. Aboultaif and then Mr. Virani, and we'll continue on with the other members.

Mr. Aboultaif, you have seven minutes.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Thank you.

Thank you to the witnesses for appearing today before committee.

Ms. Lhamo, you've answered some of the questions that I was going to ask by outlining the final strategy of the Chinese regime or the Chinese Communist Party for the Tibet region and the Tibet population. However, the question that begs to be asked about those residential schools is when this problem was known to the international community and to Canada. When was this issue highlighted?

You're talking about how 20 years from now, there will probably be a complete change of the culture, the education system and the way these generations are going to grow in the future. I think it would be important to understand when this issue became known to the international community and to Canada. What have you been hearing from the international community on this issue?

The question is for Ms. Lhamo and for the Tibet Action Institute and Ms. Tethong.

[Chemi Lhamo]

I believe Lhadon would be a great speaker to respond to your question, because they put out the report in 2020, and the international community has definitely responded. We see the U.K. has spoken out.

We've also attached, in the briefing document, the letter by Congressman Jim McGovern from the CECC that has called out China to shut down the colonial boarding schools.

We need Canada to step up. The U.K. has risen. The U.S. has risen. The UN has also done its own research to tell us that one million children are being ripped away from their parents. It's time for Canada to join in on that.

Lhadon-la.

[Lhadon Tethong]

Thank you. It really has just been this last year. We put the report out and were briefing some governments behind the scenes just before last December. It was a year ago in December.

There has been some forward movement now, I think, with the UN special rapporteurs speaking out recently. They just put out a press release on Monday about their communication to the Chinese government, calling for more information on the school system and saying that it appears to be a violation of basically every agreement the Chinese government has made on any rights that Tibetans might have.

I think Dr. Gyal Lo always says it best. There have always been colonial boarding schools in Tibet the entire time the Chinese government has been there. He was part of the wave of academics, scholars and Tibetans trying to hold a line and push for Tibetan content and curriculum in those schools for years.

That space has steadily been shrinking, to the point now that, under Xi Jinping and the second-generation ethnic policies the last number of years, they've taken it to the next level in terms of primary school education no longer being taught in Tibetan, and now it's in preschool. It didn't used to be that Tibetans had to attend preschool, although it would be great if they were attending Tibetan language-based, mother tongue-based preschool. Tibetans would have no problem with that, and not having to do that in a boarding school but locally.

This is all new under Xi Jinping, and it's what we're seeing in general.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Dr. Gyal Lo, on eastern Tibet, as per your testimony, what I would be curious to know is whether you have had a chance to look at the academic curriculum that is imposed, let's say, on the students.

[Dr. Gyal Lo]

Let me address that in two parts.

The colonial boarding schools started in 1979 and have been running until now, but the situation is getting worse. On top of that, under the Xi Jinping regime, they've produced a new policy of having the boarding preschool education system.

I deeply engaged with the curriculum issue and the contents of the textbooks over the 10 years when I was teaching at my former university. For example, I produced two Tibetan knowledge-based textbooks. I also did some of the training conferences and, one year after Xi, China stopped that.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Would you be able to give us some examples from these textbooks that raise a flag over what the Chinese government is trying to do and how that is going to really affect the future of these younger generations?

[Dr. Gyal Lo]

Yes. They're ultimately making it a purely Chinese cultural environment for the kids in the schools.

For example, they shut down Tibetan objects, Tibetan historical figures and the Tibetan cultural environment in the classroom in 2018. Also, they're asking kids to wear Chinese soldier dress as their uniforms. Also, every day, they're required to sing the Chinese national song when they enter the school.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

I have a question to ask and I have about 30 or 40 seconds. Are parents able to visit their kids in those schools?

[Dr. Gyal Lo]

There are two types. At the boarding preschool, the parents are allowed only to pick them up on Friday evening and drop them off on Sunday evening. Those are the kids aged four to six. For other boarding schools, they can see their parents almost every three months.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sameer Zuberi]

Thank you, Mr. Aboultaif.

Now, for seven minutes, we have Mr. Virani.