Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on April 21st, 2023

NDP

Heather McPherson NDP Edmonton Strathcona, AB

I'm sorry to interrupt. I'm very sorry, but the translation has switched, and I'm getting French on the English channel. I would love to hear what that fifth point was, please.

Conservative

The Vice-Chair Conservative Arnold Viersen

I would attempt to speak in French, although I'm unable to.

My name is Arnold Viersen.

There we go. We're good.

You may continue with your presentation on the fifth point, please.

Abbot, Tashi Lhunpo Monastery

Tenzin Rabgyal

[Witness spoke in Tibetan, interpreted as follows:]

Five, the aspirations of the Tibetans in Tibet is for His Holiness the Dalai Lama to be able to return at the earliest. Therefore, I urge the Canadian government to consider taking concrete initiatives to support His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration to enable the resolution of the Tibetan issue with the Chinese government through a mutually beneficial middle way approach.

The Canadian people and government have been consistently supporting the Tibetan people, so I take this opportunity to express my gratitude. This five-point appeal I have made today is in one way also connected to the mental well-being of the several million believers and connected to the democratic rights of individuals.

I have firm hope that the Canadian government will consider the reality of the Tibetan situation, particularly on the issue of His Holiness the Panchen Lama, and consider my appeals positively.

Thank you.

Conservative

The Vice-Chair Conservative Arnold Viersen

Thank you.

We'll now turn the floor over to the Canada Tibet Committee and the executive director from there.

You'll have five minutes. I'll attempt to give you a signal at the one-minute mark.

The floor is yours.

April 21st, 2023 / 1:25 p.m.

Sherap Therchin Executive Director, Canada Tibet Committee

Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members. I deeply appreciate this opportunity to speak with you on this important matter of Tibetan language and education.

The Canada Tibet Committee is an independent, non-partisan association of Tibetans and non-Tibetans from across Canada. Founded in 1987, its mandate is to promote the human rights of Tibetans living under Chinese rule.

As committee members will know, the right to education is protected in both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Both of these treaties explicitly guarantee that minority groups must not be denied the use of their own language, either in the community or otherwise. Further, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights states that individuals “have the right of self-determination”, including “social and cultural development”.

Here in Canada, the federal government supports efforts by indigenous peoples to reclaim and revitalize their linguistic heritage, in part by adopting the Indigenous Languages Act in 2019. In the province of Quebec, it has been more than 40 years that all children in the province have to be educated in the French language until the end of their secondary studies.

It is also interesting to note that the Government of China has adopted its regional national autonomy law, which clearly states in article 37 that “The organs of self-government of national autonomous areas shall independently develop education for the nationalities” and “shall, whenever possible, use textbooks in their own languages and use their languages as the media of instruction.”

Despite such guarantees, however, a suite of policies imposed across the whole of China by the central government under the pretext of poverty alleviation or ecological protection have reinforced the ongoing assault on the Tibetan language and cultural traditions. Such policies include various nomad relocation schemes, the school consolidation policy and the bilingual education policy. These policies have, in effect, reduced the ability of Tibetan children to access schooling in their own language, as witnesses explained in detail before this committee in the previous meeting.

A few years ago, Global Affairs Canada funded a project to support efforts by the Tibetan exile community in India and Nepal to deliver quality education in the Tibetan language. Notwithstanding the many differences in the broader context, the project provided valuable lessons about challenges faced when promoting Tibetan language in the face of a different dominant language. For this reason, Canada is well placed to take the lead on this issue.

Therefore, in conclusion, we wish to make the following recommendations for the committee's consideration.

Number one, open the dialogue with the appropriate counterparts from the National People's Congress on the matter of minority languages and education in Tibet.

Number two, invite visiting parliamentarians from China to indigenous communities and to Quebec in order to share Canadian experiences regarding the protection and promotion of minority languages.

Number three, support academic research aimed at identifying the impacts that resettlement and education policies in Tibet have had or might have on the vibrancy of Tibetan language and culture.

Number four, encourage the Canadian embassy in Beijing to develop Canada fund projects related to Tibetan language education, including support for Tibetan-language lending libraries or the training of Tibetan-language teachers.

Finally, number five, advocate on behalf of Tibetan human rights defenders who uphold linguistic rights.

Thank you.

1:20 p.m.

Conservative

The Vice-Chair Conservative Arnold Viersen

Thank you, Mr. Therchin. That's right on the time there, for sure.

I will now move on to the senior researcher with the Tibet Action Institute.

The floor is yours for five minutes.

1:20 p.m.

Tenzin Dorjee Senior Researcher and Strategist, Tibet Action Institute

Thank you. I'd like to thank the distinguished members of the committee for this opportunity.

Among all of the tools of colonial dispossession wielded by European settlers against indigenous populations in North America, residential schools stand out for the scope, scale and persistence of their impact. Under the guise of providing education, these boarding establishments removed indigenous children from their homes, erased their cultures and languages and left a lasting legacy of multi-generational trauma that haunts indigenous communities to this day.

This 19th-century colonial practice is being quietly resurrected on the Tibetan plateau by the Chinese government.

Two years ago, after hearing about children being forced into state-run boarding schools in parts of eastern Tibet, my colleagues at Tibet Action Institute began investigating the matter. After months of research, they arrived at the disturbing conclusion that approximately 800,000 children, which is 78% of all Tibetan students aged six to 18, are living in residential boarding schools. That's 800,000 children. This staggering statistic does not include the more than 100,000 Tibetan children aged four to six who are believed to be in boarding preschools.

In these boarding institutions, children are put through a highly politicized curriculum designed to sever their ties to their religion and culture, strip them of their mother tongue and methodically replace their Tibetan identity with a Chinese one. The residential school system sits at the centre of China's new solution to the Tibetan problem.

Whereas previous administrations under Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin and Deng Xiaoping balanced political repression with a degree of ethnic accommodation towards Tibetans, Xi Jinping's China has opted for an all-out eliminationist approach. This new approach is grounded in the ultra-nationalist notion that the only route to political stability is cultural uniformity and ethnic homogeneity.

In the past, Beijing believed that the best way to solve the nationalities problem was to afford non-Han minorities a range of special protections and cultural accommodations. However, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Chinese public intellectuals like Ma Rong and Hu Angang argued that special treatment for minority communities somehow undermined Chinese nation building. They called for a highly interventionist form of party-directed cultural nationalism. What Beijing now seeks to eliminate is not just separatist ideology but the separate identity of Tibetans. Dissent never went unpunished under Beijing, but now even difference is criminalized.

Among all the features of Tibetan identity, language is what most effectively unites Tibetans across the plateau. The Tibetan language forms the bedrock of one of the great civilizations of Asia, with a written history dating back over a millennium and an oral literature that goes back even further. It is also home to the largest body of canonical Buddhist literature in the world. Of all the markers of a distinct identity, language is the central pride of the Tibetan people.

For Xi Jinping's China, this is precisely why the Tibetan language must be eradicated. What better tool for that task than the residential school system? In all schools across the plateau, Tibetan has been replaced by Mandarin Chinese as the medium of instruction. Beijing has deceptively labelled this new policy “bilingual education”, but there is nothing bilingual about the system. Tibetan has been demoted to second-language or third-language status in its own native homeland. This is literally a highway to mother-tongue erosion. To make it worse, China has shuttered scores of local and private schools, pre-emptively destroying all village-level alternatives to the consolidated boarding schools.

Ironically, two months ago, when UN experts in Geneva grilled the Chinese delegation, Chinese officials defended the mandatory boarding policy by claiming that there were no schooling alternatives in rural Tibet. Guess what. They themselves had destroyed all the local alternatives that existed. At the same event, when asked about the use of Mandarin as the medium of instruction in Tibet, Chinese officials said that the Tibetan language doesn't have the right words for teaching math and science. This is a blatantly racist and fictitious argument.

All languages, when they meet new subjects for the first time, face challenges that can be overcome. The Chinese language itself faced the same problems in the recent past, and it managed pretty well, borrowing thousands of terminologies from Japanese and Russian. Tibetan has by and large also solved some of these problems.

Meanwhile, the boarding system is causing a major upheaval in the social, psychological, cultural and linguistic structures of Tibetan life. We are already seeing the early results of this colonial policy. Tibetan children below a certain age are fast becoming native Mandarin speakers, which means they can no longer converse meaningfully with their parents and cannot even communicate with their grandparents. In Tibet, as in many traditional societies, grandparents play a seminal role in shaping children's overall psychological development and orienting their cultural world view. If children inherit genes from their parents, it can be said they inherit culture from their grandparents.

This colonial system is clearly designed to stem the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. Thankfully, the world is beginning to take action and take note. Two months ago, the UN sent a strong communication to Beijing on the issue. Yesterday, the German government officially called for an end to this system.

My recommendation to the Canadian government is to publicly condemn this consolidated boarding institution and to call on the Chinese government to halt this system and allow the reopening of village-level local and private schools. Finally, I request that the Canadian government sanction Chinese leaders and officials responsible for this heinous policy, including the intellectual architects responsible for developing and implementing this system.

Thank you.

1:25 p.m.

Conservative

The Vice-Chair Conservative Arnold Viersen

Thank you.

We will now be hearing from the senior researcher from Tibet Watch.

The floor is yours for five minutes.

Tenzin Choekyi Senior Researcher, Tibet Watch

Thank you for having me.

On behalf of Tibet Watch, I would like to thank all of the members of the committee for their attention on this urgent matter, and the interpreter for making this communication possible.

First, I must make note of the atmosphere of fear and surveillance under which Tibetans inside Tibet live every single day. Ever since the spate of 2008 freedom protests and the self-immolations from 2009, Tibet was effectively turned into a police state. Rural villages, cities, crossroads, community halls, monasteries, border crossing areas, chat groups and social media are all monitored by police.

The Chinese Communist Party says it is for social stability. Meetings are convened to announce unilateral decisions. Tibetans inside are warned to cut off their ties with friends and family living in exile and diasporas. Old-aged people with knowledge of family history are interviewed to extract information about Tibetans living outside. Huge cash awards are promised for reports on communication between those inside and outside. Police visit homes and warn aging parents to tell the children in exile to stop going to protests calling for freedom in Tibet.

What is oppressed at home is repressed abroad. What, then, is the purpose of school in an occupied country? A young refugee girl, aged 15, who recently escaped to India from eastern Tibet, told us about her time at her minority boarding secondary school. She says this: “We wake up early around 4 to 5 in the morning and start morning exercises like running in the playground, all under the close watch of surveillance cameras.

“The medium of instruction is mainly Chinese. Except for the Tibetan language class, the rest of the subjects...are taught in Chinese language. Tibetan language class is optional and marks in the Tibetan exam are not even counted in the final exam score.”

She belongs to the top class of students who scored the highest, but they don't get the chance to visit home on weekends like others. The best teachers give them classes, but only 10 out of 50 teachers at the school are of Tibetan origin, teaching Tibetan language.

A couple of other newly arrived refugees from eastern Tibet also echoed the same observation, adding that naming a school “Tibetan” is just for the namesake. There is no career and scope for jobs in a market-driven society where Chinese-language proficiency is the main requirement.

In between this structural injustice, Tibetans have carefully and consistently carved out spaces for a Tibetan education with private school, online language chat groups and home tuition. However, these spaces are also rapidly shrinking.

For example, in July 2021, Sengdruk Taktse, a school founded with government permission, was forcibly shut down without any official clarification. Its students were then enrolled into local state-run schools, whilst orphans without fixed domiciliation faced many difficulties. A Tibetan teacher at the school was deeply disturbed by the closure and unable to eat. She was detained. The same year, Gyalten Getsa, another renowned Tibetan school, was ordered to change the curriculum and medium of instruction to Chinese and take all exams in Chinese, or face a shutdown.

Then came the replacement of Tibetan textbooks with that of Chinese. Parents in Darlag township in Golog were told that from September 2021 onwards, all of their children must go to school with only the newly introduced textbooks in Chinese. Two youngsters expressed concerns about the future impact of this decision in an online chat group, and they were both detained.

Another teenager in Ngaba county was also taken into custody after he submitted a petition against the Chinese medium of instruction and refused to join a propaganda meeting about praising the CCP. Shortly after the schools opened in September 2021, in Markham county three children aged 11, 15 and 16, who expressed unhappiness about the lack of Tibetan classes, were arrested from their boarding school and taken to a so-called “reform through education centre”, under the pretext of needing psychological counselling.

The Chinese government also issued two other notices in 2021—promoting Mandarin Chinese as the national common language in preschool kindergartens, and reducing the burden of homework and off-campus tuition. This double reduction, so to speak, means that off-campus tuition in the Tibetan language, or any other subjects by Tibetans, faces scrutiny and closure.

The boarding school is also deeply intertwined with state policies that displace nomads from their ancestral lands. Known in Tibet Autonomous Region as the extremely high-altitude ecological resettlement program, by 2025 entire villages in their hundreds are going to be moved hundreds of kilometres away. The consequences are that parents lose their traditional and sustainable livelihoods. Even if their children and their boarding school have also been moved to the same new area, parents no longer have their homeland to live in and pass on their ancestral knowledge of the land.

This is how the Chinese Communist Party, to use their jargon, give “full play” to the children of Tibet. Their mother tongue is systematically devalued to nothing more than a language subject.

Thank you.

1:30 p.m.

Conservative

The Vice-Chair Conservative Arnold Viersen

Thank you very much.

We'll now turn to our questioning. This is a seven-minute round, so each member will have seven minutes to ask questions.

I will turn the floor over to Ziad Aboultaif.

1:30 p.m.

Conservative

Ziad Aboultaif Conservative Edmonton Manning, AB

Thanks for appearing today before the committee.

It's very obvious that the Chinese regime and government is trying to use schooling to be able to impact changes on the culture of the Tibet region and Tibetans in general. Since 2008, these forced boarding schools have been running, and they may have been running before that.

I would like to start with Mr. Therchin.

In your own assessment, how much of an impact have these boarding schools had on the culture, the language and the community in general?

Executive Director, Canada Tibet Committee

Sherap Therchin

Thank you for the question.

The impact of forcibly putting Tibetan children into residential boarding schools has created an environment where Tibetan children are no longer able to communicate with their grandparents, because grandparents speak Tibetan and children are not able to speak Tibetan. It has cut off the link of sharing not just the language but also the history that grandparents would usually share with their grandchildren.

That is just one example, but I would defer to our colleague at the Tibet Action Institute, who has done research and spent a lot of time on this particular issue.

Conservative

Ziad Aboultaif Conservative Edmonton Manning, AB

Thank you.

Senior Researcher and Strategist, Tibet Action Institute

Tenzin Dorjee

If I may add very quickly to what my colleague Sherap just said, in terms of doing extensive research on the ground on exactly the scope and scale of the impact, it's very difficult to do because the Chinese government does not allow any foreign researcher, scholar, independent investigator or journalist to go into Tibet. They don't allow any information from Tibet to escape out of Tibet.

In Tibet, one reason there is an information black hole is that the messengers get punished sometimes even worse than the protesters. At the same time, here are a couple of examples that I have observed in my own experience: The age of the child seems to be very important in terms of how deep the level of impact is, let's say, if we just look at the individual impact on one family. My colleague, Dr. Gyal Lo, who is here with us, observed that among children who are between the ages of three and six, three to six months is long enough for a child to switch completely from Tibetan to Mandarin. It literally takes less than six months for the language erosion to happen at a very fundamental place.

I also met a young Tibetan student around the age of 11 or 12. This was somebody who attended one of those boarding institutions recently. Her story was a little bit different because she grew up in a family that was fiercely proud of their Tibetan heritage. She grew up speaking only Tibetan in her home and that was the language of the home, but when she was enrolled into a boarding institution at age 10, within one year, Mandarin displaced Tibetan as her first language. When I met her, she was no longer comfortable speaking in Tibetan. She was speaking to me in halting Tibetan, and her first language was very clearly Mandarin.

I asked her, “What about the other students in your school? In class, of course, you speak Mandarin, but outside of class, what language do you use with each other, with your peers?” She said, “Mandarin, Chinese.”

Conservative

Ziad Aboultaif Conservative Edmonton Manning, AB

On this note, how long will it take, with continued residential schools, to wipe out completely the Tibetan culture and language?

Senior Researcher and Strategist, Tibet Action Institute

Tenzin Dorjee

That's the implication that many of us really deeply worry about, because it is one of those impacts that are difficult to observe and difficult to notice. Let's imagine. In her case, students who are 11 to 12 years old right now have already switched to Mandarin as their first language. We cannot say what's happening to people who are 16, 17 or 18 years old. It's easy for people to think that the Tibetan language is still doing okay, because people are still speaking Tibetan, but if we play this experiment forward, when her generation gets to 40 years old or 50 years old, we will have a world where in Tibet the majority of the Tibetan population will be speaking in Chinese—not Tibetan—to each other. There is nothing wrong with being bilingual, but there is something disturbing when Tibetans talk to each other in Chinese as their main language.

This is the real scenario that we are looking at because it is a cohort effect and it happens. Right now it's hard to notice, but when the world starts to notice, it might be too late. That's why right now is the time for action.

Conservative

Ziad Aboultaif Conservative Edmonton Manning, AB

Between the action of doing something with a very stubborn regime out there, which is basically on a power trip, versus the other countering action to be able to preserve and to minimize the impact of the actions happening as a result of residential schools, what do you think is the best action to be taken to minimize the effect of what's going on?

Conservative

The Vice-Chair Conservative Arnold Viersen

Unfortunately, that puts us out of time.

We will turn it over to Mr. Virani for seven minutes.

Liberal

Arif Virani Liberal Parkdale—High Park, ON

Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you for the welcome to the committee.

Thugs rje che—that's thank you in Tibetan—to all the witnesses, virtual and in person, who have come to share such important information. It's not lost on me as a Muslim Canadian that today is Eid al-Fitr, and Muslim Canadians are free to celebrate with their families, as I have been doing with my family today, while religious worship and religious freedom in other parts of the world, including in Tibet, are extremely restricted. I think it underscores the need for us all to be vigilant. Let me start by saying that.

I want to put out a request to the first three witnesses. I was jotting things down as quickly as possible, but I think between Thupten Rabgyal-la and Sherap Therchin and Tenzin Dorjee, you have provided about 12 different recommendations. Could you please just make sure that all of those recommendations are provided in writing to the clerk and the analysts? That would be very beneficial for us, because we do want to scrutinize those very closely.

My first question in these seven minutes is for the Tibet Action Institute and Tenzin Dorjee-la.

It seems to me that Tibet, given what we've heard, is at an inflection point where Canada was in maybe the 1870s or 1880s, just when we were designing the residential school system for indigenous kids in this country. The overt policy of the Government of Canada at the time was to take the Indian out of the child.

You've said quite candidly, Tenzin-la, that the PRC under Xi Jinping is deliberately attempting to assimilate Tibetans quite directly by converting to a complete usage of Mandarin. What analogies do you see between what happened in this country, and unfortunately continues to this day in Canada—with the Indian residential school system, where we took kids away from their indigenous homes and put them in faraway places, forcing them to learn English as a foreign language—and what is happening right now in Tibet? What lessons can we apply from our own experience to help the Tibetan cause?

Could you start with that, please, Mr. Dorjee?

Senior Researcher and Strategist, Tibet Action Institute

Tenzin Dorjee

I think the two cases are very similar when it comes to the intent of the government. The main goal of the government and many of the strategies that the government is using are also very similar. Some of the tactics might be a little bit different, but most of the strategies are the same. The goal is exactly the same.

The only major difference I see is that, in the case of what China is doing to Tibet right now, it is not too late—yet. There is time to stop it from happening. If the phrase “never again” has any meaning, we have a chance to stop this genocide.

Liberal

Arif Virani Liberal Parkdale—High Park, ON

Thank you, Dorjee-la.

I will turn to Sherap Therchin from the CTC.

Obviously there's a moral flaw to what the PRC is doing. There's a violation of international human rights, and you outlined some of the covenants. It also seems that you're making the case that the Chinese government, even pursuant to their own domestic legislation, are violating their own domestic laws, their own national laws, of the PRC in terms of what they're doing to the Tibetan people.

Can you just refresh us about the legislation that you feel is being violated domestically in terms of the PRC violating their own laws?