Representative Ngodup Tsering addressing the commemoration of the 62nd anniversary of Tibetan national uprising day in front of the United Nations.
By Ugyen Gyalpo 13 March 2021
So much is going around the world. Burmese are fighting on the streets of Myanmar for a different future after their covert military coup and imprisonment of their democratically elected leader. While in Russia, the calls for Alexei Navalny’s freedom from the clutches of Putin’s Russia intensifies. Also, to add to the whirlwind, the new deadly CCP virus variant is emerging all over the place. It has now killed over five hundred thousand Americans. That is more than the Americans killed in WWI, WWII, and the Vietnam War combined. While the world is crippled even after a year, China is growing leaps and bounds. If the Chinese Communist Party had been thoughtful and transparent from the beginning, thousands of lives could have been saved worldwide. They lied like they always do, and people worldwide are dying today as a result. Because of their lies and hideous transparency, the CCP has pushed the rest of the world’s prosperity behind by at least thirty years.
I had seen many major issues of the world for as long as I can remember when I started paying close attention to the world’s affairs, from wars to famines come and go, from new countries born to dictators being toppled by revolutions. Still, the issue of Tibet hasn’t budged from the world’s hypocritical eyes and has always taken a back seat. The crooked moral compass of the world that is so hard to tilt even a bit for Tibet for decades seems to be gingerly moving as of late. It is assuring to see Tibet being mentioned time and again in India’s China conflicts. It is also assuring to see huge bills being passed for Tibet by the U.S.
Yesterday towards the first anniversary when the WHO declared covid Pandemic, Tibetans all over the world commemorated the sixty-second year of the Tibetan uprising that was crushed by the armies of the Chinese Communist Party and the holocaustic loss that ensued to the total annexation of Tibet and the dawn of the unrelenting oppression thereon that continues unhinged to this day, manifested time and again with countless self-immolations coming inside of Tibet and the senseless killings by the heartless Chinese police of two young Tibetans by the name of Tenzin Nyima and Kunchok Jinpa in a two-month span.
The commemoration of this uprising took place in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, on March tenth, 1959. It was a spontaneous culmination of people’s outrage and the build-up of a fear of imminent threat to the life of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, the spiritual and temporal head of Tibet. History has it that fearing of a possible assassination conspiracy after an unexpected invitation of His Holiness to attend the cultural performance at a Chinese military headquarter broke the camel’s back of suspicion and sparked the biggest Tibetan uprising that fateful day of March 10, 1959. The nation’s nationalistic mood and the clouds of suspicion and air of fiery rage and anger that hungered above Lhasa were evident of that historic day. On that fateful day, the whole nation rose spontaneously and called for self-determination and freedom for Tibetans. Many Tibetans out of Lhasa, from as far as Kham, the farthest province that bordered China, had walked many weeks before developing such a historic cataclysmic event.
This uprising was truly a culmination of the people’s fight to restore their country’s independence and repeal the dubious Seventeen Point Agreement that Tibet was forced to sign under duress. Over a million Tibetans have been killed since then, many being brutalized to their last breath, and many without judicial trials broke on their slavery backs upon the weight of the vicious Chinese gulags, tilling lands like animals and feeding on rats and cockroaches to survive for another day.
Sixty-two years later, after many of our grandparents and parents fled the occupation firsthand, including mine, tragically, many have already died in their long wait, of a buried dream of one day tracing back their footsteps to their lost home through the now scarred receded glaciers of the Himalayas.
In 1959, when countries around the world were breaking the shackles of colonialism, Tibet was the only country that fell back into the abyss of colonialism. The infamous day also marked the total and official annexation of Tibet into Chinese brutal hegemonic rule despite repeated pleas of help to the United Nations that fell on deaf ears and help to Pandit Nehru, the Prime Minister of newly independent India few years prior that also fell on the ax of his biggest political blunder of sacrificing Tibet into the altar of geopolitical gamut and self-interest that seems to haunt India as we speak, as Chinese troops are breathing heavily over their backs from the closest Himalayan borders.
Fast forward to 2021, Tibet continues to be one of the most oppressed and least free countries globally, always ranked either after or before North Korea and Syria by the index of the Freedom House. Just like back in 1959, when Tibetan calls for help were being ignored, the newfound political and economic clout that China wields today has transformed the case of Tibet into a case of a leper that no one wants to touch but only sympathize with. The huge statue of China in the symbiotic world we live in today, combined with their economic clout, has a lot to do with kowtowing and intentional blindness to this wrathful regime.
Nation after nation, leaders after leaders continue to fail the “Tibet Test” coined by Edward Lucas “If you think you live in a free country, ask if your politicians feel free to meet the Dalai Lama. If the answer is no, then you are part of the Chinese empire; you just haven’t realized it yet.” This is the Tibet Test that many spineless leaders of the world continue to fail whoring their pure conscience to appease China.
I am reflecting on his promising statement in little less than two months since I watched the inauguration ceremony of Joe Biden. To quote, “My administration will sanction Chinese officials responsible for human rights abuses in Tibet, and step up support for the Tibetan people, including by expanding Tibetan language services at Radio Free Asia and Voice of America to get information from the outside world into Tibet.”
I think despite everything that is going around from getting the U.S out of Covid, President Biden’s greatest test will be standing up to the bullishness of China. Trump came like a tornado uprooting China but his own backyard too. But one thing that can’t be denied is that the U.S policy against China has toughened since Trump started rattling them. Now that he has folded into the pages of history in infamy, his legacy is defined and forever tainted by that infamous insurrection at the Capitol he incited. As for my China-centric discourse, post-Trump has already set a high tough bar in the US-China Policy that even political analysts, regardless of the partisan divide, agree on. Now it’s really up to President Biden to continue to ante up the pressure to an already assertive China who is bent on their expansionist craze despite the world being crippled by the pandemic. I don’t want to old hold anything back for Biden as far as his 47 years in D.C have accumulated to nothing but kissing China’s ass. But that is past, and the days ahead are the new future. I hope that his new position as the most powerful person in the world will awaken him to act against a regime that has become a legitimate threat against humanity and democracy as a whole.
In the wake of the despicable acts of insurrection that took place in D.C, where the fragility of U.S democracy was exposed as a huge wound, China was rubbing salt against it and was actually busy selling their Chinese Communist Model to the world. A model that has killed over half a billion people and suffocated the freedom of millions. I am sure Biden will redeem himself from his abject failure to stand up to China for the last 47 years. But now, since this is his moment, his chance, his orders, his thought. I am sure he will hold China accountable. History will always be there to judge him, and in contemporary, people like us and many others who are the direct victim of China’s wrath will be there to judge too.
As for India, our historical immediate neighbor, a place of refuge for Tibetans and home to the Dalai Lama and his people who fled along with him sixty-two years ago, India has become their second home, and for many like myself, the only home I have known since Tibet existed only in the figment of our imaginations told through stories and folklores.
In the face of the ever-growing fears of another skirmish in the India-Chinese Occupied Tibet borders( I refuse to call this Indo-China border), India holds the key in resurrecting the Tibetan independence status that was sacrificed by Prime Minister Nehru in the altar of geopolitical self-interest back in the fifties. If India heeds to the calls of 80 percent of Indians(recently held polls)who would like to see the Indo-Tibet border and Tibet as a buffer state being resurrected, then the world’s democracies will follow India’s lead for sure. This also could have happened. Nehru recognized Tibet’s independence back then when the world’s nations were looking to follow India’s lead at the United Nations. Things could have been much different had India sought to recognize Tibet’s independence, and United Nations could have taken Tibet seriously too. After seventy-plus years when Tibet is being raped and sucked to the core, and the greed of China is felt encroaching towards India’s sovereignty, to suddenly awaken to the realization of the importance of Tibet mentioned mad amplified time and again by the Indian media is regrettable, to say the least. But yes, India can still save Tibet from being annihilated and erased. It is still not too late!
The “Tibet card” long-held close by the Indian policymakers to their chest will definitively resurrect the Indo-Tibet border for their own self-interest. Although it is played, repealing of India’s recognition of Tibet as a part of China to its historical status of an independent country being invaded and occupied by China will be all but certain and significant in pushing China to their original borders close to their Great Wall.
The United States is equally crucial to the solution of the Tibetan cause. It’s the only superpower that can seriously challenge China on the international stage. Global collective efforts to make this world a better, safer place have taken backstage. United Nations has become a meme for its ineffectiveness and is actually hostage to the security council’s vetoes that is run by rogue nations such as China and Russia.
It’s so sad and tragic that our little Tibetan voices are being censored even on Facebook regularly. Passionate Tibetan’s posts on Facebook are being blocked and fast surveilled for any anti-CCP post to appease China. Mark Zuckerberg is truly sold out to China without a doubt. All the CCP paid trolls that flood his platform and sympathizers of the CCP are equally responsible for inciting the expeditious death and destruction of Tibet. If Facebook is not banning them, Mark Zuckerberg is equally culpable for crimes against humanity and the Tibetans and the Uighurs’ suffering.
In the last two decades, more than the butter lamps, Tibet was alighted with countless self-immolations. Repression grew manifold. Human volcanoes were exploding and imploding everywhere. Forced assimilation intensified, sinicization systematically notched up to wipe and raze our culture from the core.
But the actual incorporation of the Tibetan race to greater China as equal peers to Hans and other Chinese minorities in terms of rights and economic opportunities were bare to minimal as was expected on a wishful compromise of the Middle Way Policy of staying within the framework of the Chinese constitution and the rights it supposedly guarantees to the ethnic minorities. Far from this, Tibetans have pushed around, disenfranchised, and turned beggars in their own lands. They are forced to vilify His Holiness the Dalai Lama and forced to display the portraits of Chinese leaders butchers of Beijing on to their altars and places of worship. In the last many decades, Tibet became a laboratory to test all sci-fi tools of modern surveillance, control, and torture, the mastery of which is in full display in East Turkestan for a few years now.
While the March of folly continues unabated and looking at China’s belligerence, its expansionist craze and Xi’s lust for global dominance in the face of its shaky relationship with the U.S and the global outrage for the suffering the CCP-Virus has caused, China’s folly in many areas whether it is dealing with the issue of Taiwan or their territorial assertion on south China seas, or whether it is fighting the new Cold War with the United States or fighting along the borders of Tibet with India, China’s March of Folly will usher its downfall sooner than we can expect.
While a Tibetan activist Tenzin Tsundue is on an epic march on foot from Dharamsala to New Delhi to climax the end of his patriotic walk to coincide on March tenth, a hashtag “walkamilefortibet” has become viral. His campaign to evoke the policymakers in India’s political seat to repeal the long-held “One China Policy” and resurrect “Tibet as a buffer state” has caught the conscience of Indians by storm from the streets of the town to the rural’s horn.
How far will the “Tibet Test” fare given China’s encroachments on India’s neck, and how far President Biden and the world will hold China accountable will remain to be seen in the months to come? As for Tibetans, it is yet another year of commemorating a brutal uprising that was crushed by the Chinese Communist Regime, while our nemesis is growing stronger by the day, whether it is through their “wolf diplomacy” or their new manufactured “vaccine diplomacy” that they can sell the Chinese model to that world, the same Chinese model that has turned our world upside down and devoured my country.