Report Summary
- No other province-level area in the PRC has equivalent barriers to access as the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). This is most evident every year in March, when the Tibet Autonomous Region is closed to foreigners coinciding with the anniversary of the March 10 Uprising in 1959 and protests in 2008. This year, a more universal lockdown across the PRC due to the coronavirus was implemented.
- The TAR is currently the only area for which the PRC requires a separate permit for foreign travelers, including foreign residents and foreign journalists or diplomats based in China. Such permits are routinely denied. Tibetan Americans also face denial of visas to visit their homeland on family visits, which is mentioned in the Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act. Tibetans in Europe face the same issue, and are subject to intense pressure and scrutiny from Party officials in the process of obtaining a Chinese visa. China has stepped up its efforts to influence Tibetans in Europe, seeking to impose a false narrative using a mix of threats and incentives.
- Chinese authorities intensified their propaganda drive and promotion of Tibet as “open” still further in 2019, seeking to obscure their covert and coercive policies, while at the same time restricting meaningful engagement with the situation on the ground for journalists and governments. The PRC authorities have weaponized the issue of access to Tibet, with access granted only on its own specific terms, and with different conditions to the rest of the PRC. Denying access, or threatening to do so, is used as a means of shutting down critique by government officials, scholars, journalists and independent experts.
- In 2019 rapidly expanding surveillance and an oppressive climate of fear drove deterioration in the work environment for foreign journalists, and there was a downward trend in organized press visits permitted by the authorities to Tibet. The Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC) reported in 2018 “the darkest picture of reporting conditions inside China in recent memory,” and this has continued throughout 2019, with even fewer media visits possible.
- As the diplomatic focus on reciprocal access has gained attention, China has heightened its propaganda efforts on Tibet by sending official Tibetan delegations to foreign capitals to attack the Dalai Lama and gain support for its representations of Tibet. Over the past decade nearly three times the number of Party state organized delegations visited Western countries compared to Western government representatives allowed access to Tibet. In 2019, this continued to be a priority of the Chinese Communist Party, with a particular focus on its efforts to control the succession of the Dalai Lama, in response to an increasing international pushback on this issue as governments assert the Dalai Lama’s legitimacy over Beijing’s. While there was a small downturn in visits of Chinese delegations telling their version of Tibet’s story to Europe compared to 2018, hardly any foreign governments were hosted in Tibet.
- No access was possible in 2019 for any United Nations (UN) experts and special rapporteurs to Tibet, despite repeated requests. Following requests since the fire at the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa in February, 2018,[3] a “Reactive Monitoring Mission” to Lhasa by UNESCO took place from April 8 to 15, 2019, and was kept under wraps by the global heritage body. Its mission report has still not been released, more than a year later, and despite the outstanding significance of the sites in Tibet’s historic and cultural capital.
- Mass Chinese domestic tourism and foreign tourists to Tibet have been coexisting with the untrammeled powers of a security state engaged in the most widespread political crackdown in a generation. In contrast to the situation in Xinjiang (known to Uyghurs as East Turkestan), in 2019, China announced a dramatic spike in the number of foreign tourists visiting the Tibetan plateau, indicating a high level of confidence in covering up the human rights situation to visitors from outside the PRC, and ambitious new plans to attract Chinese tourists and promote “Third Pole Tibet” as a new tourist “brand.”
- Risks to American and European citizens of travelling in the PRC in general increased in 2019, linked to China’s shifting political agenda against their countries of origin. The dangers of access to both Xinjiang and Tibet for foreign visitors were first highlighted in the U.S. State Department’s China Travel Advisory in 2018, following the detention of two Canadians, former diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor, in the wake of the controversial arrest of a Huawei executive in Canada in December, 2017 – a disturbing indicator of China’s interpretation of “reciprocity.”
- While Chinese tourists are increasingly free to come and go to the plateau, Tibetans themselves face unprecedented restrictions on their movement. Ongoing restrictions imposed by the Party state also leave Tibetans locked in virtual isolation from the global community, unable to travel, even when they are able to obtain Chinese passports and scholarships abroad, which is rare. Tibetans face some of the most severe penalties anywhere for expressing views that differ from those of the Party state, no matter how moderate. While Chinese policy statements refer to the need to increase availability of propaganda materials in the Tibetan language, there has been a steady trend of the criminalization of integral elements of Tibetan identity and culture particularly targeting Tibetan efforts to promote and speak their mother tongue. Xi Jinping’s “new era” approach involves a dramatic downturn in any support for protections of minority “ethnic” culture.
- Increasing numbers of Tibetan exiles who wish to return to see families such as elderly parents are compromised and at risk from the surveillance state, and there are intensified efforts to influence a younger generation of Tibetans born to parents in exile in a bid to instill “the red gene” and replace memories or awareness of what families have lived through over 60 years of Chinese rule. Visits of Tibetans from abroad are institutionalized under the auspices of the hardline United Front Work Department (UFWD), which also attempts to work within communities in exile, seeking to influence and exacerbate divisions and convey propaganda messages.
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