Report Summary
- Looking at the past 10 years of Xi Jinping rule (2012-2022), Tibetan optimism about him ushering in a more lenient policy, including a possible solution of the Tibetan issue, was misplaced. Rather, Xi has brought forth a new period of strengthened control.
- Xi’s focus was on two primary goals: securitize Tibet and Sinify[1] the Tibetan people in the Chinese nation-state.
- Xi’s Tibet policy revolves around the issue of Tibetan identity and the associated apprehensions. His proposed solution and path to address this concern involve the reconstitution of Tibet and Tibetans as an integrated part of the Chinese identity. The historical concept of “Zhonghua Minzu,” or the Chinese nation, that was utilized by Chinese rulers became a central theme in Xi Jinping’s speeches. Although Sinification of non-Chinese has already been underway, there had been strategic ambiguity in the policy until recently. By 2019, the party-state stopped the pretense and publicly declared Sinification as a policy unambiguously in terms of religion.
- Xi has embraced the hardline “ethnic” policy advocated by a mix of Chinese policymakers and public intellectuals in the early 2000s, thereby instigating a “second generation ethnic policy” aimed at dismantling the nationalities policies that were central to the formation of the People’s Republic of China. The objective is to foster a unified Chinese identity for the goal of Zhonghua Minzu.
- Tibetans were foremost in this long-term assimilationist drive because of their socio-political identity based on the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism. Although Buddhism in general is one of the five religions (Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism) recognized by the PRC, the CCP continues to hold an antagonistic view toward Tibetan Buddhism. While the Chinese tradition of Buddhism is held as part of the indigenous Chinese culture, Tibetan Buddhism is viewed as a deviant needing guidance from the party.
- While Xi presented a positive view of Buddhism in his 2014 UNESCO speech, the reality on the ground differed significantly. Although Chinese Buddhists, too, suffer under Xi, far worse treatment is given to the Tibetan Buddhists. They are viewed as needing harmonization, and the strategy to accomplish domestication of Tibetan Buddhism is to methodically assimilate it toward developing “consciousness of the community of the Chinese nation” in order to “contribute to the realization of the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation.”
- The Xi-led administration formally launched an online database of CCP-approved Tibetan Buddhist reincarnations, officially designated as “authentic Living Buddhas” of Tibetan Buddhism, in January 2016. The database was a clear effort by the CCP to assert control over the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation and undermine the authority of legitimate Tibetan religious leaders. The legal groundwork for the CCP’s initiative was already laid down in 2007 with the issuance of Order No. 5, titled “Management measures for the reincarnation of living Buddhas in Tibetan Buddhism.”
- Creating a new generation of Sinified Tibetans for the vision of a “Chinese nation” included assimilating an entire Tibetan youth demographic. This has led to schools in Tibet being one of the primary domains for Sinification policy by strictly enforcing Chinese as the primary language over the Tibetan language in the education system to construct a new generation of Tibetans being able to identify themselves as Chinese with loyalty to the Chinese nation.
- Xi Jinping is casting the CCP’s political security as national security and accordingly frames Tibet and Tibetans as a national security issue of China. His “Overall National Security Concept” now involves everything in Tibetans’ lives, from politics, economy, development, culture, environment, etc. Xi’s version of national security is more problematic, as the new highly expansionist political-ideological construct behind the new national security concept means that any activity Tibetans undertake can be perceived as a threat to China’s sovereignty and marked as “secessionist.”
- Xi’s focus on the political security of the CCP being China’s national security has shifted the paradigm to the preemptive prevention and control model for security in Tibet. Through the mix of facial recognition and artificial intelligence technology, genome surveillance on top of the prevailing technology, the object of surveillance under Xi is to preempt any challenge to his and the CCP’s rule. Research revealed that unlike the past sporadic Tibetan DNA harvesting done by public health authorities as early as in 2012, following Xi Jinping’s coming to power, China’s police have begun collecting DNA from entire populations.
- The genome data collection of Tibetans is disturbing since both the DNA and iris collection of Tibetans is outside any ongoing criminal investigation, thus conflating crime control and social control. By targeting Tibetans from elementary school students to the elderly for genome collection, in the absence of ongoing criminal investigation, Xi views Tibetans as a threat to the national security of China.
- One of the consequences of the securitization of Tibet under Xi Jinping has been the drastic reduction in the flow of refugees from Tibet. From the 1980s until 2008 there was a steady flow of several thousand new refugees from Tibet arriving in India. In 2008, the number of refugees from Tibet dropped to 588 from 2,338 in 2007. After a gradual climb up to 753 in 2011, the number of refugees dropped to 375 in 2012, the year Xi Jinping assumed leadership. The number of refugees trickled steadily throughout the decade of Xi Jinping’s rule with only five refugees, according to the most recent available statistics, being able to flee out of Tibet in 2022.
- Similarly, there was an upsurge in the number of Tibetan self-immolations recorded in 2012. In the record 84 cases in that whole year, there were 23 self-immolations that took place in the last one and a half months of 2012 after Xi took over.
- Successive Chinese leaders, including Xi Jinping, have emphasized the importance of the unity of “all ethnic groups,” social stability and territorial integrity. Equality among peoples means that irrespective of population size, economy or military strength, everyone can co-exist on an equal footing, without one community being considered superior or better than the others. If the Tibetan and Chinese peoples can co-exist on an equal footing, this will serve as the basis for guaranteeing social stability itself. This means it is in China’s own interest to work for a mutually beneficial solution to the Tibetan issue with the Dalai Lama.
- Finally, traditional Chinese society holds filial piety important, and Xi Jinping is being projected someone who adheres to it and sees his father, Xi Zhongxun, as an inspiration. Xi senior was known to be among those advocating for a softer approach on Tibet, so Xi Jinping might uphold his father’s legacy on Tibet despite his track record to date on the contrary.
DOWNLOAD REPORT
