(Grayzone is a non-stop defender of the Chinese government against
charges of repressing Uighurs. How do they reconcile that with the
evidence of the same kind of treatment toward Tibetans. A man spends 5
years in prison for his open advocacy of schools teaching a language in
danger of extinction. I can see how Blumenthal and Maté wouldn't be
bothered by this but Ben Norton, an ex-ISOer, surely knows how important
such issues were to Lenin, who pushed for Ukrainians have language rights.)
NYT, Jan. 30, 2021
Tibetan Who Spoke Out for Language Rights Is Freed From Chinese Prison
By Chris Buckley
A Tibetan businessman has been released from prison in China after
completing a five-year sentence for “inciting separatism” by campaigning
for Tibetan language education, including in interviews with The New
York Times, his lawyer said on Friday.
The businessman, Tashi Wangchuk, returned to Yushu, his hometown in the
northwestern province of Qinghai, and was staying with a sister, the
lawyer, Liang Xiaojun, said on Twitter and in a telephone interview. But
Mr. Liang said he could not be sure that Mr. Tashi was “fully free.”
In China, former prisoners can be essentially confined to their homes or
other places even after their formal release, especially in politically
charged cases.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that he is out,” Mr. Liang said in the
interview, citing a phone call he had with Mr. Tashi’s brother-in-law.
“His brother-in-law said that he’s in good health, but I haven’t been
sent any pictures of him yet,” Mr. Liang said. “That may be because he’s
still not too free.”
Two legal affairs officials in Qinghai refused to comment, saying they
did not know about the case.
Despite the uncertain circumstances, Mr. Tashi’s release was greeted
with some relief by groups abroad that press for Tibetan rights and
self-determination. A spokeswoman for The Times, which featured him in a
video and article in 2015, also welcomed the news.
“His imprisonment was an action that appeared intended to silence
critics, impede the free flow of information and ultimately deprive
Chinese citizens of information,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman
for the newspaper, said by email.
Mr. Tashi, 35, a herder-turned-shop owner, took up his cause after the
Chinese government ramped up restrictions on teaching Tibetan in schools.
In recent years, the government has sought to assimilate ethnic
minorities by curtailing the teaching of their languages. That drive has
included Tibetans living in Tibet itself — a part of China known as the
Tibetan Autonomous Region — as well as those, like Mr. Tashi, who live
in the mountainous neighboring areas.
Mr. Tashi learned Chinese at school and later taught himself to write
Tibetan with the help of a brother. After studying at a Buddhist
monastery, he opened a store in Yushu that sold Tibetan products and
handicrafts online. In 2014, Alibaba, the giant Chinese e-commerce site,
featured him in a promotional video.
“Before, living in Yushu I felt isolated from the outside world,” he
said on the video, in Chinese.
But Mr. Tashi later told The Times that he was alarmed about the growing
regional dominance of the Chinese language.
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“In our Tibetan region, from primary and middle schools to high school,
there’s only one Tibetan language course among many courses,” Mr. Tashi
said in a Times documentary about his fruitless journey to Beijing in
2015 to make his case to Chinese officials and state media.
“No one wants to live in an environment that’s full of pressure and
fear,” he said. “In effect, there is a systematic slaughter of our culture.”
Worried about the erosion of Tibetan culture and language, one man takes
his concerns to Beijing, hoping media coverage and the courts can
reverse what he sees as a systematic eradication.CreditCredit...Gilles
Sabrie for The New York Times
The Chinese police detained Mr. Tashi two months after the Times reports
about him came out. Two more years passed before he went on trial in
Yushu, accused of inciting separatism, a murky charge often used against
members of ethnic minorities who rile the authorities.
Between 1998 and 2016, Chinese courts tried 11,810 people on charges of
separatism or inciting separatism, and only 15 were acquitted, according
to official statistics analyzed by the Dui Hua Foundation, a group based
in San Francisco that monitors human rights issues in China.
During Mr. Tashi’s trial in early 2018, prosecutors cited his comments
to The Times, as did the court in May of that year when it found him
guilty and sentenced him to five years in prison, including the time he
had already spent in detention.
Human rights groups and United Nations-appointed experts denounced Mr.
Tashi’s prosecution, maintaining he acted within his rights under
Chinese and international law. Mr. Tashi told The Times that he did not
support Tibetan independence, and during his trial he said he simply
wanted respect for ethnic minorities’ rights as promised in Chinese law,
including the right to use their own language.
Tibetans speak a variety of dialects that are under threat, and many
worry that their children will be unable to read and write in their
language.
“Tashi’s only ‘crime’ was to peacefully call for the right of Tibetans
to learn in their own language and governments must take strong,
assertive action calling for his human rights to be upheld following his
release,” Tenzin Tselha, an officer with the International Tibet Network
who is based in India, said in an email.
Since Mr. Tashi was detained, the pressure on minority languages in
China has increased, said Gerald Roche, an anthropologist at La Trobe
University in Australia who studies the endangerment of Tibetan languages.
“Although the policy hasn’t formally changed, things have gotten much
worse,” he said by email. Local languages, he said, “are made vulnerable
because of the very poor protection they receive in law.”
The Chinese government’s efforts to tighten control over Tibetan areas
have received less international attention in recent years, as foreign
governments and human rights groups have focused on the mass detention
of Uighurs and other largely Muslim minorities in the western Chinese
region of Xinjiang.
But in Tibetan areas, too, the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping
has intensified efforts to dissolve ethnic distinctions through
resettlement programs, labor transfers, political indoctrination and
schooling carried out almost entirely in Chinese. Beijing seems
determined to deter any unrest in those areas when the Dalai Lama, the
exiled, 85-year-old spiritual leader who is revered by many Tibetans, dies.
Anger over the suppression of minority languages has also flared in
Inner Mongolia, a region of northern China. Last year, thousands of
ethnic Mongolians protested there after the government abruptly
curtailed classes in Mongolian and expanded Chinese-language schooling.
Even after his release, Mr. Tashi faces five years of “deprivation of
political rights,” which is likely to constrict his opportunities to
speak out.
“We urge Chinese authorities to respect the human rights and fundamental
freedoms to which the people of China, including Tibetans, are entitled
under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” the State Department
said in an emailed comment about Mr. Tashi’s case.
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