1000 Tibetans Arrested For Protesting China's Destruction Of Homes, Ancient Monasteries For A Dam

After police beatings, detainees required medical attention.

Last week, more than 1000 Tibetans, including around 100 monks, from the Kardze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in China’s Sichuan province were arrested and detained by the Chinese government. They were protesting the construction of a dam that would displace two of their villages and destroy six historic monasteries — including the Wonto monastery, home to several 13th century murals.

The arrestees were ordered to bring their own bedding and tsampa — a Tibetan food staple made out of roasted barley flour — with them, indicating that they may be locked up for a good amount of time.

Sources have told Radio Free Asia, a US government-funded news source covering news in Asia, that detainees were severely beaten to the point of needing to be taken to the hospital.

This is an especially big deal, because these kinds of protests are very rare in areas controlled by the People’s Republic of China (PRC), mainly due to what they do to people who protest there.

---

---

Let’s Have A Super Quick History Lesson!

Tibet was more or less its own country from 1911 to 1949, when the Chinese government decided they owned it and in fact had always owned it, and took over in violation of international law (which, nota bene, is not actually enforced in any meaningful way). China refers to this as the “Peaceful Liberation of Tibet” and maintains that they were simply rescuing the area from a “theocratic feudal government.” Tibetans disagree and have been desperately campaigning for their own independence since then, particularly the Dalai Lama, the Central Tibetan Administration (often considered the Tibetan government in exile), and others who have since left.

Since then, more than 1.2 million Tibetans have been killed as a result of the occupation. (According to the CTA: 156,758 Tibetans were executed, 92,731 were tortured to death, 173,221 died while in prison, 432,705 were killed in uprisings, 342,970 starved to death, and 9,002 committed suicide.) In 1995, the Chinese government kidnapped and imprisoned the six-year-old Panchen Lama and his entire family and replaced him with their own chosen Panchen Lama. They have banned teaching the Tibetan language in schools and have actively worked (often violently) to repress Tibetan culture and force assimilation.

The situation is so bad there that over 160 monks have literally set themselves on fire in protest of the Chinese occupation.

For the most part, the United States has taken the position that Tibet is part of China, but that it would be super nice if China and the Dalai Lama could just talk things out and get along.

In 2020, however, the Tibetan Policy and Support Act, introduced by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts), was passed by Congress and signed into law, establishing that it is US policy to oppose China’s interference with the succession of Tibetan Buddhist leaders, including the Dalai Lama after the current one passes, and for Tibetan Buddhists to be able to choose them themselves. It also called for the creation of a US Consulate in Lhasa.

So that is something! It doesn’t sound like a ton (and I’d certainly like more), but pretty much anything that mildly challenges China’s right to do whatever it wants to the Tibetan people or even acknowledges that it is doing anything bad to them at all is enough to send China through the damn roof.

Back To The More Recent News!

The arrestees have been placed in several different locations as there is no one location in the area that can hold 1000 people. Mistreatment has been predictably rampant and residents in the area who haven’t been arrested have been heavily restricted as well.

Via Radio Free Asia:

“In these detention centers, the arrested Tibetans were not given any food, save for some hot water, and many passed out because of the lack of food amid the freezing temperatures,” the second source told RFA. […]

“Each of the police units brought in from outside Dege have been tasked with controlling a community each and for carrying out strict surveillance and suppression of the people there,” a third source told RFA.

“In the communities of Wonto and Yena, people have been restricted from leaving their homes and the restrictions are so severe that it is similar to what happened during the Covid-19 outbreak when the entire place was under lockdown,” said the same source.

Incredibly, there is video of police attacking the protesters — which I will warn you is pretty disturbing.

The fact that this video exists at all is an incredibly huge deal.

“I want to underscore how rare [it is that] we are able to have a little window into the situation in Tibet given the escalating control of information the Chinese government has imposed on Tibetan areas,” Maya Wang, interim China director of Human Rights Watch, told Radio Free Asia, adding that “People who send information out and videos like this face imprisonment and torture.”

Uzra Zeya, the United States Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights & US Special Coordinator for Tibetan Issues, responded to the situation on social media.

“Deeply concerned by reports of the PRC’s mass arrests of Tibetans protesting construction of a dam that threatens displacement of villages & destruction of monasteries. [China] must respect human rights & freedom of expression and include Tibetans in the development & implementation of water and land management policies,” she tweeted, adding, “These centuries-old monasteries are home to hundreds of Tibetan Buddhist monks & contain irreplaceable cultural relics. [The United States] stands with Tibetans in preserving their unique cultural, religious, and linguistic identity.”

---

---

For the last few years, especially, China has been going hard to push propaganda about how very much Tibetans love being occupied by them, particularly on social media sites like TikTok and Twitter. There are even bots that will reply to your account should you tweet anything negative about it (it happened to me!) and tell you that prior to the occupation, Tibet was a horrible place and that China made it better.

But these reports, along with the actual video of the protestors and monks being attacked, tell a very different story. Someday, I tell you, authoritarian governments are going to rue the day cell phone cameras were invented.