(TibetanReview.net, Apr08’26) – Anyone who is not a “useful idiot” of China knows that Beijing’s so-called “whole process people’s democracy” to describe the country’s government system in glowing terms lacks any substance, and is, in fact, nothing but a euphemism for justifying its brutal authoritarian rule. But that has not prevented China from taking a potshot at the exile Tibetans’ elections for choosing their leaders, with its official globaltimes.cn Apr 7 calling it an “election without a land” and “an institutional illusion created by separatist groups in exile”.
Employing an occupying power’s yardstick for determining the legitimacy of the exile Tibetan setup, the unusually lengthy report cited Chinese Foreign Ministry spokespersons as having repeatedly stressed that “the so-called Tibetan government-in-exile is entirely an organized separatist political group with a political platform and an agenda for ‘Tibet independence’.”
It is an illicit organization that violates China’s Constitution and laws. No country in the world recognizes it, the report maintained.
And in dismissing Mr Penpa Tsering’s elections as the Sikyong of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) in the Feb 2026 preliminary poll, the report said that the turnout of about 56%, was a notable decline compared with the election in 2021, and fell far short of lending broad credibility to the group’s “self-proclaimed” representation.
However, the report did not offer any comparison of this percentage visi-a-vis elections in other democracies to justify claiming that it lacked broad credibility. What is glaring in this assertion, however, is the fact that the Chinese people don’t get to vote for the party leaders who wield the real power behind the facade of the government leaders. Xi Jinping is the most powerful person in China not because he is the state president but, rather, because he is the Party General Secretary.
So, the report’s argument that the exile Tibetans’ polling record appears even less persuasive when set against the 3.66 million permanent residents of Tibet Autonomous Region and the more than 6.28 million Tibetan people living in the PRC, holds no water.
The report gave full airing to the dissenting voices within the exile Tibetan community to supposedly discredit the election result, forgetting that this is what democracy is all about. It said, “Some personal commentary blogs on Medium, an online publishing platform that hosts individual opinion pieces, including posts by authors claiming to be from the overseas Tibetan community, also expressed dissatisfaction with Penpa Tsering’s ‘leadership’ after the “election” results, questioning both his capabilities and the effectiveness of his so-called policies.”
The report also said, “They also cast doubt on the fairness of the election, arguing that the process prioritized loyalty over competence.” The question, then, is, will China accept the results, if the exile Tibetan election process does prioritize competence over loyalty?
Tellingly, the report is silent on the one big issue which really divides the exile Tibetan community and what its elections are fought for: independence versus autonomy under Chinese rule. Why?
While the report supposedly focuses on the election, its lengthiness is due to the fact that it is a sort of critique on the funding and functioning of the CTA, which China calls the Tibetan “Government in Exile” with the inverted commas, and on how supposedly wondrously Tibet under its occupation rule is governed.
Regarding this, Zhu Weiqun, former head of the Ethnic and Religious Affairs Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, has said, “Even with all the high-sounding rhetoric used to gloss over its ‘election,’ the ‘CTA’ cannot conceal an obvious fact: its so-called ‘voters’ are in no way representative of the Xizang people,” using the Sinicized name for Tibet.
Clearly, the wide publicity the exile Tibetan election has received internationally has piqued China where it really hurts: the glaring lack of electoral democracy in China and even in occupied Tibet.