(TibetanReview.net, May28’25) – The European Union (EU) hopes to convince China that forced assimilation is not the best solution to integrating its so-called ethnic minority regions by showcasing its own experience in the Tyrol region, according to the scmp.com May 27.
The occasion will be the EU’s hosting of talks on human rights, which rarely yield progress, on Jun 13, the report noted.
As part of this event, the two sides will visit the Tyrol region on the Austrian/Italian border to “showcase how multilinguism in education can happily function”.
The site region – where a mix of German, Italian and the local Ladin dialect is spoken – used to be the subject of a long-running border dispute but the “site trip” will be used by the EU to broach China’s alleged “coercive” efforts to replace local languages in Tibet and Xinjiang with Mandarin, the report said.
Human rights and related issues are things China does its best to avoid talking about. The report noted that following a summit in 2022, the EU’s former top diplomat, Josep Borrell, said Beijing “wanted to set aside our differences on Ukraine, they didn’t want to talk about Ukraine.
“They didn’t want to talk about human rights and other stuff and instead focus on positive things”.
“This was not exactly a dialogue, maybe a dialogue of the deaf … we could not talk about Ukraine a lot, and we did not agree on anything else,” Borrell was quoted as having said at that time.
And as the two sides seek to break the deadlock in their ties in a blitz of diplomacy leading up to July’s high-stakes summit in Beijing, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is planning to visit Brussels early that month for talks on prickly foreign policy issues with Borrell’s successor, Kaja Kallas, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
It remains to be seen whether Kallas, a former Estonian Prime Minister, will have better luck than her predecessor is getting Wang to take interest in discussing human rights improvement issues.