(TibetanReview.net, Jul21’21) – Regional-level executive committee members of the Chinese Communist Party in Tibet Autonomous Region had met on Jul 16 to push for Tibet’s complete assimilation, or Sinicization, in keeping with declarations made by president Xi Jinping in special high-level meetings on Tibet held in Aug 2020, reported the Tibetan Service of rfa.org Jul 20.
Citing state media reports, the report said the meeting, held in Tibet’s capital Lhasa, called for “political education” to further weaken Tibetan loyalty to their exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.
Noting that China had “liberated and reformed” Tibet and set the region on the path of economic progress during the last 70 years, the meeting was reported to have called for the region’s traditional Buddhist religion to be now fully adapted to socialist society and “developed in a Chinese context.”
“The July 16 meeting was all about reiterating [Chinese President] Xi Jinping’s hardline policies set out during the Seventh Tibet Work Forum, and also his statements made during the 100th anniversary [in July] of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party,” the report quoted the Central Tibetan Administration’s Taiwan representative Bawa Kalsang Gyaltsen as saying.
He sees the meeting as confirmation that China’s leadership is “hell-bent on eradicating Tibetan identity, and that the Tibet issue continues to be among the Chinese leadership’s top priorities.”
