In the lobby of an upscale hotel in Prague, Sikyong Penpa Tsering talked about death — specifically, the eventuality that China’s Xi Jinping will one day die.
“Nothing is permanent. Even our life is not permanent. We are born, and we have to die. So even empires rise and fall. Governments rise and fall. Xi Jinping will also have to die. So, these are inevitable,” said Tsering, leader of Tibet’s exiled government, the Central Tibetan Administration.
He said it casually, matter-of-factly, as if he wasn’t talking about the potential downfall of the world’s second-most powerful government and the inevitable death of its powerful leader.
“China is going to change. It has to change. There is no other choice,” Tsering told VOA last week on the sidelines of the Forum 2000 democracy conference in the Czech capital Prague.
Sitting on a leather chair and wearing a black Tibetan vest and a blue button-down shirt, Tsering spoke about how this fundamental Buddhist idea of impermanence gives him hope for his homeland.
Reports say abuse has increased
China annexed Tibet in 1950, and since then human rights abuses in the region have steadily grown, according to reports from the U.S. State Department and rights groups.
Beijing claims the region has been part of China since “ancient times.” It views the Central Tibetan Administration, or CTA, as a separatist organization and says that no government should allow the Dalai Lama — the spiritual and one-time political leader of Tibet — to visit.
But for Tsering, under the Buddhist concept of impermanence, everything in life — even Beijing’s power and repression — is transient.
Although Tsering’s hope abounds, so does his pragmatism. The prospect of an improved human rights landscape and more autonomy remains far-off. It doesn’t help that the CTA and Beijing barely have an open communication channel, Tsering said.
“Even if we manage to re-establish contact, there’s no possibility of anything really coming out of it,” Tsering said. For now, the backchannel dialogue is for the long term, not the short term, the democratically elected leader added.
But in an ideal world, where Beijing was willing to engage with the CTA, among the top priorities would be human rights in Tibet, as well as the Middle Way Approach — the Tibet administration policy that would give the region increased autonomy while remaining part of China.
Those are among the issues Tsering sought to raise with political and civil society leaders at Forum 2000, an annual gathering on democracy human rights issues founded by former Czech President Vaclav Havel.
Advocating for ‘Middle Way’
Although based in India, Tsering frequently travels the world to make his case for the Tibetan people. But he feels a particular kinship with the Czech Republic and other countries in Europe that once suffered under communism.
“They have experienced what our people are going through now,” Tsering said. “That makes it easier for them to understand.”
Tsering has about one and a half years left in his five-year term. He said he hasn’t decided whether he’ll pursue a second term, but one of his priorities for the next 18 months is to advocate for the Middle Way Approach.
The Middle Way Approach accepts Tibet’s status as part of China but advocates for increased autonomy, like greater freedoms for religion, language and culture. It’s an attempt to balance Beijing’s concerns about Tibetan separatism and Tibetans’ concerns about cultural preservation.
Tsering said he doesn’t really understand why Beijing appears to be so opposed to the approach, since it doesn’t call for independence.
‘Dying a slow death culturally’
For years, reports from news outlets and rights groups have detailed Beijing’s grave rights abuses in Tibet.
Chinese authorities are particularly repressive of any signs of dissent among Tibetans in the region, with more than 5,600 political prisoners formerly or currently jailed in Tibet since 1990, according to the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy.
Expressions of Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan cultural identity are also restricted.
“We are dying a slow death culturally, because China is squeezing us out of our breath like a python, squeezing it out, slowly but surely,” Tsering said.
Authorities have repressed the use of the Tibetan language, and the United Nations estimates that around 1 million children have been forcibly separated from families and sent to state-run boarding schools to assimilate into the dominant Han-Chinese culture.
“It’s very clear that the Chinese government seeks to essentially hollow out and erase Tibetans’ identities,” Sophie Richardson, a visiting scholar at Stanford and the former China director at Human Rights Watch, told VOA.
China’s Foreign Ministry did not reply to VOA’s email requesting comment for this story.
Other human rights issues include Beijing’s harassment of exiled Tibetan journalists and activists in a process known as transnational repression.
“It’s essentially to prevent anybody from hearing an alternative version of their story or critique of their version. The Chinese government wants everybody to believe its version of history,” Richardson said.
But when it comes to transnational repression, Tsering said he isn’t a target.
“They don’t threaten me because they know it doesn’t make sense. I won’t listen. If they threaten me, I’ll be much worse,” Tsering said. “If they ask me not to do something, I do it more because I know it hurts them.”
