{"id":12730,"date":"2022-03-02T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-01T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/savetibet.nl\/nieuws\/analysis-sinicizing-tibetans-in-a-chinese-nation-state\/"},"modified":"2022-03-02T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-03-01T23:00:00","slug":"analysis-sinicizing-tibetans-in-a-chinese-nation-state","status":"publish","type":"nieuws","link":"https:\/\/savetibet.nl\/en\/news\/analysis-sinicizing-tibetans-in-a-chinese-nation-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Analysis: Sinicizing Tibetans in a Chinese nation-state"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For implementing the top-level design of \u201cSinicization\u201d of Tibetans in a Chinese nation-state, the Chinese Communist Party convened an \u201cethnic work conference\u201d<\/a> in Lhasa, Tibet\u2019s capital, in early February. The provincial leaders of the Tibet Autonomous Region\u2019s Communist Party, government, political body, judiciary, military and armed police attended the meeting on Feb. 9, 2022. According to the state media outlet Tibet Daily<\/a>, the \u201cethnic conference\u201d was convened for its importance to the \u201cunity of the motherland, border stability, national unity, social stability, long term happiness of the country and rejuvenation of the people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The \u201cethnic conference\u201d follows the tenth TAR party congress<\/a> in late November 2021. Describing the coercive implementation of the party\u2019s policies and strategies in Tibet as Chinese President Xi Jinping\u2019s \u201cbenevolence,\u201d TAR Party Secretary Wang Junzheng extolled the party\u2019s success, among other issues, in Sinicizing Tibetans in the past five years in his report to the 10th congress. In following up on the congress, the party convened the latest Tibet ethnic conference to further entrench Beijing\u2019s agenda of \u201cforging a sense of community of the Chinese nation.\u201d The phrase \u201cforging of Chinese communal consciousness\u201d<\/a> was enshrined in the party\u2019s constitution at the 19th party congress in 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the Tibetan resistance firmly repressed through various preemptive \u201cstability maintenance\u201d mechanisms, the party appears to be readying to roll out more governance measures while also being vigilant to \u201clook for and prevent major risks and hidden dangers in the ethnic field.\u201d Two areas of concern jump off in analysis of the discourse during the latest Tibet party ethnic work conference and the 10th party congress. The party appears to be bringing changes to the governance system in terms of \u201ccapacity for ethnic affairs in Tibet\u201d and stepping up bidirectional migration into and outside Tibet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using ethnic minority cadres for legitimacy<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

During the 2014 Central Ethnic Work Conference, Xi Jinping stated<\/a> that \u201cto do a good job in ethnic work, ethnic minority cadres are important bridges and bonds. Let them deal with lot of the matters for us because they are more likely to be accepted by ethnic minorities; they will show up at critical moments, and the effect will be better.\u201d When applied to Tibet, this is a strategic move to step up Tibetans controlling Tibetans for the party\u2019s domestic legitimacy while the central leaders who pull the strings sit 1,600 miles away in Zhongnanhai, the Communist Party\u2019s central headquarters in Beijing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The party knows that its legitimacy in Tibet is shallow and recognizes the need to weed out and straighten out the ideology of its 82,000 TAR Tibetan party members by targeting their political and religious views. For example, the party issued a code of conduct to its Tibetan members mid-last year ordering them not to engage in any religiosity\u2014a measure that has been repeatedly taken in various forms. In February 2021<\/a>, the TAR party standing committee in its \u201cfight against underworld forces\u201d reiterated its resolve to \u201cidentify and eliminate \u2018two-faced people\u2019 hidden in the ranks of party members and cadres.\u201d Numerous Tibetan party members and government employees have been investigated as \u201ctwo-faced people\u201d by the party\u2019s commission on discipline inspection and supervision and subsequently expelled from their positions for holding onto their Tibetan identity and values. These expulsions are reported ambiguously in the state media as expulsion for \u201cviolating party\u2019s political discipline, organizational discipline, integrity discipline, work and life discipline.\u201d The latest expulsion<\/a> of Apo, the Tibetan party secretary of Chamdo city, on Feb. 11, 2022, like that of the expulsion of former accountant Phurbu Tsering<\/a> of Lhoka\u2019s Nakartse county in September 2021 and TAR government official Tashi Gyatso\u2019s<\/a> expulsion in May 2020, follows a pattern of such expulsions in the name of cracking down on corruption, a structural problem with no real progress since the launch of an anti-corruption campaign in 2012.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In emphasizing the role of cadres in party building in the TAR, Wang Junzheng calls for comprehensive strengthening of the party\u2019s leadership<\/a> by \u201cadhering to the standards of good cadres in the new era and the political standards of good cadres in ethnic areas to consolidate the grass-roots foundation for ethnic work and the party\u2019s leadership.\u201d With China sending scores of officials and party cadres to the countryside under the \u201cBenefit the Masses\u201d<\/a> program beginning from 2011, Wang seems to be focusing on managing the performance of the cadres for party building in Tibet. Emphasizing the performance of cadres in party building has been pointed out in local government work reports in the recent past. For example, Dranggo (Chinese: Luhuo) County People\u2019s Government\u2019s 2021 annual report (webpage now deleted<\/a>) on the construction of a rule-of-law government pointed out the deficiencies in the implementation of the rule-of-law government by the party members and cadres, and the consequences thereof for lapses in discharge of duties. Rule-of-law government in the Chinese context in essence means the rule of law as defined by and for the CCP. The top leaders pressuring local level party members and cadres in the past resulted in misreporting of local conditions to appease the leaders in the high echelons of the party-state. In the early revolutionary years, misreporting by party members had led to Mao\u2019s disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign; a campaign originally meant to meet China\u2019s industrial and agricultural problems that led to the death of millions in China due to starvation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bidirectional migration<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The second concern is that of bidirectional migration into and out of Tibet. With the official designation of a poverty-less Tibet at the end of 2019, Wang Junzheng at the CCP\u2019s ethnic work conference in Lhasa signals the importance of migration in the \u201cnew journey\u201d toward a \u201csocialist modernized new Tibet.\u201d In stating<\/a> \u201cit is necessary to further promote the exchanges and integration of all ethnic groups, and strive to create social conditions for the people of all ethnic groups to live together, learn, build and share, work together, have fun together and hug tightly like pomegranate seeds,\u201d Wang signals gradual roll out of a migration strategy; an important component in the CCP\u2019s ethnic policy to dilute the majoritarian Tibetan voice by emphasizing the equality of all ethnic groups in an area. Tibetan majority demography in Tibet and China\u2019s early Soviet inspired autonomy law have been perceived as problematic in forging a consciousness of Chinese-ness in the Tibetan population. For over a decade, China\u2019s influential ethnic policy public intellectuals like Ma Rong and Hu Angang have been advocating for the removal of China\u2019s ethnic autonomy law and instead laying emphasis on \u201cequality\u201d of all, which would mean to Sinicize all ethnicities. Although once a fringe voice, the central leadership had seriously considered the intellectuals\u2019 thoughts in the party\u2019s search for a new ethnic policy, culminating in the 2014 Central Ethnic Work Conference in Beijing<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to articulating it as \u201ccommon movement of all ethnic groups towards socialist modernization\u2026allowing people of all ethnic groups to build a better life and share development results, and jointly promoting national unity,\u201d the state media carried quotes<\/a> from a local party leader of a Trading Company in Lhoka (Chinese: Shannan) City and the Publicity and Education Section of the Chamdo Ethnic Affairs Committee highlighting that \u201cpeople of all ethnic groups work side by side, hand in hand, heart to heart\u201d and \u201cpeople of all ethnic groups blend and learn from each other, help each other and jointly build a beautiful home.\u201d By prominently highlighting the movement for success of all ethnic groups in the state media, the party sends a clear message in development language that migration is key to tackling the ethnic question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the heels of the ethnic conference in Lhasa, conditions and restrictions on urban household registration<\/a> in Lhasa were abolished last week. The International Campaign for Tibet observes that although unrestricted urban household registration was publicized in fall 2021, the policy took effect after the ethnic conference in Lhasa. Presented as a \u201cZero threshold\u201d settlement policy, the abolishment of restrictions on urban hukou (household registration) in effect paves the way for the non-hukou population to settle in urban areas. With the unrestricted urban household registration in effect now, state media quoted one excited Mr. Zhang, a migrant worker from Sichuan, as saying, \u201cIt\u2019s great to finally be able to settle down!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within the past decade, the demography of Lhasa underwent a rapid 55% change from a 559,423 population in 2010 to 867,891 in 2020<\/a>. As in the past censuses, the very large seasonal Han migrant workers in Lhasa were not counted in the 2020 census. With the new urban household registration in Lhasa in effect now, ICT is anxious at the influx of Han settlers in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa with effects gradually spilling across the officially redesignated urban areas in Tibet. With an 80% increase (245,263 in 2010 to 443,370 in 2020) in the Han population in the TAR, the new urban household registration policy compounds the fear of an official beginning of settler colonization of Tibet under the guise of a long-term natural process of development assistance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For implementing the top-level design of \u201cSinicization\u201d of Tibetans in a Chinese nation-state, the Chinese Communist Party convened an \u201cethnic work conference\u201d in Lhasa, Tibet\u2019s capital, in early February.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":12731,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"categorie":[45,691],"news_tag":[],"class_list":["post-12730","nieuws","type-nieuws","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","categorie-inside-tibet","categorie-news"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAnalysis: Sinicizing Tibetans in a Chinese nation-state - Campaign for Tibet<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/savetibet.nl\/en\/news\/analysis-sinicizing-tibetans-in-a-chinese-nation-state\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Analysis: Sinicizing Tibetans in a Chinese nation-state - 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