Category Archives: Tibet

UCAnews: China to further clamp down on religions: rights group

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under the leadership of President Xi Jinping is all set to impose more restrictions on religious freedom when the new measures take effect next month, warned a rights group.

The State Administration for Religious Affairs, the top CCP body overseeing religious affairs, announced the new measures on religious affairs on July 31 to be effective from September, ChinaAid reported on Aug. 10.

“The religious freedom of Chinese citizens, including those in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia, will face further restrictions,” said the US-based group run by exiled Chinese Christians.

“All religious activities will be limited to official religious venues, and the display of religious symbols will be restricted indoors,” it added.

The new rules–Measures on the Administration of Religious Activity Venues– severely restrain the establishment and registration procedures for venues. But the measures also set forth management rules and stipulations for managing personnel.

The regulations specify the establishment of supervisors for religious activity sites and impose conditional limitations on internal management within these sites.

Though China’s Constitution allows freedom of religion or belief, the CCP has been accused of violating the rights of religious groups for decades, though it recognizes five organized religions – Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism.

The state runs seven bodies to oversee the affairs of all recognized religions and impose restrictions on groups that are not registered and whose activities are not pre-approved by the state.

Since Xi became China’s president, religious groups have faced constant crackdowns under several repressive policies and regulations including sinicization of religions and the 2018 Regulations on Religious Affairs.

ChinaAid alleged that the CCP seeks to assert more control over religions by “suffocating” members of underground religious groups and placing official groups under more restrictions.

“This amounts to a complete ban on religious activities, whatever remains must align with the leadership and political propaganda of the CCP,” it warned.

Article 3 of the new measures requires religious activity venues should uphold the leadership of the Communist Party of China.

Those at the activities must uphold the socialist system and adhere to Sinicization. Managing personnel will be expected to implement Xi Jinping Thoughts on Socialism

Article 16 of the Measures states that places of religious activity shall not be named after churches, sects, or persons.

Article 27 stipulates that members of the management organization of venues should possess the qualities of “loving the motherland and supporting the leadership of the Communist Party of China and the socialist system.”

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SMHRIC: Asia Freedom Institute webinar: “Cultural Genocide under Xi Jinping and the CCP”

SMHRIC
August 2, 2023
New York

The Chinese government’s policies towards ethnic and religious minorities have widely been characterized as genocide. Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have launched the second-generation ethnic policy (第二 代 民族 政策) through which the Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other minority non-Chinese communities are experiencing unprecedented suppression and eventual eradication of their language, religious practices, traditions, and independent histories. The end goal is assimilation and sinicization. There are credible and numerous reports of forced labor, mass surveillance, re-education camps, mass collection of DNA, massive colonial boarding school systems, forced sterilizations, increasing restrictions on religious practices, etc. How does the Chinese government policies amount to cultural genocide? What has been the impact on the targeted communities? How can the impacted communities and the international community counter the CCP policies?

What night-time lighting tells us about Tibet’s prisons and detention centres

Authorities in Tibet are engaging in preventive repression towards their population.
As part of their nationwide ‘stability maintenance’ strategy, they are detaining, persecuting and convicting Tibetans for non-violent forms of protest and other expressions of dissent such as assisting or supporting self-immolations and carrying pictures of the Dalai Lama.

We found that there are currently at least 79 prisons and detention centres throughout Tibet, with most towns and villages having a detention centre.
We began with a publicly available dataset of 83 known detention facilities from the Tibet Research Project (TRP). Using historical satellite imagery of these locations, we developed a coding scheme to classify these facilities by level of securitisation and purpose. We also excluded facilities that did not fit neatly into the mould of a prison or detention centre, leaving 79 known prisons or detention centres for analysis.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RBA2474-1.html
Report (pdf)

RFA: Blinken remarks on mass DNA collection in Tibet, Xinjiang spark backlash from China

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has expressed concern over the collection of DNA from Tibetans and Uyghurs by Chinese authorities, sparking a vehement reply from Beijing.

Speaking at a Freedom House awards event in Washington on Tuesday, Blinken said access to human genomic data opens up more human rights concerns because advances in biotechnology have enabled genomic surveillance based on DNA, potentially facilitating rights abuses. He is the senior-most U.S. official to raise the issue.

“We’ve seen some of those, for example, committed by the People’s Republic of China against Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang,” he said. “We’re also concerned by reports of the spread of mass DNA collection to Tibet as an additional form of control and surveillance over the Tibetan population.”

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