Original image;usmissionchina/ap-upgraded by @tibettruth
The only fact that a visiting diplomat to occupied Tibet can come away with is this:
There is no way she or he will ever discover the nature or extent of Chinese oppression of Tibet’s people and culture because every moment of such trips are controlled and monitored. There is no freedom for independent assessment, everything is choreographed by the Chinese regime. The only Tibetans met will be those who are willing collaborators, minds contaminated by China’s propaganda, Ordinary Tibetans are fearful to speak, the conseqences being dark indeed.
In truth Ambassador Branstad has been a compliant player in an exercise of disinformation and censorship, we wonder if he will report that reality, or would such a disclosure be considered by the State Department too offensive to Chinese sensitivities?
Sera monastery, Lhasa, Tibet, now an indoctrination center and tourist attraction
Image: archivenet
For anyone selfish or unthinking enough to take a vacation to Lhasa its likely they will join a tour to Sera Monastery just north of the Tibetan capital. There they can see monks enjoying Buddhist debate, marvel at the traditional architecture and absorb the peaceful environs at which Buddhism is flourishing.
Meanwhile behind that staged show of supposed cultural freedom a darker reality exists for Tibetans, although you would not come into contact with that during your tightly controlled and monitored time at Sera.
Dictator Xi jinping prominently displayed within Sera Monastery
Image: Eric Baculinao
We wonder how such tourists would feel about their Tibet trip had they been in attendance at a March 13 meeting in Sera during which a panel of Tibetan collaborators (Lhakpa Tsering ‘Lhasa, Monastery Management Committee Director’, Tsetan Dorje, ‘Manager Sera monastery’ and Jampa Kelsang, ‘Media and Education Committee Director’ Sera Monastery) addressed some three hundred monks. Insisting that they should “… feel grateful to the Chinese government and show their loyalty to the nation by obeying the country’s laws,”.
Tibet’s religious centers are now under occupation by Chinese paramilitary and the thought-police of China’s regime
Image: Tsering Woeser
Surrounded by Chinese paramilitary police, security officials and ‘management’ staff the monks were ordered to stand against what was described as ‘sepratism’. They were also warned of a series of prohibitions regarding online activity, including posting any information the regime considers sensitive.
Tourists, undercover Chinese officials and paramilitary mingle within Lhasa’s Jokhang temple
Image: Tsering Woeser
The meeting concluded with an exultation ‘re-pay China’s generosity in Tibet and demonstrate loyalty to Beijing and love for the top leadership of China’s ruling Communist Party.’.
Sera monastery is in truth no longer a center for Buddhist learning, like monasteries across Tibet it is an indoctrination facility, placed under a suffocating control by the thought-police of the Chinese regime.
Sera monastery is effectively a prison in which its Tibetan Buddhist inmates are under 24/7 surveillance and forced to perform for tourists.
Image: Tsering Woeser
It also has another function, one that exploits the wonderment, gullibility and ignorance of those who travel to Lhasa for an exotic vacation. It’s calculated and tightly controlled illusion of a thriving Tibetan Buddhist culture is an important propaganda tool to manipulate and deceive.
Image: courtesy of the Chinese regime/adapted by @tibettruth
The surrounding regions of Lhasa such as Ngari witness regular convoys of buses heading off to Tibet’s capital. On board are Tibetan children and their Chinese ‘minders’ headed for indoctrination centers.
Image: courtesy of the Chinese regime/adapted by @tibettruth
The aims of which are to erode Tibetan cultural identity. The language medium is Chinese, classrooms and corridors display the propaganda slogans of China’s communist party regime, each day children are lined up to sing in praise of dictator Xi Jinping. Chinese culture dominates every aspect of attendance at these centers, including the food!
Image: courtesy of the Chinese regime/adapted by @tibettruth
This psychological assault is one of the weapons used to assimilate Tibetans and eradicate any notion of national and cultural distinctiveness.
Tibetan Puppets On China’s String, Performing In Lhasa, March 23 2019
Image:newscn
No other political authority reaches the excesses of China’s regime when it comes to the deployment of euphemism. Within its monolithic structure there’s a dedicated team engineering pretentious titles to deflect from or mask the odious realities of China’s tyranny.
Take the phrase democratic reform used by China to describe a ‘process’ born it claims from Tibetans, who we are asked to believe appealed for the Chinese authorities to suppress the Lhasa Uprising of 1959. Following that military response the ‘reforms’ were launched with devastating consequences for the Tibetan people and their culture.
Apart from being a calculated deception it is of course an oxymoron of titanic proportions that a totalitarian, self-described communist state, headed by the dictator Mao Zedong could describe the cultural genocide which followed as a democratic transformation.
Whatever injustices existed withing Tibetan society were replaced by a foreign military occupation, mass arrests, forced labor camps, political thought-control, and the armed imposition of policies which targeted Tibetan culture as ideologically corrupt and regressive.
Like a serial kleptomanic who has come to believe his delusional insistence that thievery is economic redistribution, the Chinese government regards its deranged falsehoods as legitimate. In truth the so-called ‘reforms’ it celebrates are a political fiction and no amount of smiling Tibetan dancers performing in the front of Lhasa’s Potala Palace will change that fact.
Tibetans and their culture victims of voyeurism by floods of tourists
Image:usatoday
We’ve long taken the position that tourism to occupied Tibet serves the interests of the China’s regime and bank-balances of Chinese dominated tourist businesses. Those seeking the ‘spiritual experience’ of visiting Tibet are exploited, manipulated and suffocatingly controlled by the Chinese authorities. What they are allowed to see is an ersatz version of Tibetan culture, engineered by the same regime which, away from the stage-managed tourist hotspots, wages a genocidal assault upon Tibetan national and cultural identity.
Image:archivenet
Our just criticism and opposition on this issue occasionally results in weak responses from those who attempt to justify tourism to Tibet by claiming their presence enables information on the plight of Tibetans to reach the wider world. This reasoning held some credibility in the late 1980s and 1990s but no longer. With the instant access of the internet (informed by the knowledge, testimony, courage and sacrifices of Tibetans inside Tibet) the dire circumstances endured by Tibet’s people is freely available, 24/7 via a few taps of a mobile device or laptop.
The once pristine shores of Tso Ngonpo in Amdo region of Tibet now trashed by tourism
Image:chinacn
The fact is that travellers are lead by a leash along well worn and safe tourist routes, constantly monitored, meeting approved Tibetans and exposed to China’s distorted version of Tibetan culture. They do not see the torture centers, visit forced labor camps, or witness the misery of Tibetans forced into concentration settlements.
Tourists smile for the occasion, oblivious to the fact that from this location near Lhasa’s Jokhang Temple Chinese paramilitary threw Tibetan monks to their death
Image:archivenet
Of course that inconvenient reality is not what tourists to Tibet are paying top dollars for. They come for the illusion of a Buddhist Shangri-la, which the Chinese tyranny is more than happy to fabricate, while milking them as cash-cows and promoting its propaganda narrative.
Lhasa has been under foreign occupation since 1950
Image:filephoto*
With armed paramilitary roaming the streets, security checks, 24/7 cctv surveillance, over 100 ‘police’ stations and a number of interrogation centers Mr Wang Yongpu a head of Chinese law enforcement proudly declared (March 13, 2019) such measures as resulting in Lhasa, the capital of occupied Tibet, as being virtually crime free.
Armored vehicles, locked and loaded ready to cause mayhem and trauma to any Tibetan who dares to protest Chinese rule.
Image:filephoto*
By ‘crime’ of course he doesn’t mean robbery, traffic offenses, assault and the like, nope he’s talking public dissent against China’s illegal and violent occupation of Tibet.
Wherever you go in Lhasa there’s one of these around.
Image: filephoto*
The city has been on lockdown since China invaded in 1950. Tibetans terrorized into a state of compliance, made aware of the grim consequences of opposing Chinese rule. Torture, forced-labor camps, midnight raids on houses family members disappearing into the darkness.
The totalitarian eye of China’s regime is across the city of Lhasa
Image:filephoto*
The latest measures of oppression, including identity cards, facial recognition technology and tight restictions on movement across Lhasa have added to the suffocation endured by Tibetans.
Paramilitary patrols a daily sight in Lhasa
Image: filephoto*
Behind however the technology and security stratagies being praised by the Chinese regime what is maintaining the so-called ‘social harmony’ is the daily reality facing the people of Lhasa that any expression of opposition to China’s presence results in broken bodies and destroyed minds.
* The details of the photographers who took these images have been withheld for reasons of security. These can be added by contacting us to authorize.
This remarkable photograph was taken on March 12, 1959. as thousands of Tibetan women demonstrated against Chinese tyranny and massed around the Potala Palace Lhasa to show support for and protect the Dalai Lama from China’s army of occupation. Which had begun its deadly repression against legitimate Tibetan protests that sought freedom from an illegal and violent Chinese rule. We remember and salute the courage and sacrifice of those brave Tibetan women, whose spirit of resistance continues in the ongoing demands of Tibet’s people for their rightful independence.
