By Laurie Chen
BEIJING (Reuters) – A senior Tibet official on Wednesday said there were no “mass incidents” last year in the Himalayan region, a euphemism for protests, at a briefing on the sidelines of China’s annual parliamentary sessions.
Tibet is administered by Beijing as an autonomous region within China and has a long history of protest against Chinese rule, including a violent uprising in 2008 and a spate of self-immolations that peaked in 2012.
In recent years Beijing has maintained a tight security presence and made efforts to improve the local economy. Critics have repeatedly accused China of human rights abuses in Tibet, including forced assimilation of Tibetans into the dominant Han Chinese culture.
“Last year no serious mass incidents, political incidents, or violent terrorist acts occurred,” Yan Jinhai, the region’s second-ranked official and chairman, said during a scripted press conference where questions were selected in advance.
“We have always regarded maintaining national unity and strengthening ethnic solidarity as the focal point of Tibet work,” said Yan, an ethnic Tibetan who worked in neighbouring Qinghai province before being transferred to Lhasa in 2020.
United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk this week called on China to implement U.N. recommendations to amend laws that violate fundamental rights in Tibet and the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang in northwest China.
The United States in September also imposed visa sanctions on unnamed Chinese officials for allegedly taking part in “forced assimilation” of Tibetan children through state-run boarding schools seeking to eliminate Tibet’s traditions.
“We will always adhere to the principle of firmly … curbing extremism, resisting infiltration and fighting criminality,” said Yan, adding that spoken and written Mandarin Chinese has become “comprehensively widespread” across Tibet.
He also vowed to “continue advancing the Sinicisation of Tibetan Buddhism” and stressed Tibet’s “high-quality economic development” in recent years, which improved living standards for many of its 3.6 million residents.
Tibet is one of China’s poorest regions whose economy largely relies on subsistence farming by nomadic herders, although an increasing number of them have been transferred into factory labour programmes in recent years.
Since 2012, “central government fiscal subsidies to Tibet have cumulatively reached over 1.7 trillion yuan ($236 billion), which makes up 90.3% of Tibet government finances”, Yan said.
“Last year alone, the central government’s fiscal transfers to Tibet exceeded 250 billion yuan ($34.7 billion), which per capita equals over 100,000 yuan ($13,890). This is the highest out of all China’s 31 provinces, regions and municipalities.”
A group of U.N. ambassadors toured Tibet last September in a visit arranged by China, in an apparent push by Beijing to counter mounting criticism of its human rights record.
(Reporting by Laurie Chen; Editing by Alex Richardson)
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