The supression of Tibetans under China’s authoritarian regime continues as the monitoring is becoming heavy with every passing day in the region.
Due to political sensitivity in the region, Tibetans experience harsher consequences and more intense monitoring than citizens in other countries, Tibet Press reported.
As per several media reports, the Tibetans continue to be persecuted, molested, harassed, beaten and tortured in their own territory.
According to Radio Free Asia, a 30-year old Tibetan elementary school teacher, who goes by the name of Palgon was detained at his house in August 2022 and has been out of contact ever since.
Palgon hails from the Qinghai province of China’s south-eastern Golog Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. He had been an elementary school teacher in the Pema county of the prefecture, but he left his position and carried on as an independent author. China’s widespread crackdown on Tibetan individuals, including monks, writers, young activists, and others, over the past few months has now become a regular affair.
A Tibetan father and his three young children were transported to the Lhasa Beijing Middle School Quarantine Center after the man’s wife’s anti-COVID test came back negative, according to a report by Voice of America.
Two of the small children, according to VoA, “had fevers in the school facility where there were no doctors, medicine or medical treatments,” and “authorities compelled the entire family to quarantine alongside 800 people,” Tibet Press reported.
Even when the number of illnesses globally fell to its lowest point since March 2020 due to COVID, and the World Health Organization declared that the pandemic was essentially over, China was still under lockdown.
Moreover, Xi Jinping’s “zero-covid” policy has been a strong tool of repression for a while.
Under the guise of safeguarding their health, lockdowns and other such procedures immensely aided the government in putting into place its massive and hyper-technological system of citizen control and surveillance, Tibet Press reported.
Furthermore, the CCP’s crackdown is not only subjected to older people but children too under the pretext of education. The Chinese government is taking children as young as four away from their Tibetan parents. “They are attempting to wipe out Tibetan identity and replace it with a Chinese identity so that there is no resistance to the Chinese occupation of Tibet in future,” said the director of Tibet Action Institute Lhadong Tethong in a webinar recently, according to a ground-breaking report released by the London based non-profit organization, Free Tibet on 23 January 2023 along with their charitable research arm, Tibet Watch.
Meanwhile now, the Tibetans are facing the harsh practices of mass DNA collection by China. Tibetans activists in Dharamshala last week staged protests against the mass DNA collection policy by China, demanding an end to human rights violations against Tibetans in the region.
During the protests, the Tibetan NGOs protesting expressed alarm about how DNA samples taken from Tibetan children as young as five years old are being used by China to strengthen its programme of mass surveillance using Thermo Fisher kits, Tibet Rights Collective reported.
Tibet under Chinese occupation has been repressed since 1949 when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established.
However, the collection of genetic material is not new to China as its ministry of public security runs the world’s largest forensic DNA database, which probably contains more than 100 million profiles. This activity involves gathering samples from criminal suspects or victims of crime, similar to what western countries do. (ANI)
