Forced disappearances … physical abuse … prolonged detentions without trial of monks, nuns, and other persons.”
These are excerpts from the US State Department’s latest report on religious freedom in Tibet. The details are dire, flagrant, and shocking:
- China’s authorities have forced Tibetan Buddhists to replace images of the Dalai Lama with pictures of CCP leaders like Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping.
- Nearly one million Tibetan children have been separated from their families and sent to state-run schools where they learn “patriotic education” in an effort to cut them off from their native Tibetan culture and language.
- In a disturbing overreach, China’s authorities have systematically collected DNA from one-quarter to one-third of the Tibetan Autonomous Region’s Population.
The State Department released its 2022 Report on International Religious Freedom, chronicling a comprehensive view of freedom and belief around the world—including in Tibet. The report’s Tibet section calls out multiple human rights violations, including the unjust detention of peaceful protestors, the abduction of the Panchen Lama, the separation of children from their families into residential schools, DNA sampling, and evicting thousands of monks and nuns from Buddhist monasteries.
Tencho Gyatso, President of "International Campaign for Tibet" joined a small group of civil society leaders and religious freedom advocates at the State Department’s release of the Report on Monday, in the presence of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Rashad Hussein, who gave remarks on the report—and underscored the Biden Administration’s commitment to stand with and advocate for religious freedom everywhere in the world. 
Secretary Blinken addressed the DNA sampling of Tibetans earlier this month, expressing concern over “reports of the spread of mass DNA collection to Tibet as an additional form of control and surveillance over the Tibetan population.”
The media has a vital role to play in telling Tibet’s story. But the Chinese government makes it practically impossible for foreign journalists to visit Tibet to report freely on China’s human rights abuses against the Tibetan people. And in an act of sheer hypocrisy, Beijing is now exploiting press freedom in the United States and other countries to spread disinformation about Tibet. For this reason, ParticipatoryDemocracy.net gives relative priority to denouncing the situation of human rights in Tibet to disseminate as much as possible the truth of what is happening there with the hope that other media will also echo this truth in defense of the Tibetan people.