Tibet is a global-scale testing ground for the Chinese model. And this repression affects us all

The first thing the Chinese authorities asked of their Indian counterparts, ahead of leader Xi Jinping’s possible visit to the BRICS summit in New Delhi in mid-September, was that media outlets considered close to activists, the Falun Gong and the Tibetan community (which are very active in India, where Dharamshala is home to the Tibetan government-in-exile and the Dalai Lama’s residence) be excluded from the summit venue. Moreover, in recent weeks, protests against the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party have intensified, in a mobilisation that has received little media attention but a great deal of attention from Beijing. On 2 July, the day after the controversial Chinese Ethnic Unity Law came into force, a Tibetan activist, Lobga Rangzen, set himself alight outside the UN headquarters in New York. He died shortly afterwards.

News of the first Tibetan self-immolation to take place on American soil drew a crowd of demonstrators outside the UN Headquarters. Rangzen was an independence activist and leader of the New York community, who had emigrated from Tibet in the 1980s. He worked as a taxi driver, and his death represented a ritual protest against the entry into force of China’s Ethnic Unity Law, designed to assimilate the 56 ethnic minorities officially ‘recognised’ by China – including Tibetans – into a single Chinese national identity, and to prosecute anyone, anywhere in the world, accused of ‘undermining ethnic unity’ (Article 63), a phrase vague enough to make anyone a target. The law has sparked protests almost everywhere, but Western governments, at a delicate juncture between the war in Ukraine, the war in the Middle East, and trade conflicts with Washington and Beijing, probably do not have sufficient resources to open yet another front of confrontation with China. It is precisely for this reason that the leadership in Beijing has chosen this moment to introduce the law (again on 1 July, just as it did six years ago with that freedom-suppressing legislation in Hong Kong): what has long been happening in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and, since 1959, in Tibet has now been institutionalised, with a terrifying acceleration under Xi Jinping’s leadership. Last Sunday, CNN interviewed Choegyal Dawa, a 25-year-old Tibetan who managed to flee to Nepal earlier this year and, for the first time, saw the face of the Dalai Lama, whose images are banned in China. Choegyal said that his generation risks being the last to have been able to study the Tibetan language and culture, before the new policies on ‘ethnic unity’ make the assimilation process sought by Beijing irreversible.

The problem with the law – and the reason why it should be alarming to everyone, not just ethnic Chinese minorities – is that it is not merely a form of cultural erasure, but serves as a means of intimidation against anyone who speaks out about Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang and, more generally, the rule of law in China. The United States, the EU and individual politicians have issued concerned statements, but the truth is that Beijing has succeeded in making itself an untouchable, uncriticisable regime. To give a very local example, some Italian politicians have spoken out about the law and its consequences, including Ilenia Malavasi, a Member of Parliament for the Democratic Party. At the same time, another MP from the same party, Vinicio Peluffo, embarked on a parliamentary mission to China at the invitation of the International Department of the Party’s Central Committee, complete with a visit to the ‘Red Boat’ in Jiaxing – the wooden vessel on which the Party’s First Congress concluded – with the aim of ‘understanding the historical trajectories’ in order to ‘build bilateral parliamentary relations based on mutual respect’. Understanding China, as Chinese officials obsessively repeat, means seeing the selective reality presented by the leadership – not exactly a shining example of diplomacy.

And so the only person left to defend ordinary Chinese people is Richard Gere, the 80-year-old Hollywood icon, a practising Buddhist and for decades one of the most prominent voices in defence of Tibet, who in recent days released a video in which he posed a question: what would you think if another state claimed the right to punish me for the words I am about to speak in this video? This is not rhetorical hyperbole, said Gere, but the logical consequence of the new Chinese law, which extends Beijing’s jurisdiction to anyone, in any country, found guilty of ‘undermining ethnic unity’. Tibet, said the actor, is merely a testing ground: the place where Beijing trials tools of surveillance and assimilation before exporting them elsewhere. Gere remains one of the very few in the international entertainment industry to speak out publicly on these issues; everyone else – even those who, until a few years ago, were riding the wave of Tibetan Buddhism as a trend – has fallen silent for fear of reprisals and the risk of losing access to the world’s largest entertainment market.