SEOUL, South Korea — A Tibetan died late Thursday after setting himself on fire outside the U.N. headquarters in New York in a dramatic act of protest against a new Chinese law stressing ethnic unity.
Beijing says the “Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law,” which went into effect Wednesday, aims to create a shared national identity among China’s 56 ethnic groups, while ensuring balanced national development across all regions.
Critics say Beijing’s real aim is to accelerate minorities’ assimilation into the dominant culture. One expert said it reflects a historic paranoia about separatism and strife that lies at the heart of the Chinese Communist Party.
Lobsang Palden, also known as Lobga Rangzen, immolated himself in protest of the law, an action more than 150 Tibetans before him have taken in protest of Chinese rule.
“Communist China is waging a campaign to destroy the Tibetan people through its genocidal policies in Tibet,” he said, according to the Tibetan Action Institute, just before his suicide. “I have little to say to Tibetans inside Tibet, who are doing everything in their power to safeguard our culture, religion, language. I am doing this for my country.”
The Uber driver, who had reportedly lived in the U.S. for two decades, burned himself wearing Tibetan monastic garb, having earlier erected a Tibetan flag on the sidewalk.
Emergency workers rushed him to the hospital, where he died. He was 52.
The law he killed himself to protest “…is designed to enhance cohesion and common prosperity among all 56 ethnic groups,” wrote official state news agency Xinhua. “This comes as the country enters the final decade of its drive to basically achieve modernization by 2035.”
It stipulates “upholding national unity and ethnic solidarity is the responsibility of all Chinese citizens, and prohibits discrimination and suppression against any ethnic group,” Xinhua stated.
Critics differ — especially Tibetans.
The law “codifies forced assimilation policies, including colonial-style boarding schools in Tibet,” said Dorjee Tseten, a U.S.- based Tibetan activist and former member of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile. “Rather than promoting unity, it criminalizes efforts to protect the Tibetan language, culture and identity with the aim of erasing the distinct national identity of the Tibetan people.”
Pro-Chinese voices say compulsory Mandarin education offers ethnic minorities the tools necessary to advance in China’s educational, bureaucratic and business sectors, where Mandarin is the lingua franca.
According to activists, state boarding schools established for Tibetan children, some as young as 4 years old, teach a Beijing-centric curriculum, with minimal classes in Tibetan, causing inter-generational communication barriers between children and their parents, and dilution of ethnic identity.
The Tibet Action Institute, an NGO, said more than 1 million children have been impacted.
Mr. Tseten, who knew the late Mr. Palden, said he had devoted his entire life to Tibetan independence.
China, the world’s second most populous nation after India, is majority Han Chinese. 2020 census data found 125 million members of 55 ethnic minorities — including Hui, Koreans, Manchus, Mongolians, Tibetans, Uighars and Zhuang — making up just less than 9% of the total population.
Many minorities appear comfortably assimilated. Others, notably Tibetans and Muslim Uighurs, have been restive.
Both regions have seen riots and attacks on Han Chinese, generating harsh pushback from Beijing. In Xinjiang’s case, several thousand fighters fought overseas with Islamist groups, notably in Syria, adding to Beijing’s concerns.
Chinese pushback, in turn, has generated criticism about human rights violations by activist networks based overseas.
“Chinese authorities have human rights obligations requiring them to protect minority communities and their cultures, but this law does the opposite,” said Sarah Brooks, regional director of global human rights group Amnesty International in a statement. “Rather than celebrating difference, it is about pushing ethnic groups such as Uyghurs, Tibetans and Mongolians to adopt a single, state-defined national identity dominated by Han Chinese culture.”
Relations between China and Tibet have long been troubled.
In the 18th century, China’s Qing Dynasty took control of Tibet. In the 19th century, Qing China was violently shaken by predatory foreign powers, the Opium Wars, and the Taiping Rebellion — a religious conflict often regarded as the world’s bloodiest war after World War II. The Qing fell in 1911, and the Chinese Republic was established. Lhasa proclaimed its independence in 1913. The weak Chinese Republic descended into chaos in 1916.
Tibetan independence persisted until communist forces won the Chinese Civil War and took control of China in 1948-49, after Nationalist forces fled and established a competing government on the island of Taiwan.
Communist forces moved forcibly to establish stability across the mainland.
In 1950, Tibet was conquered by the People’s Liberation Army and annexed — “liberated” in Beijing terminology — in 1951.
A Tibetan uprising, aided by the CIA, was crushed in 1959. An exile community, headed today by spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, is based in Dharamshala, India.
Since then, Beijing has established the Tibetan Autonomous Region for local governance, undertaken land redistribution, and overseen the movement of Han Chinese into Tibet, where they reportedly make up about 12% of the populace.
Meanwhile, Tibetans in Dharamshala, as well as a global diaspora, agitate against Beijing’s policies.
Concerns about China applying the law abroad have led to pushback from the European Union and the U.S. State Department as well as discussions on countermeasures in Taiwan.
The law “represents a legitimate sovereign measure to protect Chinese people from disruption by separatist forces,” Xinhua stated.
It aims to combat “violent terrorism, ethnic separatism and religious extremism, holding organizers, planners, perpetrators, instigators and funders of these activities criminally liable.”
Fear of separatism is baked into the CCP’s DNA, said Geoff Cain, author of 2021’s “The Perfect Police State,” a book on China’s extensive security oversight technologies.
The CCP was founded in 1921, a time of central decontrol. China’s warlord period was followed by Japan’s invasion in 1937, and then, following Japan’s defeat in 1945, by the Chinese Civil War.
“The CCP, by its very foundation, is a paranoid government born of civil war, of strife, and of having to fight among many scattered ethnic groups,” the author said.
Subsequently, further paranoia “stemmed from watching the dissolution of the Soviet Union,” he said, referring to violent conflicts that broke out in Russian frontier republics such as Chechnya and Georgia — roughly analogous to Beijing’s fears of breakaways by Tibet and Xinjiang.
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