Persecution of Buddhists: Tibet

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2023 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

As always, it is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Vaz.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) on securing it. He is always in his place, but it is good to see him leading a debate rather than being one of the last to speak and having to talk at breakneck speed because he has only three minutes to get his words in. He talked about his membership of the all-party group for international freedom of religion or belief; I am also a member of that group, which does excellent work.

I am also an officer of the all-party group for Tibet, which is what brings me here today. It is a very active group: the officers speak quite frequently in the Chamber and ask questions of the Government. In the past year, we have welcomed Sikyong Penpa Tsering, the political leader, to Parliament; we knew his predecessor very well. As the hon. Member for Strangford did, I apologise for my pronunciation: I trust that Hansard will read my notes and will get it right on paper, even if what I am saying bears very little relation to how it is actually pronounced.

We also met Tibetan activist Dr Gyal Lo to talk about Tibetan children being placed in Chinese-style colonial boarding schools, a matter to which the hon. Member for Strangford referred. Several years ago, we made a trip to the Tibetan Parliament in exile in Dharamshala, which was eye-opening. It gave us a chance to speak to so many people who had been displaced from Tibet. We are not allowed to visit Tibet, although we have tried a number of times. I have also been fortunate enough to go to Nepal a couple of times and meet Tibetan people in exile there.

Since my last speech on Tibet in 2020, I would have hoped to see at least some humanitarian improvements in the region, but sadly not. Instead, China has continued to act with impunity, denying the most fundamental human rights to people in Tibet, and has not ceased its vigorous extermination of the Tibetan identity. I will echo the recent statement made by the Sikyong in Dharamshala, the headquarters of the Tibetan Government in exile. His speech was given to a group of Tibetans at the temple there—I am not even going to try to pronounce it—to mark Human Rights Day and the anniversary of the Dalai Lama being awarded the Nobel peace prize. He said that the Chinese Communist party was

“forging a strong sense of the Chinese nation as one single community, promoting the Chinese language, the Sinicization of Tibetan Buddhism”

and that

“such infliction of suffering and oppression on the Tibetan people by the Chinese Communist Party authorities is unparalleled and unprecedented.”

It is true that Chinese control in Tibet reaches far beyond what even most would expect. In August this year, a yoghurt festival was met with a police crackdown. Sho Dun, the Tibetan yoghurt festival, is not a one-off; it is an important cultural event, but entirely harmless. It typically includes traditional performances, a feast involving yoghurt, and the unveiling of a large portrait of the Buddha. This year, there was a decidedly different atmosphere, with a heavy Chinese police presence, prohibitions on engagement in religious and public gatherings, and inspection booths to confirm the identities of participants and devotees. That is just one example of the pernicious oppression of the Tibetan people. They cannot even carry out expressions of their cultural identity without the Chinese seeking to stop them.

Over the past decade, Tibetan Buddhism has been seen as a threat to the occupying Chinese state. It has been tightly regulated, with Chinese officials closely monitoring and controlling religious activity at monasteries and nunneries. Religious festivals have been banned more frequently, and Government employees, teachers and students have been barred from participating in religious activities.

Aside from religion, Chinese control of education and the workforce has been extensive and overreaching. Tibetan schools have been closed and the Chinese Government have been accused of trying to forcibly assimilate over 1 million Tibetan children through state-run boarding schools, in an attempt to eliminate Tibet’s distinctive linguistic, cultural and religious traditions. All those things go together. It is not just about the suppression of religious views; it is part and parcel of their whole cultural identity, too.

In April, a group of independent experts within the United Nations human rights system “expressed concern” over China’s alleged practice of having Tibetans “transferred” from their traditional rural lives to low-skilled, low-paid employment since 2015. Although the programme is described as voluntary, experts have said that in practice, participants are being coerced.

As I always do when I speak about Tibet, I will also raise the environmental significance of instability in the region. The Tibetan plateau in the Himalayas is known as the third pole, as home to the largest ice storage outside the north and south poles. As a direct result of global warming, permafrost, the permanently frozen layer on or under the Earth’s surface, is thawing, with potentially devastating consequences for the invaluable water supply that flows into neighbouring superpowers China and India. The Mekong, Yangtze, Ganges and Indus rivers all have their source in Tibet. Some 1.6 billion people are supported by those rivers. If the third pole continues to melt at the same rate, the effects will be felt around the world: whole communities destroyed, an unprecedented refugee crisis and the potential for Indo-Chinese relations to turn increasingly sour with an arms race for resources.

I got back from COP28 on Monday. Events there this week have underlined just how difficult it is to facilitate global action on climate change. The 1.5° target is increasingly in doubt. When the Tibetan people cannot even defend their own environment, cannot speak up for themselves and are having to rely on a hostile force —the Chinese Government—to speak for them, the possibility of their concerns being recognised is even less than it would be for many climate-vulnerable places trying to speak up. We have to consider not just the terrible human rights record of the CCP in Tibet, but the environmental impact of what it is doing.

I remember challenging the Government of the current Foreign Secretary about the UK’s relationship with China back in 2013, when he was Prime Minister. There was quite a bit of fanfare at the time because during the coalition years, the then Business Secretary Vince Cable and the then Foreign Secretary William Hague launched a business and human rights action plan that was supposed to mean that the two things were not separate and that when we were doing business with countries like China, human rights always had to be on the agenda.

In theory, it was a really good move. However, at around that time a Trade Minister in the other place came to the all-party parliamentary China group. I asked him about human rights, but he just said, “That’s nothing to do with me. That’s Foreign Office. I’m just there to do business deals for China,” so it was not working as well in practice as it could have. Of course we want to trade with China—it is incredibly important —but we have to use that trade relationship to exert leverage, because that is the only way we can do so. I will finish by asking the Minister: is that happening? What representations are we making to China, not just about Tibet and the plight of the Buddhists there, but about the Uyghur Muslims, the Falun Gong and the people of Hong Kong? Is that happening across Government, not just in the Foreign Office?

--- Later in debate ---

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

Absolutely; that is why I apologise. My private office will be able to learn from the practicalities of that point.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I just want to say, Ms Vaz, that there was a bit of confusion because on the website, where it says “What’s on” in Parliament, it said 4 o’clock. People contacted me saying there was a debate at 4 o’clock. I just thought that it would be 3 o’clock and double-checked, because it usually is at 3 o’clock. That needs to be clarified in future.

[Valerie Vaz (in the Chair)]

That has been noted by the very assiduous PPS, who pointed that out to us, and we will take it back.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

My hon. Friend sets out her point clearly. As someone who has sat in many a multilateral session—the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) mentioned COP, which I led on two years ago—it is often a slow and tortuous process to reach a form of words that as many countries and voices can sign up to as possible. My hon. Friend’s point is well made, however, and we will continue to raise the matter. The past couple of years have been the first time this issue has been in those statements. We will continue to work on expanding them and on persuading with the force of the evidence other countries to accept the realities of what we see, so that they will be willing to be stronger in the multilateral statement that we can put out together. Her point is well made and well heard.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Our focus today is in part on the religion of people in Tibet. I wonder whether the fact that they are Buddhists, which is very much a peaceful religion, plays against them, because full-scale conflict in Tibet with fighting back would perhaps get more international attention. Sadly, however, as I am sure the Minister is aware, there have been at least 158 self-immolations in Tibet, with another 10 by people in exile. Those are the sheer lengths that they have to go to in order to get international eyes on their plight.

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

The hon. Lady highlights something important. One of the beauties of this extraordinarily peaceful religion is that it does not cause some of the violence and aggression that one sees in other clashes between religions or beliefs across the world.

The challenge in Tibet is that of access for foreign nationals, including accredited diplomats and journalists, and it remains highly restricted. British diplomats visited Tibetan areas of Sichuan province in June 2023, and we will continue to push for access to Tibet, including for the UN special rapporteurs, which China either has not responded to or indeed has refused. We are consistent in our calls for the necessity of greater access to Tibet for international observers.

On UK policy towards China more broadly, China of course has a significant role to play in almost every global issue. We want to have a strong and constructive relationship. As such, we continue to engage directly with China to create space for those open, constructive, predictable and stable relations that are important in, for example, areas of global challenge such as climate and health. Those are areas that we need and want to work together on, for the good of the whole of mankind.

We will, however, always condemn human rights violations, privately in our meetings with Chinese representatives and in public fora, as we have set out. The UK Government will continue to play a leading role in pressing China to improve its human rights and to get its record to a better place.