Freedom House Report: Tibet Is Less Free than North Korea

The occupied region of Tibet is less free than communist North Korea, and the Asia-Pacific region generally is among the most repressed in the world, where only five percent of people live in free countries, the international organization Freedom House revealed on Thursday.

Freedom House published its annual “Freedom in the World” report this week covering 2022. The report uses specific metrics – minority rights, freedom of expression, the existence of independent media and courts, for example – to give each country and disputed territory numerical rankings on political freedom. Overall, Freedom House lamented that 2022 was the 17th year in the report’s half-century of existence that freedom declined around the world. It noted, however, that the removal of some remaining coronavirus lockdown restrictions around the world did yield increases in freedom, even as the expansion of China’s international surveillance apparatus and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine significantly damaged global movements towards individual freedom.

In the Asia-Pacific region – which also includes parts of Oceania such as Australia and New Zealand – Tibet ranked the least-free territory assessed (Freedom House includes, in addition to universally recognized states, some disputed or occupied territories “if they meet certain criteria, including boundaries that are sufficiently stable to allow year-on-year comparisons”). Tibet also shared the title of least free territory in the world with Syria and South Sudan, all of which received negative rankings in political rights. Freedom House attributes a score from zero to four, four being most free, for multiple categories of political rights. In total, Tibet received a -2, significantly below North Korea’s score of zero.

Tibetans consider their homeland an occupied country, with a rich, centuries-old history of self-rule and independent culture and language from the occupying force, the Han-majority Chinese Communist Party. Its particularly low rankings in this year’s Freedom in the World report are largely driven by Beijing’s genocidal policies against indigenous Tibetans. While the report did not use the word “genocide,” it described policies that fit the international legal definition of the term, particularly “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The report noted that children between the ages of eight and 16 are often forced into “military-style summer ‘education camps'” where they are taken away from their families and forced to speak Mandarin. The observance of any faith under the age of 18 is illegal in China, so Tibetan Buddhists, like parents of other faiths, cannot legally pass on their faith to their children.

Tibet received its lowest score on the matter of the government “deliberately changing the ethnic composition … so as to destroy a culture or tip the political balance in favor of another group,” a -3.

In addition to the “education camps” for children, Chinese Communist officials force Tibetan adults into “vocational training” facilities – similar to the concentration camps used in the ongoing Uyghur genocide in neighboring, and similarly occupied, East Turkistan – where they are indoctrinated into communism, forced to “denounce the Dalai Lama, and forced into “wage labor,” Freedom House detailed. The organization estimated “hundreds of thousands” of Tibetans were forced into these camps in 2022.

“To damage and destroy Tibetan culture, Chinese authorities have incarcerated scores of Tibetan cultural, religious, and intellectual figures,” Freedom House’s report detailed, “such as monks, writers, intellectuals, musicians, and prominent scholars—throughout the year. The exact number of people imprisoned is unknown due Beijing’s tight control of information in the region.”

Freedom House made a point to note that the Chinese Communist Party used its “zero-Covid” policy – consisting largely of city-wide lockdowns without food or medicine and mass imprisonment in quarantine camps – to repress Tibetans. The Party engaged in “mass transfers of thousands of people to overcrowded and unsanitary isolation centers, where detainees reported lacking access to food and medical treatment, and where individuals who tested positive for the virus were housed with individuals who tested negative.”

Lockdowns in September 2022 in Tibet and East Turkistan were particularly brutal on local populations, fueling starvation and unnecessary deaths of those who would have otherwise lived with access to basic medicines.

Freedom House included its analysis of East Turkistan, which China refers to with the Mandarin name “Xinjiang,” in its general assessment of China. China was ranked number nine on the list of least free countries, alongside war-torn Yemen and neighboring Myanmar, currently under the iron-fisted rule of a murderous military junta.

“Increasing numbers of ethnic minority children in Xinjiang and Tibet have been separated from their parents and forced to attend state-run boarding schools, where Mandarin is the sole language of instruction and where students are subject to intense political indoctrination,” Freedom House noted in its report on China.

Generally, the organization noted, “no country can match the scale and sophistication of China’s surveillance state, in which residents’ activities are invasively monitored by public security cameras, urban grid managers, and automated systems that detect suspicious and banned behavior, including innocuous expressions of ethnic and religious identity.”

The Asia-Pacific region did see some moderate improvements in some countries, the report detailed.

“In Sri Lanka, protesters persevered through police violence and ultimately forced the resignation of the long-dominant Rajapaksa family from their multiple positions in government, though years of mismanagement left the country with serious economic and governance challenges,” Freedom House noted. “In Malaysia, the results of general elections offered the promise of political and social reforms, and the judiciary displayed increased independence by upholding the 2020 corruption conviction of former prime minister Najib Razak.”

Malaysia, officially designated “partly free,” received the largest improvement in score from the 2022 report to the 2023 report.

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