1959 Tibet uprising commemoration held in Taipei

Taipei, March 10 (CNA) Civic groups commemorating the 1959 Tibetan uprising in Taipei on Sunday called for an end to China's use of state-run residential schools to "exterminate" Tibet's culture and language.

Kelsang Gyaltsen Bawa of the Tibetan government in exile, one of the organizers of Sunday's event, said that students at the schools are taught exclusively in Mandarin Chinese and forbidden from learning about Tibet's history.

Bawa said the Chinese government should cease its attempt to "exterminate" Tibet's religious and cultural traditions by compelling them to participate in a Han-centric curriculum.

According to the United Nations, as of 2023, nearly 1 million Tibetan students attend state-run residential schools, which have been described as a form of "abduction and forced assimilation" by the European Parliament.

Meanwhile, Kunchok Lhakpa, president of the Tibetan Youth Association in Taiwan, called on China to halt construction of a hydroelectric dam in Sichuan Province, which opponents claim will submerge several ancient Tibetan monasteries.

According to Lhakpa, Chinese police arrested more than 1,000 protesters demonstrating against the dam in February, nearly all of whom remain in detention.

Lhakpa said that over the past 65 years since the Tibetan uprising against Chinese communist rule on March 10, 1959, Tibetans have had no freedom and no human rights.

"The Chinese communists claim Tibet has become more open these past decades and that Tibetans are living a great life. These claims are not true -- no matter how beautiful Tibetans are on the outside, nothing compares to a lack of freedom on the inside," Lhakpa said.

Li Wen (李問), who represented the ruling Democratic Progressive Party at Sunday's commemoration, said that Taiwan and Tibet faced the same authoritarian threats from China and shared the same democratic values and peace-loving.

Li, director of the DPP's Department of International Affairs, claimed that the Chinese People's Liberation Army "forced" Tibetans to agree to the Seventeen Point Agreement a year after invading in 1950.

Within less than a decade, however, Beijing breached clauses in the agreement that said religion and customs should be respected, leading to the uprising in March 1959.

Following a violent crackdown by the Chinese government, the Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso fled to India, where he later formed a Tibetan government in exile.

An annual commemoration of the uprising has been held in Taipei since 2004.