Beijing's motives for crushing Tibetan language

Transportation has played several different roles in the rise of civilizations and also in national defense. For instance, the efficient utilization of roads helped the Roman Empire rule the ancient world. The good network of roads served two purposes for the Romans: During wars with neighboring kingdoms, it served for quick deployment of soldiers. On the other hand, the well-connected roads helped them send quick reinforcements and to crush rebellions in their conquered colonies.

Like the Romans, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has given utmost priority to infrastructure development. Almost immediately after the conquest of Tibet in 1951, the CPC began constructing highways that would link Tibet with China for the first time in history. Thus, with this step, all roads from Tibet led to Beijing. The Chamdo-Lhasa Highway (called by the Chinese the Sichuan-Tibet Highway) and Tsongon-Lhasa Highway (Qinghai-Tibet Highway) constructed from 1954-1955 were two major routes connecting Tibet with rest of China, which later became the CPC's modes of transportation and exploitation of everything for its own interests and not those of Tibet, the Tibetan people and neighboring countries.

By 1975 China had completed 91 highways totaling 15,800 kilometers, with 300 permanent bridges in Outer Tibet alone, by which 97% of the region's counties were connected by road. Claude Arpi, a historian, journalist and prolific commentator on India-Tibet-China affairs, says the infrastructure development by the CPC in Tibet has served a dual purpose. It helps the CPC to control Tibet effectively and also facilitates the People's Liberation Army's militarization of Tibet's borders.

But beyond that, these roads and railways were also engineered for the mass migration of Chinese people in search of work and pleasure in Tibet. In an interview to the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD) based in Dharamshala, India, Tsering Dorjee, a native of the Qomolangma basin who fled from Tibet and settled abroad, spent an entire year in Tibet from 2005-06. He said the number of Chinese settlers had mushroomed dramatically since he left.

Already the usage of written Tibetan language had become insignificant, and with the continuation of current trends, very soon spoken Tibetan might face the same demise as Tibetan script. For instance, the TsongonLhasa Railway (Qinghai-Tibet Railway) brought around 1.5 million passengers into Tibet during its first year of operation, ending on June 30, 2007. In its 13 years of operation, much has changed in the socio-economic and the cultural landscapes of Tibet.

The peaceful uprisings of 2008 were direct results of continuous undermining of economic, social and cultural rights and religious sentiments of the Tibetan people.

Hence, also in the veiled garb of development, the CPC is committing what Rinzin Dorjee, a research fellow at the Tibet Policy Institute based in Dharamshala, calls "urbancide." By this he means the extinguishing of Tibetan culture and identity through an influx of millions of Chinese migrants to Tibet. This process is still being implemented. Because of the increasing Chinese population in Tibet, most of the services and facilities now cater to them.

For instance, Jampa Xiangbalacuo (aka Jampa Latso), in a paper titled "Empowering Women Health Workers in Rural Tibet" (2017) submitted to the SIT (School for International Training) Graduate Institute in the US state of Vermont, highlighted the language barriers faced by female Tibetan patients at a government hospital in Garze (Ganzi), in Tibet's Kham region.

She writes, "The county towns are far, inconvenient and expensive, and women face language barriers in communicating with Chinese male doctors."

Recently too, during the Covid-19 pandemic, such indifference toward Tibetan people became even more apparent.

According to a tweet on February 10 from @Lhatseri, the Twitter handle of Tibetan historian and professor Tsering Shakya, about the paucity of interpreters for Tibetan patients in hospitals, "Many Tibetans are refusing to go to hospitals because there are no interpreters, [despite] a new campaign telling people that interpreters will be provided."

Such institutional biases are extensive throughout Tibet. One stark example is the introduction of bilingual education in Tibet. In reality, this policy was implemented to suppress further the learning and teaching of the Tibetan language.

In East Turkistan too, the CPC has politicized language policy. Because of frequent changes of official script, different generations of Uighurs and other Turkic students were exposed to different written forms of their language. The deliberate discontinuity of the traditional Arabic script has resulted in severe interruptions to the culture, heritage, traditions, and identity of the Uighur and other Turkic populations in East Turkistan.

Like East Turkistan, Tibet faced a similar language dilemma created by the CPC. Because of continual hostile language policies, ordinary Tibetans have expressed widespread concern about the increasing loss of fluency in Tibetan among the younger generations.

“Thus, with this step, all roads from Tibet led to Beijing. The Chamdo-Lhasa Highway (called by the Chinese the Sichuan-Tibet Highway) and Tsongon-Lhasa Highway (Qinghai-Tibet Highway) constructed from 1954-1955 were two major routes connecting Tibet with rest of China, which later became the CPC's modes of transportation and exploitation of everything for its own interests and not those of Tibet, the Tibetan people and neighboring countries. By 1975 China had completed 91 highways totaling 15,800 kilometers, with 300 permanent bridges in Outer Tibet

alone, by which 97% of the region's counties were connected by road.”

Tenzin Tsultrim