Tibetan businessman fights separatism charge in China
Chris Buckley YUSHU, CHINA — A Tibetan businessman who tried to protect his native language defended himself in a Chinese court Thursday against criminal charge that his oneman campaign had fanned resistance to Chinese rule.
The one-day trial of the businessman, Tashi Wangchuk, 32, was held in his hometown of Yushu, a heavily Tibetan area in the northwestern Chinese province of Qinghai, two years after he was detained by police.
Tashi was charged with inciting separatism, which can bring up to 15 years in prison, after appearing in a news report and a video documentary by the Times in 2015. His defense lawyers said the prosecution’s case rested largely on the video, which was shown during the trial.
The trial lasted just a few hours, and the presiding judge told the courtroom that a verdict would be announced at a later, unspecified, date. China’s Communist Party-run courts rarely find defendants not guilty, especially in politically contentious cases.
His lawyers said that Tashi, speaking in Chinese, used the hearing to reject the idea that his efforts to revive Tibetan language and culture were a crime. Tashi has insisted that he does not advocate independence for Tibet, but wants the autonomy and rights for ethnic minorities that are promised by Chinese law.
“Tashi argued that his idea was to use litigation to force local governments to stop ignoring Tibetan language education, and he was exercising his right as a citizen to criticize,” Liang Xiaojun, one of Tashi’s two defense attorneys, said outside the courthouse after the trial.
“He said that he wasn’t trying to split the country,” Liang added, “but exercising his rights as a citizen of the People’s Republic of China, which includes Tibetan citizens.”
The trial received international attention, with diplomats from the United States, Germany, Britain, Canada and the European Union also showing up in unsuccessful efforts to attend the hearing.
“This action by the Chinese government sends a chilling message meant to silence its critics,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for The New York Times, said by email.
Before the trial, a dozen or so of Tashi’s relatives gathered outside the courthouse. They had been told that 15 of them could attend his trial, but in the end only three were let in.
“The main thing they said against him was the video,” his brother-in-law, Sonam Tsering, said after the trial, referring to the Times’ documentary about Tashi. “They said that issuing those comments abroad was the biggest problem, that it insulted China.”
Tashi’s long captivity has been condemned by human rights organizations, exiled Tibetan groups and foreign governments, including the previous U.S. ambassador to Beijing. His case has also renewed focus on his warnings that the Tibetan language and culture are threatened by Chinese government policies to restrict education in the language and its use, even in Yushu, a remote town 12,000 feet above sea level on the highlands of western China.
The western part of Qinghai and other heavily Tibetan areas in nearby provinces form a rim around the Tibet Autonomous Region, the heartland of historic Tibet. Critics warn that the Chinese government is stifling local culture across these areas by making Mandarin Chinese the dominant, or sole, language used in education, official business and the media.
Since protests and riots against the Chinese government across Tibetan areas in 2008, Beijing has imposed smothering security, placing a heavy hand on Tibetan religious and cultural life.
The pressures have magnified under President Xi Jinping, whose policies toward ethnic minorities reflect a belief that they can be pulled out of poverty and made loyal to Beijing by encouraging their assimilation into Chinese society, including education in Mandarin Chinese.