Transforming our world
through nonviolent action
through nonviolent action
I am excited to announce that the SFT East Coast Conference 2019 will be organized by SFT International and SFT UMass Amherst on April 13-14! East Coast Conference is a great opportunity for youth activists to network and develop their skills through trainings. I hope to see you there!
Please see the attached flyer for more information. The deadline to register is Monday, April 1. Thank you!
In solidarity,
Pema Doma
USA Grassroots Coordinator
PORTLAND, Ore. — An hour-long panel discussion at Portland State University followed the March 4 screening of In the Name of Confucius, a 2016 documentary about the Chinese government-run and funded language programs that are named for the ancient teacher and philosopher.
Scores of people attended the afternoon event in the university’s Urban Center, where four panelists weighed in on the controversies surrounding the Confucius Institutes (CI), as well as the pending renewal of a 5-year contract for the local CI chapter at PSU.
Since 2004, over 1,600 Confucius Institutes and related Confucius Classrooms have been set up in colleges and schools around the world, representing at least US$2 billion in investments from the Chinese state.
While Confucius Institutes are presented as a benign facilitation of cultural exchange, activists, security agencies, and experts believe that the program helps the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) extend its political censorship and undermine academic freedom in democratic countries.
Confucius Institutes forbid their teachers from talking about topics the CCP deems sensitive or unflattering, such as the issues of ethnic and religious human rights, the political status of Taiwan, or the 1989 June 4 Massacre at Tiananmen.
In the Name of Confucius, released in 2016, tracks the ideological agenda and financial influence associated with the Confucius Institutes through a collection of interviews and on-the-scene footage at protests and meetings. The documentary follows the story of Sonia Zhao, a Mandarin teacher who, upon completing her training in China and prior to leaving for work in Canada, was compelled to sign a contract that discriminated against her faith in Falun Gong, a spiritual practice that is banned and persecuted by the CCP. It also shows the process by which the world’s largest CI was shut down in Toronto.
Zhao eventually defected to Canada and filed a complaint that, in 2013, resulted in the termination of the Confucius Institute at Ontario’s McMaster University where she was employed.
The panelists at the PSU screening, expanding on the themes featured in the documentary, cited multiple concerns with the way Confucius Institutes are operated, as well as the Chinese government’s motives in their worldwide promotion.
On the panel were Doris Liu, the Chinese-Canadian director of In the Name of Confucius, PSU film professor Jennifer Ruth, Tibetan human rights activist Dorjee Tseten, and Rachelle Peterson, research director of the National Association of Scholars (NAS).
Rachelle Peterson, who authored the 2017 study Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education, investigated 12 Confucius Institutes across the United States and came to what she said were similar conclusions as the documentary. “Academic freedom is compromised” when local schools accept funding to set up CIs, she said.
Citing a U.S. Senate report from Feb. 27 saying that the Chinese government had given US$158 million to American schools and colleges since 2016, Peterson observed that “it’s a lot of money, especially at liberal arts programs, where US$100,000 can make a big difference.”
Jennifer Ruth, who has worked at PSU for 20 years and is a member of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), said that it is very difficult for host schools to accept Chinese money for the Confucius Institutes and also guarantee academic freedom, as the financial incentive creates powerful conflicts of interest.
“Once the money’s there, it’s extremely hard to take it away,” she said.
Dorjee Tseten, executive director of Students for Free Tibet, spoke about how expanding Chinese influence in Western academia was effective in putting pressure on Tibetan activists. He cited examples of how the Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, was barred from giving speeches at universities due to Beijing’s threats that it cut off funding for Confucius Institutes.
Tibetans are one of China’s most persecuted minorities, with their religion and culture being under close control by the CCP since it annexed Tibet in 1950. The Chinese authorities label all attempts by Tibetans in and outside the autonomous region to agitate for their rights as “separatism.” Many Tibetans, like Tseten, were born in refugee camps outside China.
An article published by Inside Higher Ed last year cited PSU’s CI as an example of communist censorship in action. The article quoted a former CIPSU director as saying that “we try not to organize and host lectures on certain issues related to Falun Gong, dissidents and 1989 Tiananmen Square protests,” because “these are not topics the Confucius Institutes headquarters would like to see organized by the institutes.”
Yu Xiao, a Chinese-American professor of urban planning who hosted the March 4 screening, said she had invited the Confucius Institute to join, but received no response.
Confucius Institutes are staffed and directed by the Chinese government’s Office of Chinese Language Council International, abbreviated in Mandarin as Hanban.
Doris Liu, adding to Peterson’s comments, pointed out that the Hanban was under the direct control of the Chinese central authorities. “Above Hanban there is a council, and the head of the council is the current vice-premier of the People’s Republic of China,” she said, referring to Liu Yandong, who is also a member of the 25-strong CCP Politburo and a former head of the United Front Work Department (UWFD).
The UFWD was founded in the early years of the Chinese communist movement and played a strong role in subverting the Nationalist Chinese government before the CCP seized victory in the civil war in 1949.
United Front work continues today, both inside Chinese society and abroad. According to Peterson, CIs are part of the modern united front efforts to establish influence abroad and legitimize Beijing’s authoritarian power.
“The Chinese government works in a way to build relationships, to encourage people to have friendly feelings toward China, and one of the main priorities of the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department is to make the foreign serve China,” she said.
Ruth, the film professor, noted that academics often self censor in order to stay in Beijing’s good graces, lest they risk research and travel opportunities in China or ostracization from peers. “So our scholars on China, whether they’re of Chinese descent or not, they have to think twice before they talk about any of these issues,” she said. “That’s part of why you’re not hearing as much from scholars on China as you might think we should be.”
Peterson noted that there has been a shift in attitude in recent years to the Confucius Institutes, or a “waking up to China’s subtle aggression.” Combatting the CCP’s soft power and roundabout censorship has become a bipartisan issue, particularly under the Trump administration.
The recent Senate report, while urging universities to continue their partnerships with Chinese schools so as to offer “students unique international learning experiences and enhance research opportunities,” said that this goal should be advanced only on the condition that U.S schools “never, under any circumstances, compromise academic freedom.”
The report also recommended that Congress require U.S. academic institutions to publish all their contracts with foreign governments, which would include agreements for Confucius Institutes.
At PSU, Ruth said that more efforts are being made to take the Confucius Institute and the university administration to task. The current 5-year contract for the CIPSU expired on February 5, and a resolution was passed by the PSU Faculty Senate to recommend that no new contract be made unless the language was changed to give the school more control over hiring and academic freedom.
However, both Ruth and Peterson have doubts about how much the relationships with Hanban can be salvaged. Ruth said that in order to fully comply with American standards of academic freedom and nondiscrimination in hiring, funding for the Confucius Institutes “would ultimately have to turn into money with no strings attached.”
“It would have to turn into something that I don’t think the [Communist] Party would be comfortable with,” she said.
Peterson said that even if language was introduced to the written contracts to protect academic freedoms, it would be in practice difficult to ensure that Hanban would keep up its end of the deal.
Meanwhile, Ruth was not optimistic about the way negotiations were going for the CIPSU contract renewal, although she said it was still possible for the Faculty Senate to “do due diligence.”
“It’s pending right now, we’ll see,” said Ruth.
Thousands of Tibetans, Uyghurs, Taiwanese, Hong Kongers, Chinese democracy activists and supporters strengthen alliance against Xi’s totalitarian regime.
NEW YORK, March 8, 2019 –2019 marks both the 60th anniversary of the Tibetan National Uprising and the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. With over one million Uyghurs currently detained in internment camps, March 10, 2019 marks an important symbol of solidarity among those affected by China’s abuse. Leaders from Students for a Free Tibet and seven of New York’s largest Tibet groups, along with supporters commemorate Tibetan National Uprising Day in New York.
WHAT: On March 10, 2019, an estimated 3,000-5,000 Tibetans and their supporters in New York will join the global commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Tibetan National Uprising. Speakers from prominent pro-democracy and human rights groups will address issues ranging from political prisoners in Tibet and internment camps in East Turkestan (Chinese name: Xinjiang), to foreign intervention and censorship on U.S. and Canadian university campuses.
WHY? On March 10, 1959, tens of thousands of Tibetans took to the streets of Lhasa — Tibet’s capital — rising up against China’s illegal occupation of Tibet. The uprising was violently quelled by the Chinese military, resulting in thousands of deaths. In the six decades since March 10, 1959, 1.2 million Tibetans have been killed, 6,000-plus monasteries have been demolished and more than 100,000 Tibetans have fled to exile as a direct result of the Chinese occupation. March 10 has become an iconic day of uprising among Tibetans and their supporters. This year, China began barring foreign travelers from Tibet weeks ahead of the significant March 10 anniversary.(1)
Brutal reprisals by the Chinese authorities for openly expressing political dissatisfaction has led to an increase in Tibetan self-immolations, with over 155 since 2009, all calling for the return of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, freedom and independence. To this day, China rules Tibetans with an iron fist and Tibet is ranked as the second-least-free place in the world (directly after Syria and ahead of North Korea) in the annual Freedom in the World report published by the Washington-based Freedom House, a nonprofit that advocates for democracy around the world.
Under Xi Jinping’s increasingly totalitarian rule, the brutal crackdowns against voices demanding freedom, democracy and human rights across China and its occupied territories have intensified. In Tibet today, there is no freedom of speech, assembly, press or religion. The Chinese government is determined to wipe out all traces of Tibetan national identity in an attempt to stifle any form of dissent among Tibetans. Recently, the attempts to monitor and censor behavior of dissidents have even spread beyond the confines of China’s borders, reaching as far as the U.S. and Canada.(2)
WHEN & WHERE: (For Media Invitation Only)
11.30 a.m.: Protest Starts at United Nations (Dag Hammarshjold Plaza, 224 E. 47th St., New York)
1:30 p.m.:Protest from United Nations to Chinese Consulate (520 12th Ave., New York)
Photo Op: Massive protest – thousands of protesters (Tibetans and non-Tibetan locals) with Tibetan flags and placards marching for Tibet through the streets of New York, including Times Square, the UN building and the Chinese Consulate
Organized by eight leading Tibet organizations based in New York:
The Tibetan Community of New York & New Jersey
Regional Tibetan Youth Congress of New York & New Jersey
Regional Tibetan Women Association of New York & New Jersey
Dokham Chushi Gangdruk
Utsang Association of New York & New Jersey
Domey Association of New York & New Jersey
US Tibet Committee
Students for a Free Tibet
Google employees have carried out their own investigation into the company’s plan to launch a censored search engine for China and say they are concerned that development of the project remains ongoing, The Intercept can reveal.
Late last year, bosses moved engineers away from working on the controversial project, known as Dragonfly, and said that there were no current plans to launch it. However, a group of employees at the company was unsatisfied with the lack of information from leadership on the issue — and took matters into their own hands.
The group has identified ongoing work on a batch of code that is associated with the China search engine, according to three Google sources. The development has stoked anger inside Google offices, where many of the company’s 88,000 workforce previously protested against plans to launch the search engine, which was designed to censor broad categories of information associated with human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest.
In December, The Intercept reported that an internal dispute and political pressure on Google had stopped development of Dragonfly. Google bosses had originally planned to launch it between January and April of this year. But they changed course after the outcry over the plan and indicated to employees who were working on the project that it was being shelved.
Google’s Caesar Sengupta, an executive with a leadership role on Dragonfly, told engineers and others who were working on the censored search engine in mid-December that they would be allocated new projects funded by different “cost centers” of the company’s budget. In a message marked “confidential – do not forward,” which has been newly obtained by The Intercept, Sengupta told the Dragonfly workers:
Over the past few quarters, we have tackled different aspects of what search would look like in China. While we’ve made progress in our understanding of the market and user needs, many unknowns remain and currently we have no plans to launch.
Back in July we said at our all hands that we did not feel we could make much progress right now. Since then, many people have effectively rolled off the project while others have been working on adjacent areas such as improving our Chinese language capabilities that also benefit users globally. Thank you for all of your hard work here.
As we finalize business planning for 2019, our priority is for you to be productive and have clear objectives, so we have started to align cost centers to better reflect what people are actually working on.
Thanks again — and your leads will follow up with you on next steps.
Sources with knowledge of Dragonfly said staff who were working on the project were not told to immediately cease their efforts. Rather, they were instructed to finish up the jobs they were doing and then they would be allocated new work on other teams. Some of those who were working on Dragonfly were moved into different areas, focusing on projects related to Google’s search services in India, Indonesia, Russia, the Middle East, and Brazil.
But Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, refused both publicly and privately to completely rule out launching the censored search engine in the future. This led a group of concerned employees — who were themselves not directly involved with Dragonfly — to closely monitor the company’s internal systems for information about the project and circulate their findings on an internal messaging list.
The employees have been keeping tabs on repositories of code that are stored on Google’s computers, which they say is linked to Dragonfly. The code was created for two smartphone search apps — named Maotai and Longfei — that Google planned to roll out in China for users of Android and iOS mobile devices.
The employees identified about 500 changes to the code in December, and more than 400 changes to the code between January and February of this year, which they believe indicates continued development of aspects of Dragonfly. (Since August 2017, the number of code changes has varied between about 150 to 500 each month, one source said.) The employees say there are still some 100 workers allocated to the “cost center” associated with Dragonfly, meaning that the company is maintaining a budget for potential ongoing work on the plan.
Google sources with knowledge of Dragonfly said that the code changes could possibly be attributed to employees who have continued this year to wrap up aspects of the work they were doing to develop the Chinese search platform.
“I still believe the project is dead, but we’re still waiting for a declaration from Google that censorship is unacceptable and that they will not collaborate with governments in the oppression of their people,” said one source familiar with Dragonfly.
The lack of clarity from management has resulted in Google losing skilled engineers and developers. In recent months, several Google employees have resigned in part due to Dragonfly and leadership’s handling of the project. The Intercept knows of six staff at the company, including two in senior positions, who have quit since December, and three others who are planning to follow them out the door.
Colin McMillen, who worked as a software engineer at Google for nine years, quit the company in early February. He told The Intercept that he had been concerned about Dragonfly and other “ethically dubious” decisions, such as Google’s multimillion-dollar severance packages for executives accused of sexual harassment.
Prior to leaving the company, McMillen said he and his colleagues had “strong indications that something is still happening” with Google search in China. But they were left confused about the status of the China plan because upper management would not discuss it.
“I just don’t know where the leadership is coming from anymore,” he said. “They have really closed down communication and become significantly less transparent.”
In 2006, Google launched a censored search engine in China, but stopped operating the service in the country in 2010, taking a clear anti-censorship position. At the time, Google co-founder Sergey Brin declared that he wanted to show that the company was “opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent.”
Pichai, Google’s CEO since 2015, has taken a different position. He has a strong desire to launch search again in China — viewing the censorship as a worthwhile trade-off to gain access to the country’s more than 800 million internet users — and he may now be waiting for the controversy around Dragonfly to die down before quietly resurrecting the plan.
“Right now it feels unlaunchable, but I don’t think they are canceling outright,” McMillen said. “I think they are putting it on the back burner and are going to try it again in a year or two with a different code name or approach.”
Anna Bacciarelli, a technology researcher at Amnesty International, called on Google “to publicly confirm that it has dropped Dragonfly for good, not just ‘for now.’” Bacciarelli told The Intercept that Amnesty’s Secretary General Kumi Naidoo had visited Google’s Mountain View headquarters in California last week to reiterate concerns over Dragonfly and “the apparent disregard for transparency and accountability around the project.”
If Google is still developing the censored search engine, Bacciarelli said, “it’s not only failing on its human rights responsibilities but ignoring the hundreds of Google employees, more than 70 human rights organizations, and hundreds of thousands of campaign supporters around the world who have all called on the company to respect human rights and drop Dragonfly.”
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
Notice warns that monks, monasteries offering free lessons to children during winter break will be punished
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) recently banned Tibetan monasteries from offering Tibetan language classes, prompting international human rights organizations to request that Beijing lift the unreasonable ban.
On Dec. 25, the United Front Work Department (UFWD) of the Nangqian County Party Committee in Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, in China’s southwestern Qinghai province, issued an urgent notice to all party committees, local governments and monastery management committees in townships and villages across the county.
It noted the winter vacation was approaching for primary and secondary schools and cautioned that illegal Tibetan language classes in monasteries were on the rise.
To curb this, townships were instructed to strengthen their sense of urgency, improve the way monasteries are organized and roll out measures to rectify the situation.
Monasteries in the region have also been ordered to hang up portraits of party heroes like Mao Zedong or face punishment.
The management committees were told to conduct a thorough review, shut down any Tibetan classes and severely punish monks who had ignored the state’s guidance on education.
Those responsible for organizing the classes must be expelled from the monastery and their religious certificates confiscated, the notice stated. It demanded warnings be pasted in public places to discourage others from following suit.
Meanwhile, any students who attended the unlawful language classes are required to undergo “ideological education” along with their parents.
Rights organizations are much concerned about this notice. Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a statement in New York on Jan. 21 demanding the Chinese authorities immediately rescind the ban.
“China’s ban on the establishment of Tibetan language classes in monasteries is a violation of many basic human rights from education to cultural life,” said Sophie Richardson, HRW’s China director.
“Preventing Tibetan children from contacting monks and monasteries will only fuel Tibetan fears that China aims increasingly to restrict Tibetan culture and religion.“
However, what I really want to ask is: Who was actually offended by the Tibetan language classes being offered by monasteries? Moreover, what regulations did they violate?
In fact, since last year, the CCP has not only prohibited Tibetan cadres (including those already retired) from participating in religious activities but also strictly prohibited Tibetan children from kindergarten to middle school, together with their parents, from participating in religious activities.
Later, the party started to ban students from attending free tutorial classes on the Tibetan language, “in accordance with the law”.
But the CCP does not stipulate that it is illegal to hold a language tutoring class, let alone one that is free of charge and only available on holidays.
Of course, as long as the CCP’s centralized government wants to suppress Tibetans and monasteries, it can — and it can always find a way to fabricate charges against whomever it wishes to condemn.
For a long time now, the CCP has tried to define Tibetan culture and religion as a threat to national security. Amid this attempted suppression, the fact that monasteries have been trying to swim against the tide by offering free Tibetan classes seems to have stung.
The urgent notice from Nangqian was issued by a local chapter of the UFWD.
This working organ has assumed a more central role in the last few years, especially after the party incorporated the National Ethnic Affairs Commission and the State Bureau of Religious Affairs into its fold.
President Xi Jinping has also repeatedly heaped praise on the UFWD and stressed its importance to China’s rejuvenation.
As a department, it specializes in spying, bribery and fraud. More recently, it seems to have adopted a much stricter line after taking responsibility for ethnic and religious affairs. The ban on Tibetan lessons is one of many extreme manifestations of its power.
In Tibet, especially in Yushu Autonomous Prefecture, Tibetan literacy rates among schoolchildren and government officials are appallingly low. This is largely because schools rarely offer courses in Tibetan language anymore; those that do only offer it as an elective course.
This is reflected in the abysmal translation of the notice from Chinese to Tibetan: it is full of typos, confused expressions, bad grammar and wrong sentence structure.
But it is common nowadays to see such poorly written Tibetan language documents churned out by party officials. In fact, the UFWD cadres urgently need to upgrade their Tibetan language skills instead of banning classes; if not, the CCP will surely lose face for being unable to even pen a letter in the local language while raising a crop of useless people.
Faced with this mounting crisis regarding the fate of their mother tongue, monasteries in the region took it upon themselves to organize the language classes during the school winter break.
In doing so, they have been helping to preserve their language while keeping children occupied with healthy pursuits during their vacation. It is little surprise, then, that most parents applauded the move.
Yet the CCP views this as a threat to its hegemonic power — something that must be stopped.
It sent a thinly veiled warning by sentencing Tibetan language and culture advocate Tashi Wangchuk to five years in prison just for petitioning the government at various levels to protect Tibet’s language and culture. He was charged with “inciting separatism.”
There are several reasons why the CCP is so bent on suppressing these language classes.
Chiefly, it aims to cover up the government malpractice that has been going on in terms of education in Tibet. However, it also wishes to diminish the influence of monasteries and prevent a new generation of Tibetans from mastering their language and connecting to their traditional culture.
The goal is to pave the way for the “China Dream” of eliminating Tibetan ethnicity altogether in the interests of a unified nation under the full control of the CCP.
* Sang Jieja is a Tibetan writer, commentator and a former Chinese spokesman for the exiled Tibetan government. He is now studying in Spain.
The U.S. Senate released a report on Wednesday condemning Chinese learning centers at U.S. universities.
The report, issued by the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, called for stringent controls to be placed on learning centers run by the Confucius Institute, which operates at over 100 U.S. universities and receives funding from the Chinese government’s Ministry of Education. If the centers cannot be overhauled, the report says, they should be closed.
The Confucius Institute, which runs more than 500 centers globally, says its mission is “providing Chinese language and cultural teaching resources and services worldwide,” as well as “contributing to the development of multiculturalism and the building of a harmonious world.”
The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, however, is not convinced. “Confucius Institute funding comes with strings that can compromise academic freedom,” its report says.
“The Chinese government approves all teachers, events, and speakers. Some U.S. schools contractually agree that both Chinese and U.S. laws will apply … As one U.S. school administrator explained to the Subcommittee, when something is ‘funded by the Chinese government, you know what you’re getting.’”
The 93-page review claims the centers are used as a propaganda tool “aimed at attempting to change the impression in the United States and around the world that China is an economic and security threat.”
It adds that the branches of the Confucius Institute operate with “little-to-no transparency” and suggests that without “full transparency regarding how Confucius Institutes operate and full reciprocity for U.S. cultural outreach efforts on college campuses in China, Confucius Institutes should not continue in the United States.”
The committee also accused schools of covering up their Chinese government funding. “Nearly seventy percent of U.S. schools with a Confucius Institute that received more than $250,000 in one year failed to properly report that information to the Department of Education,” the report says.
The Confucius Institute has attracted increased criticism since a 2017 report by the National Association of Scholars laid out concerns about its influence on intellectual freedom and close ties with the Communist party.
Last year, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio challenged three Florida universities with Confucius Institutes to a debate on topics that are taboo in China, like political prisoners and the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.
At least three American universities have closed their Confucius Institute centers in 2019. Students at some other schools are pressuring their administrators to cut ties with the organization.