Today we commemorate the 67th anniversary of the National Tibetan Uprising.
For decades, the Chinese Communist Party has enforced its illegal occupation of Tibet under shifting slogans—“liberation”, “class struggle”, “land reform”, “socialist transformation”, the “Cultural Revolution”, “development”, and “ecological relocation”. The slogans change. The structure does not. Tibet has been ruled without Tibetan consent.
Land has been seized. Communities dismantled. Monasteries attacked. Tibetan language suppressed. Imprisonment and coercion have never ceased. Historical records and testimony document mass death: over decades, more than one million Tibetans died through execution, imprisonment, famine, and other non-natural causes. Tens of thousands have been jailed for exercising basic freedoms.
The struggle for freedom has been repeatedly suppressed, but it has not been extinguished. It endures—in memory, in language, and in the collective will of Tibetans across the world.
Today, four realities expose the continuing structure of domination: land, environment, language and culture, and religion.
- First, land and livelihood
Traditional Tibetan life is rooted in pastoral and farming systems adapted to the plateau’s fragile ecology. In recent decades, mass settlement policies have driven about 930,000 rural Tibetans from their homes. Under the so-called “labour transfer programme”, nearly 650,000 Tibetans were subjected to labour transfers in 2024 alone, separated from traditional livelihoods. Between 2000 and 2025, about 3.36 million Tibetans have been affected by housing reconstruction and settlement campaigns—policies designed to convert nomadic and rural life into a fixed system under state control. This is not merely economic adjustment: it extends and tightens state control over land, and further strips Tibetans of the right to decide their own future.
- Second, the environment.
The Tibetan plateau is the source of Asia’s great rivers and sustains nearly two billion people downstream. Yet dam construction, mining, and infrastructure expansion are fundamentally altering this fragile ecosystem. These projects are imposed from above. Tibetans are excluded from decisions reshaping their land and water. A model grounded in ecological balance is being replaced by one driven by extraction and mega-engineering.
- Third, language and culture.
Around one million Tibetan children are confined to residential boarding schools, separated from their families for most of the year. Mandarin is compulsory in schools and increasingly enforced in workplaces and public life, pushing Tibetan out of daily existence. Language carries memory and identity. When a child’s mother tongue is removed from the centre of life, cultural continuity weakens. Recent laws further restrict Tibetan children’s right to learn their own language. Those who continue to speak and teach Tibetan are not merely preserving culture; they are defending a people’s continuity.
- Fourth, religion.
Repression reaches the spiritual core of Tibetan society. The recognition of reincarnated lamas is controlled by the CCP. Monasteries are subjected to surveillance and political indoctrination; their social role is dismantled. This is not regulation. It is the systematic hollowing out of Tibetan Buddhism.
Land enclosure, resource extraction, linguistic marginalisation, and religious control form one integrated system. Its purpose is not development but political domination over territory, resources, identity, and belief.
- The CCP claims legitimacy through “modernisation” and “poverty alleviation”. But when communities cannot protect their land, use their language, or practise their faith freely, poverty becomes structural and enduring. Modernisation built on occupation, dispossession, repression, and environmental destruction is not progress. It is authoritarian imperialism.
Under CCP rule, China functions as a party-state in which an imperial logic is embedded—a system in which a single party claims permanent authority over people, land, and truth. The alternative is self-determination and democratic participation, rooted in self-rule and basic freedoms.
Tibetans have already demonstrated this alternative. In sixty-seven years of exile, they have built democratic institutions—an elected parliament, elected leadership, civil society organisations, independent media, and education dedicated to safeguarding language and culture. This proves that Tibetans are fully capable of building a modern future not founded on coercion.
Power cannot erase history. It cannot extinguish a people’s identity.
- We remain committed to self-determination, to basic freedoms, and to democratic participation. We will continue—with wisdom, persistence, and self-determination.
Tibet will be free.
