Day: January 17, 2022

The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) is to impose the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s patriotic education program on all students starting in the fall of 2022, a source told RFA.

Newly revised core curriculum requirements will ensure that no student who doesn’t complete the one-credit course titled “Understanding China Today” will be allowed to graduate, the source said.

In response to RFA’s questions, the university confirmed that it would be bringing in courses under its requirement to offer “national security education,” mandatory in all educational establishments from kindergarten up, after Beijing imposed a national security law from July 1, 2020, ushering in a crackdown on public dissent and political opposition.

“In accordance with Article 10 of the Hong Kong national security law, [we are required] to implement national security education through classroom teaching and other means to enhance national security awareness and promote law-abiding behavior by Hong Kong residents,” the university said.

The program will include a special lecture on “national security” as part of student orientation, and training those conducting orientation activities in the same, it said.

The announcement follows similar moves at Hong Kong’s Polytechnic University, Baptist University, Lingnan University and Education University.

The University of Hong Kong, University of Science and Technology and City University have yet to make public the details of their programs.

The move came as a number of outspoken academics announced their retirement from Hong Kong universities, citing their lack of comfort with the new regime in the city’s education system.

Early retirement

Former CUHK politics lecturer Ivan Choy, 56, said he recently took early retirement for the same reason.

“The reasons I retired are even more depressing that the broader changes happening [in Hong Kong], and people no longer recognize the culture at CUHK,” Choy told RFA in a recent interview.

“During the past year, they have disbanded the student union and removed the Goddess of Democracy statues,” Choy said. “All of this made me very sad, and I felt it was time to retire early.”

“I wanted to retire early and find something else to do, to feel good about myself,” he said.

Choy had already discontinued a regular column in the Ming Pao newspaper, which was recently denounced in the CCP’s Ta Kung Pao newspaper, sparking fears that the paper could meet with the same fate as the Apple Daily, and a series of other pro-democracy media outlets that have folded or relocated in recent months.

The Ta Kung Pao accused the Ming Pao of wanting to “take over Apple Daily’s role by inciting others,” after it published an op-ed piece on the removal of the Goddess of Democracy, the Pillar of Shame and other statues marking the 1989 Tiananmen massacre from university campuses across Hong Kong.

Choy said the new climate means that academics like himself are far less likely to comment on social or political matters in future.

“Academics, especially the younger ones, may fear for their careers or their personal safety,” he said. “Also, there is far greater self-censorship in the media, which means fewer commentators.”

A recent report in the pro-CCP Sing Tao Daily said more than half of University of Hong Kong faculty chiefs are planning to leave, if they haven’t already, including Keiji Fukuda, dean of the school of public health, whose contract wasn’t renewed at the end of 2021.

‘National security education’

In November 2021, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) said its president Wei Shyy, who called for an inquiry into the death of HKUST student Chow Tsz-lok during the 2019 protest movement, will step down next year.

In an announcement published the day after the anniversary of Chow’s death, the university said Shyy had notified it that he would resign with effect from Oct. 19, 2022, one year ahead of his five-year term.

Soon afterwards, City University announced that its president Way Kuo would step down in 2023, without explaining the move.

After the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) imposed a draconian national security law on Hong Kong from July 1, 2020, Shyy told reporters he had “no need” to support it, as it was already law, and would have to be obeyed.

The law ushered in a city-wide crackdown on public dissent and peaceful protest, including peaceful actions deemed “subversive” or otherwise undermining of the authorities, that has left dozens of opposition politicians, rights activists and journalists behind bars, and led to the shuttering of prominent unions, civil society organizations and the pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper.

“National security education” — which is being tailored to all age-groups from kindergarten to university — is also mandatory under the law, while student unions and other civil society groups have disbanded, with some of their leaders arrested in recent months.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Authorities in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong are scrambling to contain outbreaks of the omicron variant of COVID-19 ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics, which open in Beijing on Feb. 4.

Games organizers said they had canceled plans to sell tickets to the public for the events. The decision follows an existing ban on international spectators.

Instead, spectators will be “organized” to watch the Games, with no details given about how they would be selected, the Beijing Olympics organizing committee said in a statement, saying the move was made “in order to protect the health and safety of Olympic-related personnel and spectators.”

The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has persisted with a “zero-COVID” approach to the pandemic, often imposing total lockdowns in major cities or across neighborhoods, coupled with mass testing programs to try to contain the spread of cases.

But the highly-transmissible omicron variant has strained the existing system to the maximum in recent weeks, with clusters reported in the northern port city of Tianjin, the southern manufacturing hub of Guangdong, and the Chinese capital.

Japanese camera maker Canon shut down its Zhuhai factory after three decades amid the outbreak, citing “huge operational difficulties” and the “long-term ravages of COVID-19.” Germany’s Volkswagen and Fengtai Motors also shut down their factories in Tianjin.

A Tianjin resident surnamed Yang said the Dagang Oilfield has been shut down.

“We live in the Binhai New District,” Yang said. “The oilfield has been shut down.”

“Last night, my daughter-in-law told me there was a case [in our area] found via a PCR test.”

Under reporting feared

Anyone wanting to travel to Beijing must now supply a negative COVID-19 test before traveling, and another after they arrive, while residents have been told not to travel outside the city ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday in February.

A Beijing resident surnamed Tang said she believes the authorities aren’t reporting all of the positive tests,  in a bid to play down the outbreak ahead of the Olympics.
 
“In Beijing, they were saying the day before yesterday that there was another positive case in a certain community, but they absolutely daren’t report it now, because the Winter Olympics are about to open,” Tang said.

“They daren’t report too many cases these days, if you understand me.”

The fresh outbreaks come as the country gears up for what is usually the largest mass movement of people on the planet, as hundreds of millions crowd trains, planes, buses and highways to get home for the traditional family meal on the eve of the new year.

Complaints continued to filter out of the northern city of Xi’an, which has been under a strict lockdown for nearly three weeks, although the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases fell to just five on Jan. 16.

Official media said the city has now been assessed as a “low-risk area,” and businesses, postal and delivery services and the catering industry are all gradually reopening there.

“We just started back today after getting a notice from our community committee and a work resumption certificate,” Xi’an convenience store clerk Liu Yan told the state-run Shaanxi Daily newspaper. “Anyone coming here to shop needs to have a negative PCR test and a green code [on the test and trace app].”

“Customers are placing orders via our WeChat group or phone and paying by WeChat Pay and other [remote] methods,” Liu said.

Strict measures

But the paper’s video clip prompted further complaints from Xi’an residents saying that they have yet to be allowed to leave their homes. Other comments said the authorities have given scant consideration to the fate of university students wanting to come home for the holiday period, or to patients still awaiting surgery after having their procedures suspended during the lockdown.

A Xi’an resident surnamed Li said many people now doubt that the authorities can contain these outbreaks.

“A lot of people are wondering whether this can actually be controlled, based on the way it’s currently going,” Li said.

“They imposed such strict measures, including preventing people from going out to buy groceries, and yet the outbreaks still grew that fast,” he said.

China’s National Health Commission reported 223 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 across the country, 163 of which were locally transmitted, including 80 in Tianjin, 68 in Henan, and nine in Guangdong, including five in Zhuhai and two in Shenzhen.

There were no new deaths.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

When Sakina Batt, a young Tibetan Muslim from Nepal, wrapped up a four-year job working with the Tibetan government in exile in Dharamsala, India, she received a rare honor: an audience with the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of the Tibetans.

“I completely broke down when I entered the room,” she said. “The environment was such and the vibe was such that even though it was just a virtual audience, I felt so special.”

“Just because I’m a minority, just because I’m a Tibetan Muslim who worked at the administration, I was given that opportunity,” added Batt.

“Most people don’t know about the existence of the Tibetan Muslims,” she told RFA’s Tibetan Servce.

“Religion, of course, is the only difference between devout Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists,” she told RFA. “Other than that, everything is the same. We have the same culture, we have the same traditions and language, what we eat is the same, and what we wear is the same.”

Batt, 30, hails from a community whose origins date at least to the 14^th century, when Muslim merchants from Nepal, China, Kashmir and Ladakh began settling in Tibet, according to information on the website of Tibet House U.S., a Tibetan cultural institution based in New York.

The migrants intermarried with Tibetan Buddhist women, who then converted to Islam, while adopting Tibetan language and customs.

By the 16^th century, these Tibetan Muslims, now known as Khache, formed an integral part of Tibet’s golden age, according to David Atwill, a history professor at Pennsylvania State University who wrote about Tibetan Muslims in his 2018 book Islamic Shangri–La: Inter–Asian Relations and Lhasa’s Muslim Communities, 1600 to 1960.

“In the [Tibet Autonomous Region], most of the Khache have, when forced to choose their officially designated ethnicity … have identified themselves as Tibetan even as they continue to believe in Islam and attend daily prayers at the local mosques,” Atwill wrote in an email. 

After China took over Tibet in 1950 and the Dalai Lama fled to Dharamsala nine years later, many Tibetan Muslims left the region for neighboring areas to preserve the religion and identity they felt were threatened in communist China.

Their biggest community lives in Kashmir, but smaller pockets can also be found in Darjeeling and Kalimpong in the Himalayan foothills of India’s West Bengal state, and in Kathmandu, Nepal, where 120 Tibetan Muslim families live, according to a May 2018 article in the Nepali Times.

They were granted citizenship by India due to the Kashmiri roots. Today, Tibetan Muslims form a very small minority in Tibet.

In the Tibet Autonomous Region, Muslims worship at least five mosques in the capital Lhasa area and exist peacefully with Buddhists, Atwill said.

“Like their Buddhist Tibetan brethren, the Tibetan Muslims face an array challenges to maintaining their Tibetan identity, maintaining fluency in the Tibetan language with the younger generation and identifying ways to promote their Tibetan identity in politically difficult times,” he wrote.

“While in the TAR, they continue to struggle to straddle the ethno-religious divide between being Tibetan and Muslim, when being Muslim is equally assumed to be Hui (not Tibetan),” he said,

Atwill said the Chinese likely chose to treat Tibetan Muslims differently than Uyghurs out of “cautious convenience” and a desire to not drive the Khache into a “common allegiance with the ethnic Tibetan majority,” many of whom want independence from China.

“That said, the Khache, like Muslims across China, remain vigilant and concerned about the stark anti-religious turn of recent policies,” he said.

Under leader X Jinping, China has mounted a campaign to “Sinicize” religion and make adherents place their loyalty in the ruling Cines Communist Party.

To Tibet’s north in Xinjiang, an estimated 1.8 million predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities have been incarcerated in an extensive network of internment camps where they are subject to violence and forced labor.

The current Dalai Lama visited the Tibetan Muslim community in Srinagar, Kashmir, in 2012, regularly receives their representatives, and has participated in inter-religious events, said José Cabezón, the Dalai Lama professor of Tibetan Buddhism and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  

“The Dalai Lama considers Tibetan Muslims an integral part of the Tibetan people, and has tremendous respect for their history and culture,” said Cabezón.

Reported by RFA’s Tibetan Service. Translated by Tenzin Dickey. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.