Activists tell US Congress of China’s far-reaching cultural erasure

WASHINGTON - A campaign by China’s government to rewrite the cultural identity and history of the country’s minority ethnic groups and political dissidents is increasingly being waged on American shores, activists told a U.S. congressional hearing on Thursday.

The Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian and Chinese activists said that while the United States once stood as a bastion of free speech and a redoubt of cultural preservation for groups targeted by the Chinese Communist Party, many now feared Beijing’s extensive reach.

Rishat Abbas, the president of the U.S.-based Uyghur Academy, told the hearing of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China that his sister Gulshan had been jailed in China on a 20-year sentence due to his and other family member’s anti-government activism abroad.

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The U.S. government says China’s government is carrying out a “genocide” against the mostly Muslium Uyghur minority in the country’s far-west. Many Uyghurs abroad actively campaign to end the genocide and to do what they can to preserve their language and culture.

But many look to the treatment of the family members, still trapped in China, of those Uyghurs who choose to speak out, and decide it’s safer not to provoke the Chinese Communist Party, even from abroad.

“My sister’s imprisonment is a clear action of retaliation,” he said. “Her detention exposes the CCP’s aggressive policies that target Uyghurs simply for their identity and for the activism of their relatives abroad.”

“She has never engaged in any form of advocacy in her life,” he said.

Abbas said he was nonetheless not deterred, and hoped to one day bring a Uyghur-language textbook developed in the United States back to China’s Xinjiang region, where Uyghurs live under surveillance.

Lawfare

It’s not only Uyghur immigrants who have been targeted.

In years gone by, American higher education institutions like Stanford University fearlessly curated U.S.-based historical archives about events censored by the Chinese government, said Julian Ku, a constitutional law professor at New York’s Hofstra University.

But things have changed.

Ku pointed to a lawsuit brought in the United States by the Beijing-based widow of the late Li Rui – a former secretary to Mao Zedong and later dissident who donated diaries to Stanford.

Stanford says Li Rui donated the diaries through his daughter, fearing that they would be destroyed by Chinese officials if left in China. But Li Rui’s widow says they are rightfully hers and wants them returned.

The widow, Ku explained, was inexplicably being represented by “some of the most expensive law firms in the United States,” and had likely already racked up legal fees in the “hundreds of thousands of dollars – and probably more – on a widow’s Chinese state pension.”

Describing the tactic as “lawfare,” he suggested that the widow had powerful backers funding the battle, who may not even care if the litigation is ultimately successful.

The nearly four years of costly legal battles sent a message to other U.S. universities, museums or nonprofits to avoid any contentious documents that might attract the attention of Beijing, Ku said.

“They might think, ‘Well, maybe I don’t want to acquire that one, because it might subject me to litigation in China and maybe litigation here in the United States,” he said. “It serves as a deterrence for universities, museums and other institutions in the United States.”

Living in fear

Like Uyghurs, many ethnically Han Chinese in America also fear speaking out against Beijing even while in the United States, said Rowena He, a historian of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing who was last year banned from entering Hong Kong.

“It’s very difficult to not to be emotional being in this room again because I remember 5-10 years ago, when I was first invited to testify to Congress,” He recalled. “I was extremely hesitant, because I was so concerned about my family members, and I was so worried.”

“I lived with fear ever since the day I started teaching and researching the topic of Tiananmen,” she explained, citing the “taboo” around the topic in China, where the massacre is not openly acknowledged.

She said increased funding for curriculums with alternate Chinese histories to the one put forward by Beijing could be one way to counter the “monopoly on historiography” held by China’s government.

“If you go to Chinatown, many people are still supporting the CCP, even though they’re physically in the United States,” He said, noting that figures like herself were denigrated as anti-government.

“Sometimes people call us ‘underground historians,’ but I do not like the term ‘underground,’” she said. “We are the historians.”

Government funding

Geshe Lobsang Monlam, a Tibetan monk who authored a 223-volume Tibetan dictionary and helps lead efforts to preserve Tibetan language outside of China, said one of the main obstacles for Tibetans outside China outside of pressure from Beijing was finding needed funds.

“Inside Tibet, the young Tibetans have appeared powerless in their ability to preserve and promote their language,” the monk said, pointing to concerted efforts to erase use of the Tibetan language as young Tibetans grow proficient in using Mandarin through smartphones.

“If there can be assistance by the United States to help procure technological equipment that can enable those of us in exile to continue our work on preservation of Tibetan culture and language and way of life … that would be very useful for us,” he explained.

Temulun Togochog, a 17-year-old U.S.-born Southern Mongolian activist, similarly appealed for more funding for cultural preservation.

Togochog said while the decreased global focus on the plight of Mongolians in China had allowed her family in the United States to openly teach her about Mongolian culture and their native language with little fear of reprisal, resources were few and far between.

Mongolians living in China’s Inner Mongolia were increasingly facing a similar treatment to Tibetans and Uyghurs, she said, with a “systematic oppression and erasure of Mongolian language” taking place in favor of what is called “patriotic education” lionizing the communist party.

In September 2020, many Southern Mongolians protested the policies through coordinated school boycotts and strikes, but there was little news coverage of the ensuing mass arrests, she explained.

“Approximately 300,000 southern Mongolian students joined the movement,” she said. “The Chinese government responded harshly, detaining and placing under house arrest 8-10,000 people.”

The young activist called on Congress to fund Mongolian-language programs on Voice of America, which currently do not exist. She said that would help the “minority within a minority” to more actively “preserve their language, culture and identity” from erasure.

Edited by Malcolm Foster.