One thing I often struggle with is how to effectively challenge an institution as powerful as the CCP. However, like all things in life, we must go one step at a time. Often, with our advocacy, the first step must be to document the human rights abuses, especially as they continue to worsen. The Tibet Advocacy Coalition (TAC) recently took that step recently, with the publication of TAC's new report: Assaulting Identity: China’s New Coercive Strategies in Tibet.

Click the photo above to read the report!

The TAC, which consists of Students for a Free Tibet and several other Tibet advocacy groups, was founded to coordinate Tibet advocacy at the UN and to monitor and highlight the situation in Tibet. The newest report details findings on the most recent policies implemented by the CCP, which aim to dismantle Tibetan identity and culture.

Here are a couple of the key findings:

• The rise of residential schooling has separated Tibetan children from their families and has limited their ability to learn about their culture and to speak their mother tongue.
• This schooling strategy also includes intensive, “military style” political indoctrination, aiming to control the minds of Kindergarteners.
• New policies on employment and relocation have amounted to an all-out assault on the traditional nomadic lifestyle common in Tibet.
• Arbitrary detentions of practicing Buddhists have led to forced denouncements of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, aiming to separate all Tibetans from any loyalty to the Dalai Lama.

All of these policies have the goals of “breaking lineage, breaking roots, breaking connections, and breaking origins,” ensuring that all Tibetans are wholly dependent on the Chinese Communist Party.

This image from state media shows released former prisoners in military fatigues in training at a vocational skills school in the Kumbum area, Qinghai.

Thankfully, this report has already helped to fight back against these atrocious policies. The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) has already issued a statement recognizing the concerning findings of the TAC report. To build on this success, SFT has sent out a letter, together with the International Tibet Network and Tibet Justice Center, to US members of Congress affiliated with IPAC. This letter requests that they officially present these concerns to Secretary of State Antony Blinken; furthermore, the letter requests a meeting with the members of Congress to discuss the human rights situation in Tibet.

I look forward to keeping you updated, and to the day when countless Tibetans no longer need to risk their safety to provide the information for a report of this nature.

In Solidarity,

Pema Doma
Campaigns Director