Tibet rights group condemns setting up of Chinese propaganda centre in Lhasa

China’s efforts to control the world’s perception of Tibet were once again seen when the Chinese government recently inaugurated the “Tibet International Communication Center” in Lhasa.

A report by the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) said that such a move by the Chinese administration is another way to promote the country’s ongoing campaign to reshape global public opinion on Tibet.

ICT claimed that the establishment of such institutions in Tibet promotes China’s propaganda on Tibet, which it mentioned earlier. And it expects that in the future China will go even further in its attempt to dominate the global conversation through its disinformation narrative and story.

In a previous report released in January this year titled ‘China’s External Propaganda on Tibet: Erasing Tibet to Tell a Good Chinese Story’, ICT claimed that “China’s Tibet policy has been the subject of international scrutiny since its invasion and subsequent occupation of Tibet in 1959. The Chinese government knows there is a political problem in Tibet. But rather than solving it, one of its ways is to falsify the situation and use various means to control the narrative about Tibet, with the aim of reshaping its portrayal in the global discourse. This report examines China’s recent external propaganda efforts regarding Tibet, and sheds light on the motives and tactics.”

According to the ICT report, the latest propaganda centre by China was established following the “Roundtable Meeting on Building an Effective International Communication System for Tibet”, jointly organised by the Propaganda Department of the Tibet Autonomous Region Party Committee and the China Foreign Languages ​​Bureau. The centre is the result of a group study session of the Political Bureau of the CCP Central Committee in May 2021.

ICT claimed that the immediate result of the Politburo of the CCP Central Committee appears to be that the CCP is trying to replace the internationally recognized country’s name “Tibet” with the Sinicized term “Xizang” in global discourse.

Furthermore, the same report claims that such a renaming policy, which was cautiously rolled out in late 2021 during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, is in line with CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s decade-old vision of “telling a good Chinese story” on the global stage.

The report also claims that China will soon intensify its use of state-controlled media platforms to spread its view on Tibet.

The ICT also expressed concern that such an institution would be used to marginalise Tibetan voices and hide the ongoing persecution in Tibet.

The report claims that “this concern is justified, as China is making extensive use of modern technology and media platforms to control information and rhetoric about Tibet.”