Washington, DC — Unlike most of his predecessors, the newly appointed party chief of the Tibet Autonomous Region, Wu Yingjie is known for his involvement advancing hardline Party campaigns and crackdowns in Tibet, said the Washington-based Tibet advocacy group.
The International Campaign for Tibet, has released a new report September 2nd on the appointment of a new leader in the Tibet Autonomous Region. According to the report, he is associated with hardline campaigns and committed to defaming His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
The appointment of the top party leader in the region is a post that has never been held by a Tibetan, and was announced amidst a reshuffling of leadership in the area. According to ICT's report, Wu Yingjie has spent almost his entire career in Tibet, unlike most of his predecessors, and is known for his involvement advancing hardline Party campaigns and crackdowns.
In his first statement as Party Secretary, Wu Yingjie – a former propaganda official - emphasized the key importance of a deepened ‘struggle’ against the Dalai Lama, using retrograde political language stating that the authorities must “expand positive propaganda, thoroughly expose and criticize the Dalai,” which seems to suggest Wu's appointment indicates a continuity of tough policies in the region.
The report goes on to list crackdowns in the Tibetan region that Wu has been involved with, including forcing villagers of Driru (Chinese: Biru) to display Chinese national flags in 2014, ultimately ending in an incident of police firing into unarmed crowds and mass arrests. He also has been involved in monastic reformation, allegedly forcing anti-Dalai Lama and pro-Chinese Communist party propoganda into the monasteries.
Wu Yingjie, who was born in Shangdong, began his career at the Central Party School in Beijing, and unusually for a TAR Party Secretary, has spent virtually his entire career in Tibet, beginning in the closing years of the Cultural Revolution on a farm in Nyingtri (Chinese: Linzhi). He even went so far as to describe himself as a “local Tibetan”, saying that he was “brought up by the Party, the people, the Tibetan Plateau and all the ethnic groups of Tibet” and that he loves "the land and the hardworking people here."
Tibet was invaded by Communist China, starting in 1949, Beijing calls a "peaceful liberation". Since that time, over 1.2 million out of 6 Tibetans have been killed, over 6000 monasteries have been destroyed— the acts of murder, rape and arbitrary imprisonment, torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment were inflicted on the Tibetans inside Tibet.
Tibet was traditionally comprised of three main areas— U-tsang, Kham and Amdo provinces, covers an area of 870,000 square miles. After 1949, other Tibetan areas (Amdo and Kham) were incorporated into the neighboring, Chinese provinces of Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan, and Yunnan.
