No foreign entity has the right to criticise China over Tibet, a senior official said on Thursday as the region attracts greater international attention.
“No one outside China has the right to point fingers at us when it comes to Tibetan affairs. Any attempt … to separate Tibet from China is doomed to fail,” Wang Yang, the Communist Party official responsible for ethnic affairs, told a ceremony outside the Potala Palace, Lhasa’s best known landmark.
Wang, the number four in the party hierarchy, is leading a delegation from Beijing to mark the 70th anniversary of the arrival in the region of the People’s Liberation Army, an event Beijing describes as a “peaceful liberation”.
The PLA’s presence in the region started in 1951 after an agreement was signed between the central government and the administration in Lhasa.
The current local government of Tibet, known as the Tibetan Autonomous Region, was founded in 1965.
Wang, a member of the seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, also praised the party for fending off “sabotage attempts by the Dalai [Lama] clique”, alongside economic development in the past 70 years.
“Only by following the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership and pursuing the path of socialism, can Tibet achieve development and prosperity,” Wang said, according to the state news agency Xinhua,
Tibet has attracted increased international attention amid China’s growing tensions with the United States and India.
Last month, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Ngodup Dongchung, a representative of the Dalai Lama, prompting angry protests from Beijing.
The US Congress has also passed a number of bills concerning Tibet in the past two years.
Meanwhile, the disputed Himalayan border has become the scene of a prolonged stand-off between China and India including the deadliest clash between the two sides in decades last June.
President Xi Jinping visited the region last month to mark the same anniversary, becoming the first top Chinese leader to visit the region since 1990.
During the trip, he laid down Beijing’s priorities in the region, including political stability, economic development, ecology and border security.
Wang reiterated some of those talking points on Thursday, but also said that “all-round efforts” are needed to promote Chinese language education, and said “Chinese cultural symbols and images of the Chinese nation” should be shared by all ethnic groups.
But in the same speech, Wang pledged greater protections for traditional Tibetan culture and said the Communist Party has committed huge resources to promote the use of the Tibetan language.
Tibet has been a decades-long headache for Beijing since the Dalai Lama broke with the Chinese leadership and fled to India in 1959.
Bouts of ethnic and religious unrest rocked the Tibetan capital Lhasa in 1989 and 2008. China has accused the exiled spiritual leader of instigating the disturbances, but rights groups said they had been triggered by Beijing’s hardline policies and reflected people’s desperation.