In May 2024, Gonpo Namgyal, chief of the village of Ponkor in the Qinghai Province, was arrested along with more than twenty other Tibetans for working to preserve the Tibetan language and Tibetan culture, according to “two sources who spoke on condition of anonymity due to safety concerns.”
The arrestees were guilty of teaching the Tibetan language and encouraging Tibetans to speak it.
Gonpo Namgyal (shown above) died three days after being released on December 15, evidently after being brutally tortured (Radio Free Asia, December 23).
“The electric burn and torture marks on Gonpo Namgyal show he suffered severe abuse and repeated torture in the past seven months under Golok prefecture police,” said the first source…
The arrest and detainment of Namgyal and the others come amid heightened efforts by the Chinese government to limit the use of the Tibetan language and to expand the use of Mandarin among Tibetans….
“Among those who continue to be detained, Tibetans are deeply concerned about the well-being of Khenpo Dhargye, who is highly revered and served as the main spiritual guide for the local people,” said the second source.
The Chinese government is often mute about the whereabouts and condition of the innocent people it arbitrarily imprisons. It also has a habit of releasing some of the prisoners it abuses when they’re on the verge of death.
In the name of cultural unity, the party-state wants Mandarin “to be spoken and understood in 85% of the country as a whole and 80% of rural areas by 2025.”
The Chinese Communist Party will use any means to achieve these numbers.
In addition to outlawing the teaching of Tibetan and imprisoning and torturing Tibetans who seek to preserve Tibetan language and culture, the government has closed many Tibetan schools and compelled many children to instead attend state boarding schools where, separated from their families, they must learn and speak Mandarin to the exclusion of their native language.
Outside of Tibet, resistance to China’s brutal cultural agenda is represented by such efforts as the painstaking preparation of a 223-volume dictionary of the Tibetan tongue that this month was presented to the Library of Congress.
