Tibet: Fewer Tibetans on Lhasa’s Key Ruling Body
New York, November 7 – The Chinese government’s decision to reduce the number of Tibetans on Lhasa’s most powerful ruling body raises concerns about the role of Tibetans in administering the region, Human Rights Watch said today.
Appointments made in September to the Chinese Communist Party’s committee in
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The Chinese government is subject to constitutional requirements which stipulate that the leaders of an “autonomous area,” such as the Tibet Autonomous Region, and most of the representatives to the People’s Congress, must be members of the main nationality that lives there. But these laws apply to the government and the Congress, not to the Chinese Communist Party, which controls the government and holds all final decision-making powers.
The shift away from Tibetan participation in the
On September 25, 2006, the annual congress of the Lhasa City Party Committee confirmed the appointment of a new party secretary, Qin Yizhi, the first ethnic Chinese leader of the city since July 1980. The seven previous holders of this position since 1980 were all Tibetans, of whom three went on to become governors of the Tibet Autonomous Region.
In 1986, 80 percent of the members of the city’s party committee were Tibetan, and in 1997, 55 percent of its leading members were Tibetan – but only eight of the 30 members of the new party committee of Lhasa are Tibetan, judging by the names given in the Lhasa Evening News on September 26 (almost all Tibetans in the Tibet Autonomous Region use Tibetan names). At just over 26 percent, this is believed to be the lowest percentage of Tibetans on a party committee in the city since 1966.
In recent decades, the Chinese Communist Party regularly included Tibetan members in party committees. Although the Chinese Communist Party has never allowed a Tibetan to become Party Secretary of the Communist Party in the Tibet Autonomous Region, it had allowed Tibetans to run the
“The participation of Tibetans should be increasing, not falling to historically low levels,” said