[Joint House and Senate Hearing, 117 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]



  GROWING CONSTRAINTS ON LANGUAGE AND ETHNIC IDENTITY IN TODAY'S CHINA

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               before the

              CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA

                    ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS

                             SECOND SESSION

                               __________

                         TUESDAY, APRIL 5, 2022

                               __________

 Printed for the use of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China






                 [GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]





              Available at www.cecc.gov or www.govinfo.gov
              
              
                                 ______


                 U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE

47-621 PDF                WASHINGTON : 2022













              CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA

                    LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS



Senate                               House

JEFF MERKLEY, Oregon, Chair          JAMES P. McGOVERN, Massachusetts,  
DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California                 Co-chair
MARCO RUBIO, Florida                 CHRISTOPHER SMITH, New Jersey
JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma             THOMAS SUOZZI, New York
TOM COTTON, Arkansas                 TOM MALINOWSKI, New Jersey
STEVE DAINES, Montana                BRIAN MAST, Florida
ANGUS KING, Maine                    VICKY HARTZLER, Missouri
JON OSSOFF, Georgia                  RASHIDA TLAIB, Michigan
                                     JENNIFER WEXTON, Virginia
                                     MICHELLE STEEL, California

                     EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS

                           Not yet appointed

                      Matt Squeri, Staff Director

                   Todd Stein, Deputy Staff Director

                                  (ii)









                            C O N T E N T S

                              ----------                              

                               Statements

                                                                   Page
Opening Statement of Hon. Jeff Merkley, a U.S. Senator from 
  Oregon; Chair, Congressional-Executive Commission on China.....     1
Statement of Hon. James P. McGovern, a U.S. Representative from 
  Massachusetts; Co-chair, Congressional-Executive Commission on 
  China..........................................................     2
Statement of Gerald Roche, Senior Research Fellow, Department of 
  Politics, Media and Philosophy, La Trobe University............     4
Statement of Enghebatu Togochog, Director, Southern Mongolian 
  Human Rights Information Center................................     6
Statement of Lhadon Tethong, Director, Tibet Action Institute....     7
Statement of Ayup Abduweli, Uyghur writer and linguist...........     9

                                APPENDIX
                          Prepared Statements

Roche, Gerald....................................................    30
Togochog, Enghebatu..............................................    36
Tethong, Lhadon..................................................    39
Abduweli, Ayup...................................................    42

Merkley, Hon. Jeff...............................................    43
McGovern, Hon. James P...........................................    45

                       Submissions for the Record

List of Uyghur Intellectuals Imprisoned in China from 2016 to the 
  Present, submitted by Ayup Abduweli............................    46
Article by the Tibet Action Institute, entitled ``Separated from 
  Their Families, Hidden from the World: China's Vast System of 
  Colonial Boarding Schools Inside Tibet,'' submitted by Lhadon 
  Tethong........................................................    72
CECC Truth in Testimony Disclosure Form..........................   133
Witness Biographies..............................................   135

                                 (iii)









 
  GROWING CONSTRAINTS ON LANGUAGE AND ETHNIC IDENTITY IN TODAY'S CHINA

                              ----------                              


                         TUESDAY, APRIL 5, 2022

                            Congressional-Executive
                                       Commission on China,
                                                    Washington, DC.
    The hearing was held from 10:00 a.m. to 11:48 a.m. via 
videoconference, Senator Jeff Merkley, Chair, Congressional-
Executive Commission on China, presiding.
    Also present: Co-chair James P. McGovern, Senator Jon 
Ossoff, and Representative Michelle Steel.

  OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JEFF MERKLEY, A U.S. SENATOR FROM 
   OREGON; CHAIR, CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA

    Chair Merkley. Good morning. Today's hearing of the 
Congressional-Executive Commission on China entitled ``Growing 
Constraints on Language and Ethnic Identity in Today's China'' 
will come to order.
    Before we turn to the subject of this hearing, I want to 
acknowledge that this is our first hearing since the 
publication of the Commission's annual report on human rights 
conditions and rule of law developments in China. Every year, 
the rigorously researched and sourced work of the Commission's 
nonpartisan research staff makes a profound contribution to the 
understanding of these issues in Congress, the executive 
branch, the academic and advocacy communities, and elsewhere. 
And that is certainly true again this year. When the Chinese 
government seeks to mislead the world about the treatment of 
Chinese citizens and the government's critics, the fact-based 
reporting of the CECC Annual Report shines a light and helps 
document the truth.
    Increasingly, this work informs and catalyzes meaningful 
action. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is the latest 
example in a string of significant laws that grew out of the 
CECC's reporting. As Congress now works to advance China-
focused legislation, it's crucial that it include tangible 
steps advocated by this Commission on a bipartisan and 
bicameral basis, such as expanded humanitarian pathways for 
Hong Kong residents and Uyghurs fleeing Chinese government 
persecution, as well as the creation of a China Censorship 
Monitor and Action Group to protect U.S. businesses and 
individuals from censorship and intimidation.
    I'd like to thank the Commission's staff--incredible team--
for its tireless, professional, and expert work preparing such 
a high-quality report. While it's truly a team effort, with 
significant contributions from everyone on the team, I'd like 
to especially recognize Megan Fluker, who played an integral 
role in eight of these annual reports and managed production of 
the last several before leaving the Commission last fall. So, 
Megan, I know you're on your next chapter, but we really 
appreciate your many years of dedicated effort.
    Some of the most heartbreaking reporting details the 
genocide being perpetrated against Uyghurs and other 
predominantly Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur 
Autonomous Region, as well as elements of eugenics and 
population control policies directed at ethnic minorities. 
These are not the only ways in which the Chinese Communist 
Party seeks to destroy religious and ethnic minorities. Chinese 
authorities have engaged in a years-long campaign of 
sinicization, requiring greater conformity with officially 
sanctioned interpretations of Chinese culture.
    One of the most pernicious aspects of this campaign is the 
targeting of ethnic minorities' language and identity. Under a 
policy that promises bilingual education, authorities in fact 
largely replace instruction in ethnic minority languages with 
instruction in Mandarin Chinese. Meanwhile, only a fraction of 
the languages spoken or signed in China today receive official 
recognition and support, threatening the ability and rights of 
unrecognized language communities to use and develop their 
languages. These policies break promises made to ethnic 
minorities under China's constitution, under the Regional 
Ethnic Autonomy Law, and under international standards such as 
the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the 
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the UN 
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
    In this hearing we will hear from expert witnesses about 
the sinicization campaign that runs afoul of these standards 
for protecting linguistic rights. We'll hear about the recent 
substantial reduction in the use of Mongolian language 
instruction and the harsh crackdown on Mongolian culture that 
followed protests over these policies. We'll hear about 
insidious and widespread efforts to separate Tibetan children 
from their parents, placing them in boarding schools to disrupt 
the intergenerational transmission of mother languages.
    We'll also hear about the detention and imprisonment that 
often befalls those who stand up for language, who stand up for 
cultural rights, including the personal experience of one of 
our witnesses after he opened a Uyghur language kindergarten. 
This coercive assimilation erodes language, culture, and 
identity for ethnic minorities in China. I look forward to 
today's witnesses helping the Commission better understand the 
cost to communities of these policies as we work with Uyghurs, 
Tibetans, Mongolians, and others to protect their cultures from 
destruction.
    I'd now like to recognize Congressman McGovern for his 
opening remarks.

STATEMENT OF HON. JAMES P. McGOVERN, A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE FROM 
MASSACHUSETTS; CO-CHAIR, CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON 
                             CHINA

    Co-chair McGovern. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for 
holding this hearing on language and identity in the People's 
Republic of China. First, I want to join you in welcoming the 
release of the Commission's Annual Report for 2021 last week. 
It comprehensively documents the Chinese government's appalling 
human rights record. And the report took countless hours to 
research, write, fact-check and publish.
    I particularly want to praise the Commission's professional 
staff of researchers for their expertise and skill in producing 
each annual report. They do amazing work and are a valued 
resource for this Commission and the entire Congress. Again, 
these researchers do their work objectively. They check out 
every single fact. The reporting is impeccably accurate, which 
makes this report especially powerful. Again, I can't thank 
them enough. Those of both parties who care about human rights 
ought to recognize their incredible work.
    Let me quote from author James Baldwin, in a 1979 essay. He 
writes, ``Language is a political instrument, means, and proof 
of power. People evolve a language in order to describe, and 
thus control, their circumstances, or in order not to be 
submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate. And, if 
they cannot articulate it, they are submerged.'' Baldwin was 
writing in a different context, but his message is one that 
anthropologists and political scientists confirm, that language 
is the core of a people's identity.
    The People's Republic of China is a multilingual society. 
There are 56 official languages and hundreds more that are not 
formally recognized by the state. On paper, language is 
protected under Chinese law. China's constitution gives ethnic 
minorities the freedom to use and develop their own spoken and 
written languages and to preserve or reform their own ways and 
customs. In practice, however, we are witnessing the exact 
opposite. Government policies appear to promote standard 
Mandarin at the expense of other languages. This is happening 
as the Party under Xi Jinping imposes a coercive conformity 
across all facets of society.
    This trend provides the context and the central question 
for this hearing. Is the Chinese government and Party 
deliberately eroding the language rights of ethnic minorities 
in a quest for majoritarian political control? And in so doing, 
isn't the government violating rights guaranteed under China's 
constitution and law? This Commission has documented protests 
by Tibetans, Mongolians, and others against restrictions on 
their own languages. These protests are often suppressed. 
People are jailed for simply asking that their guaranteed 
rights be respected.
    So I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today about 
the threats to the Mongolian, Tibetan, and Uyghur languages 
under PRC policies, and what this means for the concept of 
ethnic autonomy. I also look forward to hearing about the 
vulnerability of the hundreds of unofficial languages that also 
deserve protection and preservation. So again, Mr. Chairman, 
thank you for holding this hearing. I will yield back.
    Chair Merkley. Thank you very much, Representative 
McGovern.
    And I'd now like to introduce our panel of witnesses.
    Dr. Gerald Roche is an anthropologist who is currently a 
senior research fellow at La Trobe University, a La Trobe Asia 
fellow, and a co-chair of the Global Coalition for Language 
Rights. His work focuses on issues of power, the state, 
colonialism, and race in Asia. He has researched and written on 
issues of language, oppression, racism, ethnicity, 
urbanization, popular music, and community ritual in the 
region.
    Mr. Enghebatu Togochog is the director of the Southern 
Mongolian Human Rights Information Center, a New York-based 
human rights organization he established in 2001 dedicated to 
protecting the rights of Mongolian people in inner Mongolia. He 
is the chief editor of Southern Mongolia Watch and has 
testified before the UN Human Rights Council, the UN Permanent 
Forum on Indigenous Issues, the UN Forum on Minority Issues, 
the UN Committee against Torture, and the European Parliament.
    Ms. Lhadon Tethong is a co-founder and director of the 
Tibet Action Institute. She served previously as executive 
director of Students for a Free Tibet and led the campaign to 
condemn China's rule of Tibet in the lead-up to the 2008 
Beijing Olympic Games. Her real-time accounts of her travels 
through Beijing on her blog, one of the first in the Tibetan 
world, led to her detention and deportation from China.
    Mr. Ayup Abduweli is a linguist, poet, and former political 
prisoner, a proponent of linguistic rights, and an active 
promoter of Uyghur language education. He opened language 
schools and kindergartens in Xinjiang, for which he was 
subjected to repeated interrogation, harassment, and eventually 
a 15-month detention. After fleeing China with his family in 
2015, he founded Uyghur Hjelp to document the Uyghur plight and 
aid the Uyghur diaspora.
    We'll now turn to our witnesses for their testimony. Five 
minutes each, if you can possibly do that, starting with Dr. 
Roche.

 STATEMENT OF GERALD ROCHE, SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW, DEPARTMENT 
     OF POLITICS, MEDIA AND PHILOSOPHY, LA TROBE UNIVERSITY

    Mr. Roche. Thank you very much. Greetings, everyone, from 
the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. 
Thank you sincerely for this opportunity to testify today. I 
deeply appreciate the chance to share with you all some 
insights into the language rights situation for people in 
China. And I thank the Commission for bringing attention to 
this important topic.
    This topic is important because defending language rights 
ensures dignity, freedom, and equality for all people. And who 
among us would want to live without any of these? When people 
are denied language rights, it severs their connection to their 
family, community, and heritage. It excludes them from 
political participation. When people are denied language rights 
in vital services like healthcare, their lives are at risk, and 
when they are denied language rights in education, their 
futures are at risk. Millions of people in China today face 
these challenges due to the state's denial of language rights. 
This happens primarily in two ways, erasure and suppression. 
Erasure refers to the state's refusal to acknowledge the 
existence of most of China's languages by calling them 
dialects. To put this in perspective, imagine if German, 
English, and Norwegian were defined as dialects of a single 
language. Imagine if your government told you what language you 
speak. How would you feel?
    In China, erasure means that from the country's 300-or-so 
languages, only about 56 are recognized as languages--one for 
each of the country's nationalities. Most people in China speak 
unrecognized languages, whether they belong to the Han majority 
or to a minority group. Most people in China are therefore 
completely denied their language rights. Our research 
demonstrates the catastrophic impact of this denial in Tibet. 
Tibetan people in China use about 30 unrecognized languages, 
not including Tibetan. People who use these unrecognized 
languages face linguistic barriers everywhere--in school, 
media, government, healthcare, the legal system and so on. When 
the government refuses to remove these barriers, people are 
forced to adapt by changing their language to either Tibetan or 
Chinese.
    Meanwhile, recognized languages like Uyghur, Mongolian, and 
Tibetan are suppressed. Suppression happens through the gradual 
dilution of the Chinese constitution's language freedoms, and 
the pervasive underimplementation of protections for minority 
languages. Suppression also takes place through the 
encroachment of the national language, Mandarin, into spaces 
for minority languages--part of a broader plan to universalize 
Mandarin among the entire population. The cumulative impact of 
erasure and suppression means that at least half of China's 
languages are currently losing speakers or signers as they 
switch to dominant languages.
    In an open, democratic society, people would be lobbying 
and protesting to change this unjust system. But in China, 
particularly under Xi Jinping, civil society has become 
increasingly repressed domestically and isolated 
internationally. China's citizens will therefore be denied an 
unprecedented historic opportunity to defend language rights, 
namely the United Nations International Decade for Indigenous 
Languages, which starts this year. China will prevent its 
citizens from participating in this event because it denies 
that it has indigenous people, and it denies its colonial 
history. The goal of this decade is leaving no one behind and 
no one outside. We have a responsibility to extend this 
inclusion to people in China, to ensure they are not left out 
or behind.
    So here are some suggestions for how we can do this: One, 
the U.S. must pressure China to clarify whether its citizens 
are able to identify as indigenous and whether they can 
participate in the UN Decade. And an ideal time to do this is 
China's upcoming Universal Periodic Review in the UN Human 
Rights Council in November 2023. Secondly, China's efforts to 
isolate its citizens from international civil society need to 
be countered. We must raise awareness inside China of language 
rights, and of activities taking place globally during the UN 
Decade.
    Third, with specific regard to Tibet, earmarking funding 
for Tibet's unrecognized languages will make a huge difference. 
This can be done using funds allocated under the Tibetan Policy 
Act. Fourth, finally, the U.S. needs to lead by example. The UN 
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples should be 
formally endorsed, and its obligations respected. Failing to do 
so will enable China to deflect attention from their language 
rights violations and onto America's.
    Thank you for listening and I welcome your questions.
    Chair Merkley. Thank you very much for your testimony.
    Now we'll turn to Mr. Togochog.

 STATEMENT OF ENGHEBATU TOGOCHOG, DIRECTOR, SOUTHERN MONGOLIAN 
                HUMAN RIGHTS INFORMATION CENTER

    Mr. Togochog. Thank you, Mr. Chair, Mr. Co-chair, and 
distinguished members of the Commission for holding this 
hearing. My name is Enghebatu Togochog. I'm a Mongolian from 
Southern Mongolia, also known as Inner Mongolia. What's 
happening in Southern Mongolia today is what the Mongolians 
regard as wholesale cultural genocide, aimed at total 
eradication of Mongolian language, culture, and identity.
    In 2020, responding to China's new language policy, the 
Mongolians carried out a massive resistance movement. Three 
hundred thousand Mongolian students went on a total school 
strike. The Chinese authorities responded with massive arrests. 
An estimated 8- to 10,000 protesters have been arrested, 
detained, imprisoned, and placed under house arrest. Eleven 
lost their lives in defense of their right to their mother 
tongue.
    What followed this heavyhanded crackdown was a full-scale 
cultural genocide campaign, the scope of which has extended far 
beyond the simple switch of languages in schools. ``Learn 
Chinese and become a civilized person,'' has been an official 
slogan publicly promoting Chinese supremacy. Mongolian language 
programs have been removed from radio, television, and 
newspapers, or replaced with a Chinese one. Students are 
subjected to military-style training and must sing red songs to 
extol the greatness of China. Teachers are brought to the 
Communist red base Yan'an to receive patriotic education.
    To justify the campaign, the Chinese National Congress 
announced last year that local laws on the right to education 
in minority languages are unconstitutional. The subjects of 
Mongolian culture and history have been removed from the 
curriculum for emphasizing Mongolian ethnic identity. All 
extracurricular activities for learning Mongolian have been 
banned. Mongolian traditional arts and performance have been 
altered to adopt a Chinese style to reflect the superiority of 
Chinese culture. Mongolian sacred sites have been taken over by 
Chinese traditional art performers, and Mongolian customs and 
ritual ceremonies are scorned and mocked.
    Sculptures, monuments, and buildings with Mongolian 
characteristics have been taken down. Signs in Mongolian have 
been removed from schools, buildings, streets, and parks. 
Mongolian publications are banned, books have been removed from 
shelves, printing and copy services have been ordered not to 
provide service or any materials written in Mongolian. Postal 
and courier services are instructed not to deliver any 
Mongolian books and publications.
    Starting in December 2020, a regionwide training program 
called Training for the Foreign Inculcation of the Chinese 
Nationality Common Identity was launched. All Mongolian 
students, teachers, government employees, Party members, and 
ordinary herders were targeted for the training. A 47-page 
pamphlet, marked as an internal document, was issued to detail 
the urgency and goal of the training, and to compel Mongolians 
to fully accept Chinese identity and Chinese culture. The 
document also warns Mongolians that the wrong path of narrow 
nationalism can lead to the return of national separatism.
    The trainees told us that during the training they had to 
denounce their narrow nationalism and nationalistic feeling. 
They had to surrender all of their social contacts and the 
details of their online activities to the authorities. They 
were forced to confess their supposed mistakes, including 
wearing Mongolian clothes and singing Mongolian songs. They had 
to answer multiple questionnaires designed to assess their 
ideological improvement. One of the questions, a trainee said, 
was: How many Chinese friends do you have? Those who answered 
``none'' or ``few'' had to go through further training before 
they were allowed to graduate. Before their release, all 
trainees signed a paper promising that they would not engage in 
any activities highlighting Mongolian characteristics or 
expressing Mongolian nationalistic feeling. And this is what's 
happening in Southern Mongolia today.
    Considering these deteriorating conditions--China's 
determination to erase the Mongolian language, culture, and 
identity and the lack of support from the international 
community--I would like to make the following recommendations 
to the United States Congress: One, conduct further hearings 
and testimonies to investigate the serious human rights 
violations in Southern Mongolia, in particular the ongoing 
cultural genocide. Two, establish a Mongolian language 
broadcast on Voice of America and/or Radio Free Asia to help 
Southern Mongolians have access to the free and democratic 
world. Three, introduce and pass legislation similar to the 
Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act and Tibetan Policy and Support 
Act to support the 6,000,000 Southern Mongolians in their 
effort to defend their basic human rights and fundamental 
freedoms. Thank you.
    Chair Merkley. Thank you very much for your testimony about 
the many, many ways that Mongolian language and culture are 
being impacted.
    We now turn to Ms. Tethong.

             STATEMENT OF LHADON TETHONG, DIRECTOR,
                     TIBET ACTION INSTITUTE

    Ms. Tethong. Thank you, Chairman McGovern, Chairman 
Merkley, members of the Committee, and CECC staff for this 
opportunity.
    As a Tibetan who has been working on the Sino-Tibetan 
conflict for more than two decades, I can say safely it takes a 
lot to shock me. But last year, when my colleagues and I began 
research into reports that Tibetan children were being sent to 
state-run boarding schools at an alarmingly high rate, we were 
stunned by what we found. Under the cover of darkness of 
China's near-total information blackout of Tibet, the Chinese 
authorities have been constructing a massive colonial boarding 
school system that threatens the future survival of the Tibetan 
people and nation. These residential boarding schools are the 
cornerstone of a broader effort to wipe out Tibetan resistance 
by eliminating the three pillars of Tibetan identity--language, 
religion, and way of life. The schools streamline and fast-
track this by ripping Tibetan children from their roots, by 
stealing the language from their tongues, and trying to replace 
their identity with Chinese identity.
    In our report we find that at least 800,000 to 900,000 
Tibetan children--representing nearly 80 percent of all Tibetan 
children ages 6 to 18--are now separated from their families 
and living in colonial boarding schools. And this number does 
not include 4- and 5-years-olds being made to live in boarding 
preschools. These children are forbidden from practicing 
Tibetan Buddhism, they're cut off from authentic Tibetan 
culture, and they're not allowed to study in their own 
language. Instead, they're forced to study in Chinese, under 
mostly Chinese teachers, from textbooks that represent China's 
history and culture, while completely denying Tibet's own rich 
and ancient history and culture. On top of this, they're 
subjected to intense political indoctrination.
    Most Tibetan parents have no choice but to send their 
children away to these schools because China has shut down all 
the village schools and nearly all the alternatives. Parents 
who try to resist or refuse are threatened, harassed, fined, 
and face other serious punishment. One person from Tibet 
described the anguish of these separations for young children: 
``I know of children aged four to five who don't want to be 
separated from their mothers. They are forced to go to boarding 
schools. In some cases, the children cry for days, sticking to 
their mother's laps, begging not to be sent away and even 
refusing to go back.''
    My 5-year-old son started kindergarten this year. To think 
of sending him away at this age to live apart from me for the 
rest of his school-age life, to think I wouldn't be able to 
comfort him or protect him day to day is devastating. And to 
know China's doing this intentionally so that Tibetan children 
are isolated from the influence of their parents and families 
is enraging.
    In the U.S., Canada, and Australia, residential boarding 
schools for Native American, indigenous, and aboriginal 
children are finally recognized as horrific and shameful 
mistakes of the past. Now is seen as the time for inquiry, 
reparations, and apologies, not as a time when any government 
would be deliberately implementing this genocidal model, and on 
such a massive scale. But this is exactly what Beijing is 
doing. China's colonial boarding schools, together with 
policies that severely restrict the use of Tibetan language, 
that seek to hollow out Tibetan Buddhism and end the nomadic 
way of life, threaten Tibetan existence in every space in 
Tibet. What's happening in front of our eyes is the 
annihilation of Tibet as a civilization, as an identity, as a 
culture. It is cultural genocide. And Tibetans everywhere know 
it.
    Just last month, 25-year-old Tsewang Norbu, a famous 
Tibetan pop star, self-immolated in front of the Potala Palace 
in Lhasa. He had every reason to live. He was young, 
successful, college educated. He had a family and resources. 
His whole life was ahead of him and he gave it all up in the 
ultimate sacrifice at the most meaningful location and 
political moment for Tibetans, on the eve of the anniversary of 
the 1959 Tibetan national uprising. His life and lyrics suggest 
he did this because he wanted to send a message that no matter 
what personal success we may achieve, what matters most is our 
roots, our homeland, our culture, and our freedom to live on 
our own land and be who we are.
    Tsewang Norbu's final act illuminates a simple truth that's 
held strong in Tibet for 70 years under Chinese occupation--
that generation after generation, Tibetans have shown that 
their love and allegiance is to Tibet, to the mountains, to the 
grasslands, to our mother tongue, our great sages, and 
spiritual teachers and leaders, most especially to His Holiness 
the 14th Dalai Lama, and not to China. Because Tibetans are not 
Chinese.
    Though Tibetans and Tibet continue to battle courageously 
against China's onslaught, they can't do it alone. They need 
people and governments in the free world to step up, and there 
is so much more that can be done. I think global opposition to 
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has shown us how much the 
international community can do. We need to use every tool 
available to fight these genocidal dictators, because a state 
that so blatantly flouts international rules and norms, and 
indeed actively seeks to undermine them, threatens us all. The 
fate of Tibetans, Uyghurs, Southern Mongolians, Hong Kongers, 
and Taiwanese affects us all.
    I'll end my remarks here and save my specific 
recommendations for the Q&A. Also I'd like to submit our report 
on China's colonial boarding school system in Tibet for the 
record. Thank you very much.
    Chair Merkley. Thank you. Without objection, it will be 
submitted for the record.
    Now we'll turn to Mr. Abduweli.

                  STATEMENT OF AYUP ABDUWELI,
                   UYGHUR WRITER AND LINGUIST

    Mr. Abduweli. Thank you all for giving me this opportunity. 
Let me start with the historical narrative. After Chinese 
Communist rule, the Uyghur language faced difficulty--first, 
the Uyghur alphabet was revised. That meant that after 1949, 
Uyghurs could not read what their ancestors had written. For 
example, I cannot read what my grandpa had written in Uyghur. 
And second, in 1956, the Chinese government changed the Uyghur 
alphabet to Cyrillic and then we had another period of 
illiteracy and people could not read after five years--after 
1940. In 1962, the Uyghur alphabet changed a third time, to 
Chinese phonetic Pinyin, like the Latin alphabet. And it was 
used until 1979. And then in 1982 it changed again. Since 1949, 
Uyghurs have experienced the alphabet changing four times. That 
means that we had millions of people becoming illiterate 
because of this alphabet changing.
    Since 1982, our alphabet hasn't been changed, but our 
orthography, our spelling system, changed a lot--five times--
and it gave people a lot of trouble, and you could not 
communicate with the written language because of this. In 1997, 
the Uyghur language started to be restricted, and in 2002, the 
Uyghur language was removed from higher education--from 
university, community college, and technology college. Uyghur 
was removed and replaced by Han Chinese in the education 
system. Because of this, in 2006, Uyghur intellectuals in 
Urumqi started the campaign to restore the legal rights of 
Uyghurs. This peaceful campaign ended up with one Uyghur 
sentenced to 12 years, Memtimin Elyar, and more than 10 Uyghurs 
were sentenced to different terms.
    In 2011, I started my mother language campaign. I had my 
mother language kindergarten and because of this, I was 
arrested on August 19, 2013. I spent 428 days in a Chinese 
detention center. And I was questioned, interrogated more than 
six months, and forced to ``confess'' that my goal in this 
mother language campaign was to separate from China and build 
an independent Uyghur country. I was sexually abused and 
experienced six months of torture. I spent 428 days without 
sunshine and without an appropriate toilet and without any 
healthcare.
    Since 2017, the Chinese policy against Uyghurs has totally 
worsened. Uyghurs were totally banned from public life. Uyghur 
textbooks were collected and burned in front of the students, 
and Uyghur textbook editors were arrested. According to Uyghur 
Hjelp documentation, about 400 Uyghur writers who participated 
in editing these Uyghur textbooks got arrested. And 1,000 
mother language teachers got arrested. Among them is my friend, 
Ehmetjan Jume, sentenced to 14 years. And three Uyghur 
intellectuals were sentenced to life imprisonment, and one was 
sentenced to death. His name is Sattar Sawut.
    Second, Han Chinese officials were assigned to every Uyghur 
family so Uyghurs speak Chinese at home and have their cultural 
practices monitored. And third, Uyghur kids were displaced from 
their homes and forced to study at boarding school. According 
to Adrian Zenz, there are more than 900,000 Uyghur kids in 
boarding school right now. As we know, up to 3,000,000 Uyghurs 
are in concentration camps and their kids are in special kids' 
camps.
    I met two of them, because they are Turkish citizens, and 
they were saved by the Turkish government. I met them in 
Istanbul in December 2011. When I asked, they had forgotten 
their language in two years. They were arrested in March 2017 
and released in December 2019. In two years they totally forgot 
their mother language. At the time of their arrest, the younger 
one was four years old. The other one was six years old. In two 
years they forgot their language 100 percent. And we can 
imagine that up to 3,000,000 Uyghurs are in concentration camps 
and their kids are in kids' camp--so-called boarding school. 
And we can imagine what happened to those kids.
    Uyghur kids, displaced from their homeland. For example, my 
niece, Saeda, was displaced from her home and from her 
homeland. Now she is studying in a Chinese boarding school in a 
Chinese-majority city, not at home. And Uyghur kids are forced 
to separate from their family and study and live in boarding 
kindergarten. According to Adrian Zenz, since 2017, boarding 
kindergarten in the Uyghur region increased more than 100 
times. It's increasing very, very, very quickly. Fifth, Uyghur 
kids are sent to kindergarten in inland China, not in Uyghur 
East Turkestan. It's really dangerous and it means that we 
cannot find where they are in the end because they are 
submerged in Chinese society.
    It's really dangerous, especially the kindergarten in 
Xi'an. We don't know whether they are orphans or not. Maybe 
their parents are in concentration camps. They're sent to 
Chinese orphanages. Uyghur kids in kindergarten are not allowed 
to speak Uyghur. A social media video I received said that the 
teacher asked the kid's name and the kid said, ``I am not 
allowed to tell my name in Uyghur. I have to tell my name in 
Chinese.'' Those kids cannot even tell their name in their 
mother tongue because of fear.
    I waited to give this testimony for more than five years. 
Thank you, everyone, for giving me this opportunity. And I 
think we need to take urgent action, especially for those 
innocent kids who are separated from their family, who are 
separated from their homeland, who are separated from their 
culture. Thank you.
    Chair Merkley. Thank you very much for your powerful 
testimony.
    The Senate is holding a vote on a required timeline, so I'm 
going to turn this over to Co-chair Representative McGovern. I 
hope to be back, but it's a little uncertain. It may be back-
to-back votes. I just want to note especially the testimony 
about the combination of the assault on use of the language and 
ripping children out of their family's arms to separate them, 
change the language, change the culture. It's an abomination. 
And you all have made that very clear today, about the 
extensive use both in the Uyghur communities and Mongolian 
communities and Tibetan communities. Thank you. I hope to 
return, but if not I turn this over to Representative McGovern.
    Co-chair McGovern. Thank you very much. And I want to thank 
all the witnesses for your testimony. Let me begin with Mr. 
Togochog. In your testimony you advocate for the creation of a 
Mongolian language service through Voice of America and Radio 
Free Asia. As I understand it, Voice of America has currently, 
or in the past, broadcast in some 80 languages, but never 
Mongolian. Can you expand on what a Mongolian VOA service would 
mean for Southern Mongolians?
    Mr. Togochog. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for the question. 
Neither Voice of America nor Radio Free Asia has any Mongolian 
service at this moment. And I don't think in the past they have 
ever had it either. So having a Mongolian service would be very 
helpful for the Southern Mongolians because the Mongolians do 
not have any channel or any way to communicate with the free 
and democratic world. Their situation, their conditions, are 
largely underreported.
    And so if we have a program, a broadcast service, it will 
help them to understand what's going on in the free and 
democratic world, and at the same time also it will allow them 
to have their voice heard by the international community and 
expose the human rights violations that are happening in 
Southern Mongolia, in particular the ongoing cultural genocide 
that is aiming at the complete erasure of Mongolian language, 
culture, and identity.
    Co-chair McGovern. I appreciate that. And that's, I think, 
a helpful suggestion and it's something we should explore in 
the upcoming appropriations process.
    Ms. Tethong, your testimony references the troubling 
experience in the United States, Canada, and Australia with 
residential boarding schools for indigenous children. Can you 
speak to your perspective as a native of Canada on how the 
Canadian experience can help us view what you report about 
boarding schools in Tibet in terms of accountability, 
restitution, and social justice?
    Ms. Tethong. Thank you. I think it was one of the most 
disturbing parts of what we were doing when we were researching 
and writing this report, that a number of us on the team of 
Tibet actually were Canadian. The unmarked graves of First 
Nation children were being uncovered in Canada from the 
residential schools there as we were writing this report, and 
it was haunting for all of us. It also gave us a great sense of 
urgency to get this story out. Not that they're exactly the 
same situation, but that it's happening again in another place 
in a slightly different way, but the intent is the same.
    I think for us, you know, the key right now is that people 
don't know that this is happening, because the Chinese have so 
effectively blocked information from leaving Tibet. They've 
scared people from saying what's happening on the ground. And 
they are hiding what they're doing. But the Chinese government 
cares what the world thinks, and this is why they have all of 
these hidden policies in Tibet. It's so that they can avoid 
international scrutiny. The boarding preschools or 
kindergartens for 4- and 5-year-olds, they're actively hiding 
their existence. We know there are preschools and kindergartens 
that are day schools. And we see those on Chinese state 
propaganda. But the actual boarding preschools they're actively 
hiding.
    We know that the key right now is to expose and condemn 
directly and openly. We need the U.S. Government to do that. 
That is the beginning. That's where we start. We need the U.S. 
Government to work with like-minded governments around the 
world to put a spotlight on this issue and to say it's 
unacceptable and that these children need to be returned to 
their parents and they need to have access to high-quality 
mother tongue education in their local areas, just like any of 
us who grew up in free and open societies do, no matter how 
rural or whatever the challenges may be. I think it's important 
to note that in China itself the rate of students even in rural 
areas who are in boarding schools is drastically lower. 
Tibetans are boarding at five times the rate, in the case of 
one primary school comparison that we did in central Tibet 
alone, in what China calls the Tibet Autonomous Region.
    I think the other thing that we need is to see--you know, 
the world has collectively condemned residential school policy, 
the practice of separating children from their parents in order 
to influence, to change who they are, to erase their culture 
and identity. And we need to see that the UN speaks out on 
this, that Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for 
Human Rights, breaks her silence on Tibet. She hasn't even said 
``Tibet'' since 2018, when she took up this mandate. So we need 
member states, we need the U.S. Government to push for 
accountability also at the UN.
    Co-chair McGovern. Thank you. You know, I was on a 
delegation with Speaker Pelosi, I think it was back in 2015, 
when the Chinese government actually allowed us to go into 
Lhasa and tried to micromanage and control every single moment 
of that visit. But despite all of those efforts, we were amazed 
and, quite frankly, inspired by Tibetans who approached us to 
talk about, among other things, the importance of their 
language, the importance of their culture, the importance of 
giving their children a future in which the language and 
culture were a reality. This is their identity. This is who 
they are. And it was a trip that, on the one hand, was 
depressing and shocking because of the Chinese government's 
repressive behavior, but on the other hand, inspiring and 
motivating because people, at great risk, found ways to 
communicate with us directly. And, you know, I will never, 
ever, ever forget it. And thank you for your response.
    Dr. Roche, many of us assume there is a single Tibetan 
language, but you testify to the diversity of languages spoken 
by Tibetans. And I appreciate the map that you provided us. 
Would a person from Lhasa be able to communicate with a person 
from the Dalai Lama's hometown of Amdo?
    Mr. Roche. Yes, thank you very much for that question. Just 
to answer that part very quickly, it depends on who those 
people were. There's a great difference between the spoken 
languages between Lhasa and the far-northern Amdo. If two 
people met on the street, chances are that they would not be 
able to communicate. But if they were educated in the common 
written language, if they had the experience communicating with 
Tibetans from a wide variety of backgrounds, then they would 
probably be able to communicate. There's flexibility around 
that issue.
    But those are two examples of what linguists call Tibetic 
languages, which means that they are varieties of Tibetan. 
There are also about a quarter of a million Tibetans that use 
languages which are much more different than those--a group of 
Tibetic languages that are vastly different from each other. 
Regardless of whether they were literate, regardless of how 
cosmopolitan they were, regardless of the amount of exposure, 
and without concerted study, they would not be able to 
communicate with one another. To give an example that might 
help, it would be as different as Swedish and Italian, for 
example.
    Most of the Tibetans who speak those languages, their 
communities are quite small, several thousand people among a 
broader population of over 6,000,000 people. And given the 
situation that I've described, where the state completely 
denies language rights in any forum--in education, healthcare, 
media, governance, etc.--those languages are facing a very 
serious predicament.
    In terms of thinking through these issues that we're 
talking about today, about the impact of the denial of language 
rights, thinking about the state's goals and their thinking 
about the program of sinicization, and so on, we can think of 
these smaller languages spoken by Tibetans as the canary in the 
coal mine. They point in the direction of where the actions of 
the state are going for other languages.
    What we see across all of those languages is people 
switching away from them. They're no longer transmitting those 
languages to their children. So, in an expert survey that I did 
of linguists who work in this area, I asked their assessment of 
whether those languages would still be spoken in future 
generations. And the answer was, in almost every case, that 
they would no longer be, that the children would be switching 
either to some form of Chinese or some form of Tibetan 
language.
    Co-chair McGovern. Yes, and I'm technologically challenged, 
but for those who are watching this, I mean, this is the map 
that you provided us [holds up map]. All of these different 
colors show all the different distinct Tibetan languages and 
dialects, which I think is fascinating, something that we don't 
always appreciate, when we're talking about protecting a 
language.
    How would an understanding of this linguistic diversity 
help the U.S. protect the Tibetan language? And you made a 
recommendation earlier, but maybe you can expand on it--how 
funding of the Tibetan Policy and Support Act could be used.
    Mr. Roche. Yes, thank you for that question.
    These languages face a very intense predicament. The 
speakers of these languages--also the people who sign them, 
because we should include Tibetan Sign Language here, as well--
these communities have no support from anywhere. They want to 
maintain these languages. They--in instances where they can--
create projects to support these languages--educational 
initiatives, community chances to use the language, and so on.
    One of the most clear examples of the desire to use these 
languages was seen when the COVID pandemic broke in Tibet, and 
no public healthcare information was available to these 
communities in the languages that they understood best and 
which they trusted the most, as well. And so that was creating 
great anxiety and putting those people at risk, so they 
initiated these community public health information translation 
projects on their own, without any funding, without any 
support, and so on.
    So the recommendation that I make--given that the Tibetan 
Policy and Support Act in part focuses on the protection of 
Tibetan language and culture--is the idea that funds could be 
earmarked specifically for these languages. And that money 
could be used, for example, to transmit information to those 
communities about language rights--the fact that they have 
them; how those language rights are denied. If it were possible 
to get money to the communities on the ground, to work with 
them, there are all sorts of projects that could be done to 
help those communities use their languages, develop them--for 
example, develop writing systems, recording the languages, 
helping develop vocabulary to use in new situations.
    And there are ample examples all around the world of 
different projects, different methods, for helping to support 
the language that some of this funding could be used for, and 
that Tibetan communities inside China could learn from.
    Co-chair McGovern. Well, thank you. And you know--I know 
USAID has money for this, and I think maybe we need to work 
with USAID to find a grantee that could actually do what you're 
talking about.
    I have other questions here--I'm not sure if Congresswoman 
Steel is still on the line.
    Representative Steel. Yes.
    Co-chair McGovern. OK. I want to yield to you for your 
questions. And I'll come back to me.
    Representative Steel. Thank you, Co-chair McGovern. And 
thank you very much to all the witnesses.
    It is alarming and disheartening that the CCP is working to 
restrict religious freedom and trying to eradicate entire 
cultures. The CCP is separating children from their parents, 
home, and community--I can't even imagine it. This is one more 
outrageous example of racism and troubling human rights 
violations at the hands of the CCP.
    Having said that, Ms. Lhadon Tethong--if I pronounce it 
wrong, I'm sorry--but you mentioned that the private schools 
run by monasteries and Tibetan communities have been shut down 
by the CCP. We already heard Mr. Togochog's recommendations of 
what the United States Congress can do, but what can global 
leaders do to stop this violation? I tried to let the whole 
world know during the Olympics what China has been doing, but I 
didn't get any response from the Olympic corporate sponsors 
who've been spending billions of dollars. So could you tell us 
what global leaders have to do to stop this violation?
    Ms. Tethong. Yes, I think the key is--and we can see this 
happening more and more--for like-minded governments, global 
leaders, to work together and to coordinate strategies and 
approaches in a way that really targets--for example, the case 
of sanctions. I think this whole area, you know, unlike, say, 
targeting military or security people, officials, the area of 
education policy just seems--it's such a different target. But 
there are Chinese academics and education policy experts who 
are conceptualizing and they're operationalizing these 
programs--that are separating nearly a million Tibetan children 
from their parents, and that are essentially threatening that 
an entire generation of Tibetans, and those that come from now 
on, will not speak Tibetan.
    So they are designing these genocidal policies and 
overseeing them, and they should be targeted, I think, for 
sanctions and other things. And governments can coordinate, I 
believe, to do that in a way that--perhaps, you know, the 
security officials and the top, top officials aren't so 
concerned about their international reputation, or their 
travel, or whatever. But academics are. I mean, that's so much 
of what it's about--reputation, and your international 
credibility. And I think this group of people, who are playing 
key roles in all of this, the rollout and the separation of 
very young children from their families, they play a key role. 
And if we want to sort of change behavior and send a very clear 
message, I think they should absolutely be targeted with 
sanctions.
    Representative Steel. Very essential. Thank you very much.
    So parents, not the CCP, have the right to choose how their 
child will be educated. That's what we are practicing here; we 
try to. Why is the CCP so threatened by having a diverse 
community? Ms. Tethong.
    Ms. Tethong. I think the key is difference, that because 
Tibetans are not Chinese, because Uyghurs are not Chinese, 
Southern Mongolians--we have our distinct histories, our 
distinct national histories. This is about wiping out 
resistance to Chinese Communist Party rule.
    And all of the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party in 
Tibet over 70 years have failed. All of the violence--you think 
of their economic, their political, their military power and 
might, and somehow, Tibetans are still resisting, and a whole 
new generation of Tibetans that has no memory of a free Tibet, 
is still fighting. And that's because who we are at our core is 
not Chinese.
    When Tibetans are being taught only about Chinese history 
and culture in this intense nationalistic curriculum, they know 
that they're not reflected there. Maybe it takes a littler kid 
some time to figure that out, but in the end, Tibetans know 
they're not Chinese. And when they leave these schools, or when 
they go out into the world, they face such incredible racism 
and discrimination that their instinct, of course, is to turn 
inward and to ask questions about who they are and where Tibet 
is in all of this.
    And so I think this is about wiping out resistance to 
Chinese Communist Party rule in places where the Party rules 
with a colonial occupation, where the Chinese government has 
taken over by force and maintains control by force. And 
parents' influence needs to be--I guess, they believe--broken. 
You know, these children, if they're removed from their 
parents, their families, and their communities, if they can 
forget who they are, maybe that resistance will end. And I 
think they're sadly mistaken.
    Congresswoman Steel. Thank you very much.
    And for Mr. Abduweli, you know, both my parents fled from 
North Korean communism during the Korean War, so you know, I've 
been hearing so much about the Communists. And now I am a proud 
American immigrant who is living her American dream. I speak 
Korean and Japanese as my first and second language, and 
English is my third. It is important to embrace diversity and 
to respect other cultures. I speak common greetings to my 
constituents and friends on a daily basis. Why is the CCP 
creating new language restrictions and engaging in religious 
persecution? What are they afraid of?
    Mr. Abduweli. I think it's mainly because Uyghurs keep 
protecting their language. Especially after July 5th--we had a 
demonstration in 2009, on July 5th. And after the 
demonstration, thousands of people got arrested. And after 
that, the Chinese government changed the policy a little bit 
and gave some economic benefits to the people.
    But at that time, I witnessed what happened, and for 
example, Uyghur books flourished, and Uyghur films flourished, 
and Uyghur poetry sold very well. Despite this economic 
benefit, however, Uyghurs were not fooled. Instead, Uyghurs 
increased in power, because of the economic development and 
people decided to keep the language alive, keep that language. 
And they used their money to support it.
    And when I started my mother language kindergarten, 
investment was already enough. I had enough investment, and I 
had enough support. At that time, we had--when we started our 
campaign online, we had 500,000 followers online to support us.
    So I think the main reason is because of this power--
because of this power of identity, power of culture. They are 
afraid of this.
    Representative Steel. Thank you very much.
    Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
    Co-chair McGovern. Thank you.
    I think Chairman Merkley is back.
    Chair Merkley. I'm back and thank you very much. And I'll 
apologize in advance if I ask questions that others have 
already asked, but maybe they're worth reemphasizing.
    And let me start with the depiction of a strategy by the 
Chinese government to universalize Mandarin among the entire 
population of China. Do you all agree--I'll just ask each of 
you to comment very briefly--do you all agree that getting 
everyone to speak Mandarin is the ultimate goal of the 
sinicization campaign that we've all talked about today?
    Dr. Roche, you want to kick that off?
    Mr. Roche. Sure. Yes, I think it is. This is the goal--the 
policy has been in place for a while now. The plan has been 
set. The targets have been announced and shifted year by year. 
They target different regions as it progresses, and the aim is 
to have everyone speaking Mandarin, regardless of the cost to 
other languages, people's identities, communities, families, 
etc.
    Chair Merkley. OK. Does everyone else agree? Maybe just 
speak very briefly to that, to basically wipe out every other 
language except Mandarin Chinese, over the course of the next 
couple of decades?
    Mr. Togochog.
    Mr. Togochog. Yes, thank you.
    Yes, their goal is very clear. The Chinese authorities are 
stating their goals very publicly. And they are saying all the 
so-called 55 ethnic minorities must adopt and embrace the 
Chinese Zhongguo nationality, or Chinese nationality--that's 
the stated goal.
    And eliminating language and forcing all those 55 ethnic 
minorities to speak Chinese is not the only goal. Actually, 
their ultimate goal is to turn these peoples' identities into 
the Chinese, or Zhongguo, nationality, identity.
    Chair Merkley. So, it's both about everyone speaking 
Mandarin, but the underlying goal is to wipe out the ethnic 
identity of people across China, basically genocide against 
dozens and dozens of the diverse cultures of the country.
    Ms. Tethong, when you look at the strategies being used, 
including this absolutely horrific separation of small children 
from their families to boarding schools--I think you said 80 
percent of the children are separated, about 800,000 to 900,000 
children, if I got those numbers right. So do you see a path in 
which China, the Chinese government, is seeking to essentially 
wipe out the Tibetan language within another generation?
    Ms. Tethong. Yes, absolutely. And I think the focus now on 
kindergartens or preschoolers, the focus on 4- and 5-year-olds, 
really shows us that. These children are learning entirely from 
such a young age, entirely in Chinese, or Mandarin. And they 
are so young. They're also being taught--their psychological 
foundation will be sort of trained to think about Chinese 
culture . . . because they don't live with their parents and 
their families for the majority of their lives. Even if they're 
just living five days a week in these schools, the idea is to 
really change them on the inside, who they are fundamentally, 
so as to wipe out resistance.
    Chair Merkley. It's so much more than simply language.
    Mr. Abduweli, do you also see the Chinese goal being to 
wipe out the Uyghur language within a generation?
    Mr. Abduweli. Yes, the Chinese goal is, I think, not only 
to wipe out the Uyghur language, but also to make Uyghurs 
become, not modern Chinese, but make them become ancient 
Chinese. From my documentation, those Uyghur kids in camps, 
they're forced to recite ancient Chinese texts, not the modern 
texts, and they force them to wear ancient Chinese clothes, not 
modern Chinese clothes, and make them recite things not 
relevant to this modern society. And I think the ultimate goal 
is, make them more Chinese than ordinary Chinese.
    Chair Merkley. So Mr. Togochog, you observed that in 
January of last year--about 15 months ago--Chinese authorities 
announced that the legal protections for recognized minority 
languages are unconstitutional. Of course, it's the 
constitution, Article 4 of the Chinese constitution, that 
provides for those protections.
    So, can we essentially say that the Chinese constitution 
has been invalidated by the Chinese government, and that the 
protection in Article 4 of the Chinese constitution no longer 
exists?
    Mr. Togochog. Well, that's correct. As we all know, China 
is not a country of the rule of law. So yes, the Chinese 
constitution is still there. But at the same time, because of 
the Mongolian--the large-scale protests, they came up with the 
idea that--actually, the Chinese National Congress announced 
that all the local laws, including the ethnic minority autonomy 
laws and some other regulations on the minority languages, in 
particular the Mongolian language, are unconstitutional. And 
then they said, these must be changed. So that's their 
statement.
    So, the goal is clear. They just use whatever method 
available to just completely wipe out the Mongolian language. 
And so in this effort, they even invalidate their own 
constitution.
    Chair Merkley. And Mr. Abduweli, my time is running short, 
so this will be my last question. You note in your testimony 
that in 2013, there was a movement among Uyghurs to adopt this 
slogan: If the Chinese constitution protects our language, then 
it is our turn to protect it. So it's like, OK, hey, the 
constitution is our protection; let's protect locally--and 
ensure that Article 4 is followed.
    But the Chinese reaction was to essentially say, no, the 
constitution doesn't really--we're throwing that out. So, your 
effort to seize upon those constitutional protections was, 
unfortunately, unsuccessful. Is that a fair way to put it?
    Mr. Abduweli. Yes, that's correct. That's our slogan, and 
that's my--I tried to follow the law, and I tried to practice 
my constitutional rights. But in the end, I didn't succeed.
    Chair Merkley. Well, thank you all very much. This big 
picture--China has abandoned its constitutional protections; 
it's wiping out languages. It's not just language; it's trying 
to wipe out the minority cultures across China, and that's the 
big picture I want to keep coming back to.
    Senator Ossoff.
    Senator Ossoff. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you, 
Congressman McGovern, as well. And to our panelists--I've got 
to briefly run into another meeting, so I'm going to cut right 
to the chase, and just ask each of our panelists the following 
question: Can you please share your analysis of how the CCP's 
increased repression of ethnic minorities within China fits 
into its broader long-term strategy for consolidation of 
political control?
    Go ahead, Mr. Abduweli.
    Mr. Abduweli. Could you rephrase your question? I'm sorry.
    Senator Ossoff. No problem. My question is, how does the 
continued and increased repression of ethnic minorities by the 
Chinese Communist Party fit into the CCP's broader long-term 
political and state strategy?
    Mr. Abduweli. Yes, in Xi Jinping's speech made in 2014 in 
Urumqi, he used one very specific term, ``break the root.'' It 
means break this culture, separate. Implementing this for 
boarding school, and boarding kindergarten and those things--
implementation of his order to break the root means that those 
kids have their homes, their homeland, and their culture 
replaced.
    Xi Jinping also stressed Zhongguo identity. That's the only 
identity allowed in China. And that's why the Chinese 
government had these concentration camps and forced millions of 
people to speak Chinese in those so-called vocational centers.
    And third, the Chinese government transferred the Uyghurs 
from their own homeland to Chinese cities. In 2020 alone, more 
than 50,000 Uyghurs were transferred to Xinjiang. The ultimate 
goal is not only to force them to speak Chinese but have them 
disappear into the Chinese majority of the Chinese mainland.
    Mr. Togochog. If I may--can I respond to Senator Ossoff's 
question?
    What's happening in China is a continuation of what China 
has been implementing in these three nations. Especially in the 
Mongolian case, the new policy, new cultural genocide policy, 
followed by the so-called second-generation bilingual 
education, is considered by the Mongolians to be the final step 
of China's overall cultural genocide policy that is intended to 
systematically destroy the language, tradition, and identity of 
the Mongolian people as a whole.
    If you look at the history of the past 73 years, the 
history of Southern Mongolia, as early as the late 1940s, even 
before the establishment of the People's Republic of China, the 
Chinese Communist Party took over Southern Mongolia and 
implemented the so-called land reform movement. And then they 
executed tens of thousands of Mongolians and confiscated their 
land.
    Then in the 1950s, the Mongolian elite intellectuals were 
persecuted. And then in 1960 and 1970, for example, there was a 
large-scale genocide campaign, actually. In this campaign, at 
least 100,000 Mongolians were tortured to death, and half a 
million persecuted. At that time, the Mongolian population was 
only 1.5 million. That means that one-third of the population 
was affected by this policy.
    Then in 2001, the Chinese government implemented another 
set of policies to wipe out the Mongolian traditional way of 
life. The policies are called ecological migration, with a 
total ban on our grazing lifestyle. Under this policy, the 
Mongolian traditional way of life is targeted. Mongolian 
herders who graze their animals on their own land are 
considered criminals. And now they are targeting Mongolian 
language.
    This is a continuing pattern. The recent policy is not just 
an isolated policy. It's a continuation of overall Chinese 
policy to destroy the entire nation of Southern Mongolia.
    Senator Ossoff. Thank you, Mr. Togochog.
    Ms. Tethong. If I may, Senator Ossoff----
    Senator Ossoff. Please, go ahead.
    Ms. Tethong. I agree completely. I think this is the 
continuation of destructive policies, and an intention to--
really, Xi Jinping has just completely accelerated this 
genocidal project in Tibet and East Turkestan and Southern 
Mongolia. I think we can see that, with the Chinese Communist 
Party, Xi Jinping, there can be no challenge to their 
authority. And that's what Tibetans and Uyghurs and Southern 
Mongolians do by trying to maintain our distinct way of life, 
our language, our separate national identities.
    If you look at China's threatening of Taiwan, if you look 
at the crackdown in Hong Kong, if you look at the attack on 
India, I think we can see that it doesn't end with--it's not 
like it's just about Tibetans or Uyghurs, what China considers 
its internal issues. It goes well beyond.
    Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party have imperial 
ambitions. I mean, there is a belief that they have the right 
to rule over us, on their borders, and that they should have a 
greater position of power in the world--should have more 
influence at whatever cost and to wipe out dissent and to 
attack people fundamentally, who people are, to try to destroy 
or erase us.
    We can see with Russia right now under Putin the threat 
that Russia poses to global peace and security. I believe it is 
the same with the Chinese government, and I think no matter 
what their propaganda says--trust us, they're very, very good 
at using benign-sounding, positive language to mask their 
intentions, but we know the truth of what they want to do, and 
they're doing it to us in a way the whole world can see. And I 
think that's why it's imperative on some level--it's also self-
interest, I think, globally to help to try to push China back 
to stop these genocides that are happening before our eyes--
because it doesn't just stop here, I don't think.
    Mr. Roche. If I may just expand on some of those points 
there. With reference to particularly the groups that I've 
worked with--I call these unrecognized languages, unrecognized 
groups, in terms of state and political strategy. Originally 
when these policies were formed several decades ago, the aim of 
not recognizing those groups--and it was a deliberate process--
the aim of that was to accelerate their assimilation. The idea 
was that those unrecognized groups would assimilate into the 
recognized 56 nationalities and then all of those groups would 
assimilate into a single, basically Han Chinese socialist 
unity. So, it was a deliberate strategy to speed up social 
evolution toward the socialist future, which would also 
coincidentally be Han Chinese.
    And so when those structures were put in place--those 
structures of recognition, the legal structures, constitutional 
freedom for language, the policies of ethnic autonomy and so 
on--they were all done with an aim to deliberately drive 
assimilatory processes, and they have been working as planned 
for decades now. And we see that in the fate of these 
unrecognized languages, which people are no longer basically 
able to transmit to their children or can only do so with great 
difficulty.
    Under Xi Jinping, in particular, that goal of accelerating 
assimilation has taken on goals which are primarily related to 
China's place on the global stage. It's taken on a geopolitical 
significance. Those structures that accelerate assimilation are 
now driving toward producing greater unity, integration, and 
therefore power that will accelerate China's place in the world 
order, which--you know, the aim is an ascendant China with a 
much broader, more important, powerful role on the world stage, 
and that place on the world stage will be built on the 
deliberate destruction of these communities.
    Senator Ossoff. Thank you, all. Thank you for your 
testimony. And thank you to our co-chairs.
    I yield back.
    Chair Merkley. Thank you, Senator Ossoff.
    And Co-chair McGovern, did you want to ask a second set of 
questions?
    Co-chair McGovern. Yes, briefly.
    Dr. Roche, you speak of the UN Declaration on the Rights of 
Indigenous Peoples as a mechanism for indigenous peoples of 
China to defend their languages. You say that the U.S. should 
formally endorse the non-binding declaration, as the three 
other countries who initially voted against it--Canada, the 
U.K., and Australia--have done. Would endorsement give our 
government a stronger moral position to urge China to allow its 
citizens to participate in the UN process?
    Mr. Roche. Yes, it absolutely would give the U.S. a 
stronger moral foundation for making these claims against 
China. We see this repeatedly--that when these issues are 
raised against China, whether it's in diplomatic or 
governmental forums or whether it's in the media or social 
media, that whenever these accusations are brought against 
China--about what they're actually doing, the first strategy 
that they always go to is one of deflection--to deflect the 
query back on the accuser and to say, you have no right to 
accuse us of this when you yourself have done it in your past, 
you are doing it now, etc., etc.
    Then they often go to other strategies of outright denial, 
conditional denial, and so on and so on, but the first 
rhetorical strategy is always to deflect the comment back on 
the accuser, and anything that can be done in that regard will 
prove the effectiveness of any efforts to hold China 
accountable for what they are doing--these assimilatory, 
eliminatory programs. Hopefully, that clarifies it for you.
    Co-chair McGovern. It does. Thank you. And thank you for 
being with us this--I don't know what time it is--what time is 
it where you are?
    Mr. Roche. It's after midnight now. We started at midnight.
    Co-chair McGovern. Well, thank you. We appreciate you 
staying up for us here. Thank you.
    Ms. Tethong, regarding the residential boarding school 
system in Tibetan areas, can you expand a little bit on the 
elements of coercion? I mean, do authorities order families to 
send their kids away? Do they make it a fait accompli by 
closing local schools or is it something else? And how would we 
find out more information about the schools for 4- and 5-year-
olds, which you say Chinese authorities are trying to hide?
    Ms. Tethong. Thank you for your question, Chairman 
McGovern.
    Yes, the Chinese government is making it impossible for 
Tibetan parents to do anything but comply both because of the 
consolidation of schools--closing all the local schools, all 
the alternatives, the monastery schools, the Tibetan-run 
private schools. So Tibetans on the one hand have no choice in 
most places. If they want their children to get an education, 
they have to send them away. At the same time, parents do, of 
course, resist and refuse, and when they do, they are 
threatened. They can be threatened with financial punishment. 
The number one thing is, if you don't send your child now, say, 
to boarding preschool, then they won't be able to go and join 
later--at grade one or in primary school.
    And so Tibetan parents are really left--and Tibetans know--
anyone under Chinese Communist Party rule knows you don't 
disagree, you don't push back--to do so in any meaningful way 
will be considered a threat to the state and you'll be charged 
or could be held accountable for some serious political 
charges, even though all you're trying to do is keep your child 
at home where you can protect them and watch over them.
    I know with the boarding preschools--we're really working 
to try to understand more about the picture on the ground, and 
we need governments and everyone to be asking China about the 
boarding preschools. We've been hearing reports recently that 
Tibetan parents don't want their kids to go to these schools. 
They don't want to send them away so young. When they have to--
like in nomadic communities, we've been hearing that one 
nomadic family will move to the township and live in their car 
to be near the kids that are in that boarding preschool, and 
the other families back home will take care of their work and 
their business. And families will take turns.
    It's having a very, very detrimental effect on the life of 
nomads and rural people to have such small children taken away, 
and then, of course, the things parents try to do just like in 
Canada in the residential school history there, just like in 
the U.S. You know, when these children are taken away, parents 
try to go and be near them or do what they can to protect them 
because they're being taken out of their hands. And we need to 
know more. China needs to answer and tell us what the numbers 
are. Just trying to piece together this picture from Chinese 
state media, from Chinese government sources at every level, 
from Chinese academics and other academic studies--it really is 
an incredible challenge, and that's absolutely intentional on 
the part of the Chinese government to hide this--because they 
know it's wrong.
    Co-chair McGovern. Thank you.
    I apologize, I have to go to another meeting, but before I 
yield back to Chairman Merkley, let me just thank this 
incredible panel. You know, this is an important issue. It goes 
to the issue of identity. It goes to the issue of China trying 
to wipe out an entire culture.
    I think, Ms. Tethong, you had mentioned that one of the 
reasons they do this is to try to quash resistance. On the 
other hand, I could make an argument that their repression and 
their trying to rob people of their identity, I think only 
increases resistance in the sense that people are just 
horrified that there is an entity that wants to rob them of 
their identity, of their history, of their culture, of their 
language.
    As some people have said on this panel, it's really 
important for us to be able to fund initiatives that will 
actually protect these languages and to find ways to allow 
people to have access to appropriate instruction to be able to 
pass this on to the next generations.
    But you have given us some important ideas on things that 
we need to do in the upcoming appropriations process that will 
be coming up in a matter of weeks and also some follow-up 
questions for the Chinese government.
    This has been an excellent panel, and I want to thank you 
all.
    I yield back to Chairman Merkley.
    Chair Merkley. Thank you very much, Co-chair McGovern.
    I have some additional questions I'll continue with. Let me 
start, Dr. Roche, with the question as to whether the Chinese 
government is also trying to wipe out or start the process of 
eliminating the Cantonese dialect in favor of the Mandarin 
dialect?
    Mr. Roche. Thank you for that question. I'll just give a 
very brief answer because this is not my specific area of 
research. I haven't done work in this area, so my understanding 
of it is from a very broad, general background.
    Basically, in terms of policy, the same policy of erasure 
applies, which is that there is limited-to-no formal support 
for the Cantonese language. A lot of the support is ad hoc and 
superficial, which then makes it very difficult for the 
community to sustain their language. We know that in the past 
there have been protests against the imposition of Mandarin in 
the Cantonese-speaking communities, and interestingly, the 
protests seem to have had a knock-on effect in Tibet--in part 
inspiring language protests there, emboldening people.
    I think that that's an important thing to note, that all of 
these language contexts are connected. When one group is able 
to stand up and defend their language, if that information is 
available to other people and they know that, that emboldens 
them, it encourages them, it reminds them of their rights and 
so on, which is important.
    But beyond that, I would not like to comment further on the 
situation of the Cantonese language because I feel I don't have 
the adequate expertise.
    Chair Merkley. Are all of the university admissions in 
Mandarin, all of the university exams?
    Mr. Roche. Across the entire country or just in the 
Cantonese context?
    Chair Merkley. Across the entire country.
    Mr. Roche. Again, I don't think that I have the up-to-date 
information on that. I'll pass that over to--perhaps one of the 
other panelists would know. I haven't been able to enter China, 
so my on-the-ground access to information is now limited, 
unfortunately.
    Chair Merkley. So for each of you, in regard to Mongolia, 
Tibet, the Uyghur autonomous region, are all the university 
examinations in Mandarin?
    Mr. Abduweli. Yes, they are, and we had Uyghur exams until 
2017, and since then, all college entrance exams are in 
Chinese.
    Mr. Togochog. In Mongolian areas, yes, now all college 
exams are--they have to be in Chinese, and then, there was 
until recently--until this new policy, there was a very limited 
number of colleges that had some majors in Mongolian. For 
example, a Mongolian literature and linguistics major was--the 
students were allowed to take the exam in Mongolian, but now 
all this is changing. All students have to take the exam in 
Chinese.
    Chair Merkley. Ms. Tethong.
    Ms. Tethong. Yes, I believe that's true, and it's important 
to point out that the pressure on Tibetan society and on the 
language and culture is coming from both sides. The children--
the youngest children are having the language stolen from them, 
and those in higher academic study are suddenly not able to--so 
they amalgamated the different departments. There used to be 
Tibetan studies and Mongolian studies and Uyghur studies, and 
under the common language policy, they sort of put everyone 
together, and the only way to teach is in Mandarin because 
Tibetans will not speak Uyghur and Uyghurs will not speak 
Tibetan.
    There have been Tibetan academics and education specialists 
who have been working hard for decades to try to promote 
Tibetan language and Tibetan curriculum and cultural content 
and everything, and suddenly, all of them are faced with no 
options to continue with their work. And the Tibetan language 
itself--I mean, as one Tibetan education policy expert from 
Tibet who was raised during the Cultural Revolution told us 
recently, he sees this--between the policy for little kids, the 
policies for higher education and, of course, what's happening 
in the monasteries and on the grasslands--he sees this, in a 
way, as a threat that could be the end of our history, and that 
just really struck me, when you think of it all together.
    Chair Merkley. It was in that perspective of seeing these 
many, many different strategies from different angles in which 
I was inquiring, kind of, about the plan to wipe out the 
language and essentially the culture in a generation.
    You spoke about a pop singer, age 26, I believe, who self-
immolated. Was he allowed to sing? Did he become a star within 
Tibet or was he outside Tibet? Was he allowed to sing in 
Tibetan inside Tibet and become popular culturally in that 
language?
    Ms. Tethong. Yes, he was. He, in particular, was famous in 
Chinese circles because--he was known because he participated 
in all these Chinese talent shows, like the music, sort of, 
idol-type shows, and so he became really well known. But he 
would do--you could see in his lyrics and in his story, he 
really tried to promote Tibetan language and identity and to 
have a message in there about the importance of the Tibetan 
homeland, sort of without saying it, the Tibetan nation and our 
cultural roots.
    And I think the key is, if you look from the outside--and 
this is what China will say--Tibetans have freedom of 
expression. Look, they sing in Tibetan; you know, you can see 
the kids dressed in their Tibetan clothing. In the end, they do 
allow a certain amount of cultural freedom and expression, but 
it is very, very, very constrained, very limited.
    There was a platform recently--a Chinese social media 
platform--that was streaming a conversation between two Tibetan 
pop stars, very well known, and one was saying to the other, we 
can't do this--we shouldn't speak in Tibetan on this platform, 
or they will shut us down. So, you can see----
    Chair Merkley. Yes.
    Ms. Tethong. You know, I think, really, within a generation 
we may see the end--if these genocidal policies are allowed to 
go ahead--we may see the end of Tibetans who can even sing and 
express themselves in sort of secondary discourse in that 
language.
    Chair Merkley. Well, it's a very powerful story when 
someone who's so successful and so young takes their own life 
in protest.
    And can you give us his name once again?
    Ms. Tethong. Yes. Tsewang Norbu was his name, 25 years old.
    Chair Merkley. Twenty-five. Thank you.
    I want to turn to Mr. Abduweli. You note in your testimony 
that the written language was changed from a Uyghur alphabet to 
a Cyrillic alphabet to a sinicized Latin script. How much does 
changing the writing play into interrupting the generational 
cultural traditions and language abilities?
    Mr. Abduweli. My father, when he went to high school, was 
educated using the Cyrillic alphabet, and then my mother, 
younger than him, was educated using the Latin alphabet. At 
home they have books in the Cyrillic alphabet, and they have 
books in the Latin alphabet, but no one can read what they say 
because it's a different alphabet. Then when we children 
started primary school, the first year we studied the Latin 
alphabet and the next year we studied the Arabic alphabet. And 
my brothers cannot read my books and I cannot read their books.
    Because the Latin alphabet was implemented in the Uyghur 
homeland more than 20 years ago, a generation became 
illiterate, because the Latin alphabet was replaced by the 
Arabic alphabet and people became illiterate suddenly.
    Chair Merkley. Thank you.
    Mr. Abduweli. We had illiteracy three times--use Cyrillic, 
they don't take it; know Latin and then they don't know the 
second or the third one. So they have a third generation 
dealing with this alphabetic change, and thus people become 
illiterate.
    Chair Merkley. Thank you.
    Congresswoman Steel, I see you've rejoined us. Do you want 
to ask any additional questions?
    Representative Steel. I just want to say thank you, and 
that this is so necessary for everybody to hear what the CCP 
has been doing.
    So, thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to all the 
witnesses. And you know what? I'm going to speak against the 
CCP, and I've been doing this since I got elected in 2020. 
Let's work together and let's make sure the whole world knows 
what the CCP's been doing.
    Thank you.
    Chair Merkley. Thank you so much, Congresswoman Steel. It's 
a really valuable contribution, and it's so important to have 
these hearings so that more of us become educated and 
articulate about these forms of oppression.
    I wanted to ask one last question, Mr. Abduweli, and this 
ties into a previous hearing we had. When you advocated for 
Uyghur kindergartens and worked to establish them--basically 
under that vision from Article 4 of the constitution--your 
family members were oppressed, and I believe your brother and 
sister have been imprisoned. We understand your niece, I'm very 
sorry to hear, passed away in detention two years ago after 
returning to Shandong from Japan. Did they face imprisonment 
for their own activities, or was it retaliation, in part, to 
send a message to advocates abroad?
    Mr. Abduweli. I started my mother language campaign on 
September 15, 2011--my first mother language kindergarten and 
then my mother language schools. Because of that I got arrested 
on August 19, 2013, and in Turkey in 2017 because of the Uyghur 
students that were arrested in Egypt on July 4, 2017. I 
received their voice message and written message, and I spoke 
up. Because of this my older brother got arrested, and I 
learned that he was sentenced to 14 years. Because of my 
activism, my younger sister was forced to denounce me for more 
than a year, from 2016 to September 2017. For an entire year 
she criticized me and denounced me and claimed that I'm a 
separatist or something like that, and then in the end she also 
ended up in a concentration camp and sentenced to 12 years.
    And then in November 2019, I participated in leaking the 
Xinjiang file and the Karakax List. And because of that my 
wife's family members--because at that time we had some 
contact--got arrested. And so I think those are related. When I 
take some action, when I speak up, the next step is 
retaliation. So I think it's related to the retaliation--to get 
me to stop. My niece, when she was in Japan, told me really 
clearly that I became a hero, but her father and her aunt 
became victims because of me. I feel really sorry about what 
happened to her.
    She went back to Japan because she was under the control of 
the Chinese police through the Chinese social media app WeChat. 
The Chinese police were always trying to force her to stop me, 
but she couldn't stop me. Because of this, she went back to 
China, and she died in detention at the place where I was first 
arrested and sexually abused. I feel very sorry about it. I 
hope this retaliation will stop and I hope these atrocities 
will stop.
    Chair Merkley. It's absolutely horrific and I'm sure very 
effective in suppressing conversation about China's many 
assaults on human rights.
    This retaliation against family for freedom of speech 
abroad is just--I think about this, and I think, why do we 
allow any import, any recognition, any validation of the 
Chinese government given the many, many crimes against humanity 
that we've witnessed through this series of hearings?
    Thank you for sharing that story, and we all have great 
empathy with the horrific situation it puts you in and everyone 
who wants to speak up from their heart about human rights 
abuses inside China.
    I really appreciate all of you on the panel for sharing 
your knowledge and experience. We have to keep speaking out. We 
cannot let Chinese pressure in any form--against our companies, 
against advocates within our country, against Chinese citizens 
abroad--stop us from scrutinizing and publicizing these 
activities. Without scrutiny, without publicization, there is 
no chance to diminish this strategy of wiping out the languages 
and the cultures of the many groups within China.
    And with that--I know I have an official script here 
somewhere for closing--specifically, the record will remain 
open until the close of business on Friday, April 8th. And for 
any members who would like to put additional things into the 
record, you are welcome to do so, and I extend that invitation 
to our panel of experts as well.
    Thank you. And with that, the hearing is adjourned.
    [Whereupon, at 11:48 a.m., the hearing was concluded.]













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                            A P P E N D I X

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                          Prepared Statements

                                ------                                


                   Prepared Statement of Gerald Roche

    Thank you sincerely for this opportunity to testify today. I deeply 
appreciate the chance to share with all of you some insights into the 
language rights situation for people in China, and I thank the 
Commission for bringing attention to this important topic.
    We must defend language rights because doing so ensures dignity, 
freedom, and equality for all people. Who among us would want to live 
without any of these?
    When people are denied language rights, it severs their connections 
to their family, community, and heritage. It excludes them from 
political participation. When people are denied language rights in 
vital services like healthcare, their lives are at risk. And when they 
are denied language rights in education, their futures are at risk.
    Millions of people in China today face these challenges due to the 
state's denial of language rights. This happens primarily in two ways: 
erasure and suppression.
    Erasure refers to the state's refusal to acknowledge the existence 
of most of China's languages, by calling them dialects. To put this in 
perspective, imagine if German, English, and Norwegian were defined as 
``dialects'' of a single language.\1\ Imagine if your government told 
you what language you speak. How would you feel?
    In China, erasure means that from the country's 300 or so 
languages, only about 56 are recognized as languages: one for each of 
the country's ``nationalities.'' \2\ Most people in China speak 
unrecognized languages, whether they belong to the Han majority or a 
minority group.\3\ Most people in China are therefore completely denied 
their language rights.
    Our research demonstrates the catastrophic impacts of this denial 
in Tibet.\4\ Tibetan people in China use about 30 unrecognized 
languages,\5\ not including Tibetan.\6\ People who use these 
unrecognized languages face linguistic barriers everywhere: in schools, 
media, government, healthcare, the legal system and so on. When the 
government refuses to remove these barriers, people are forced to adapt 
by changing their language to either Tibetan or Chinese.\7\
    Meanwhile, recognized languages like Uyghur, Mongolian, and 
Tibetan, are suppressed.
    Suppression happens through the gradual dilution of the Chinese 
constitution's language freedoms,\8\ and the pervasive under-
implementation of protections for minority languages.\9\ Suppression 
also takes place through the encroachment of the national language, 
Mandarin, into spaces for minority languages--part of a broader plan to 
universalize Mandarin among the entire population.\10\
    The cumulative impact of erasure and suppression means that at 
least half of China's languages are currently losing speakers or 
signers as they switch to dominant languages.\11\ In an open, 
democratic society, people would be lobbying and protesting to change 
this unjust system. But in China, particularly under Xi Jinping, civil 
society has become increasingly repressed domestically, and isolated 
internationally.\12\ In Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia, 
wherever protest happens, the state sees foreign interference rather 
than legitimate grievances.
    China's citizens will therefore be denied an unprecedented historic 
opportunity to defend language rights, namely, the United Nations 
International Decade for Indigenous Languages, which starts this 
year.\13\ China will prevent its citizens from participating in this 
event because it denies that it has Indigenous people,\14\ and it 
denies its colonial history.\15\
    The goal of this Decade is ``leaving no one behind and no one 
outside.'' We have a responsibility to extend this inclusion to people 
in China, to ensure they are not left behind or outside.
    Here are some suggestions for how we can do this:

    1. The U.S. must pressure China to clarify whether its citizens can 
identify as Indigenous and whether they can participate in the UN 
Decade. An ideal opportunity to do this is China's upcoming Universal 
Periodic Review in the UN Human Rights Council in November 2023.\16\
    2. China's efforts to isolate its citizens from international civil 
society need to be countered. We must raise awareness inside China of 
language rights, and of activities taking place globally during the UN 
Decade.\17\
    3. With specific regard to Tibet, earmarking funding for Tibet's 
unrecognized languages will make a huge difference. This can be done 
using funds allocated under the Tibetan Policy Act of 2020.\18\
    4. Finally, the U.S. needs to lead by example. The UN Declaration 
on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples should be formally endorsed, and 
its obligations respected.\19\ Failing to do so will enable China to 
deflect attention from their language rights violations and onto 
America's.

    Thank you again for your time, and if anything I have said raises 
questions for you, I would be very happy to discuss further.

[Endnotes appear after Appendix One.]


[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

                                 ______
                                 

                Prepared Statement of Enghebatu Togochog

                              introduction
    My name is Enghebatu Togochog. I am a Mongolian from Southern 
Mongolia, widely known as ``Inner Mongolia.'' Southern Mongolia is home 
to six million Mongolians, a population that is twice as large as that 
of the independent country of Mongolia. In 1949, Southern Mongolia was 
officially annexed to the People's Republic of China, becoming the 
first so-called ``Nationality Minority Autonomous Region.''
    Over the past 73 years, praised as the ``model autonomy,'' Southern 
Mongolia has served as the de facto testing ground of China's ethnic 
policies. These include genocide, ethnic cleansing, political purge, 
economic exploitation, cultural eradication, linguistic assimilation, 
social marginalization, resource extraction, and environmental 
destruction, as detailed below.
    As early as the late 1940s, before the establishment of the 
People's Republic of China, Southern Mongolia was occupied by the 
Chinese Communist forces and was subjected to the so-called ``Land 
Reform Movement.'' Mongolian land was effectively confiscated and 
distributed to the Chinese, and tens of thousands of Southern 
Mongolians were executed as ``herd-lords.''
    During the 1950s, at least 20,000 Southern Mongolian elite 
intellectuals were persecuted as ``national rightists'' for demanding 
the materialization of ``nationality autonomy'' that the Chinese 
Communist government promised to Southern Mongolia.
    From the late 1960s through the early 1970s, Southern Mongolia had 
experienced a large-scale genocide campaign carefully designed by the 
Chinese Central Government and carried out by the People's Liberation 
Army and Chinese settlers. At least 100,000 Southern Mongolians were 
tortured to death, and a half million were persecuted. One-third of the 
Southern Mongolian population was affected by this genocide of 
unprecedented scale.
    In the early 1980s, the Chinese Central Government accelerated the 
process of Chinese migration to Southern Mongolia. As a result, in 
1981, a large-scale student movement broke out across Southern 
Mongolia. After a three-month-long, region-wide student protest, the 
Chinese Government cracked down on the students and arrested, detained, 
and imprisoned the student leaders and supporters.
    In the early 1990s, Southern Mongolian intellectuals established a 
number of underground organizations protesting Chinese occupation and 
demanding national freedom. All of them were harshly crushed by the 
Chinese authorities. In 1995, one such organization--the Southern 
Mongolian Democratic Alliance (SMDA), which aimed to achieve the total 
independence of Southern Mongolia and ultimately to merge with the 
independent country of Mongolia--was declared a ``national separatist 
organization.'' The president and the vice president of the 
organization, Mr. Hada and Mr. Tegexi, were arrested and sentenced to 
15 years and 10 years in jail, respectively, on charges of ``separatism 
and espionage.'' Nearly 70 other members were arrested, detained, and 
sent to jail for periods ranging from 3 months to a year. Mr. Hada is 
still under house arrest today after serving 15 years of imprisonment 
and an additional 4-year extrajudicial detention.
    In 2001, China started a fresh crusade against the traditional 
Mongolian nomadic way of life. Two sets of policies, namely the 
``Ecological Migration'' and the ``Livestock Grazing Ban,'' were 
introduced to forcibly displace the entire Mongolian herder population 
from their ancestral lands to overwhelmingly Chinese-populated urban 
and agricultural areas. These displaced herders became homeless, 
jobless and landless. The Mongolian pastoralist way of life and nomadic 
civilization were effectively wiped out. Southern Mongolians consider 
this a critical step in China's overall cultural genocide in Southern 
Mongolia.
    According to the Chinese Central Government State Council 
announcement published on its website in May 2012, by the end of 2015, 
China would resettle the remaining nomad population of 246,000 
households, or 1.157 million nomads, within the borders of China. This 
means by the end of 2015, the millennium-old nomadic civilization was 
officially put to an end in China.
    In 2009, the Chinese Central Government announced that Southern 
Mongolia would become ``China's largest energy base.'' Chinese 
extractive industries, including major state-run mining corporations 
and thousands of ninja miners, rushed into Southern Mongolia.
    In May 2011, a regionwide protest broke out in Southern Mongolia, 
sparked by the brutal killing of a Mongolian herder who defended his 
land from coal miners. Tens of thousands of students took to the street 
supporting the widespread herders' protest across the region. The 
Chinese authorities responded with riot police and paramilitary forces 
to put down the uprising. Hundreds were arrested, detained, and jailed. 
Resource extraction and environmental destruction were not halted, but 
only exacerbated.
                       ongoing cultural genocide
    As the last phase of the cultural genocide campaign, in June 2020, 
the Chinese Central Government announced that it would implement 
``Second Generation Bilingual Education,'' a new euphemism for the 
renewed attack on Mongolian culture. The goal of the new policy is 
clear: wipe out Mongolian language, culture, and identity and turn 
Southern Mongolia into a homogenous, worry-free Chinese society.
    In response to this, starting in late August 2020, the Southern 
Mongolians carried out a regionwide nonviolent resistance movement. The 
entire Southern Mongolian populace stood up to the Chinese regime. From 
kindergarteners to college professors, from ordinary herders to 
prominent scholars, from party members to government employees, from 
artists to athletes, from lawyers to police officers, from taxi drivers 
to delivery men, all walks of life of Southern Mongolian society took 
part in the protest in one way or another. At least 300,000 Mongolian 
students went on a total school strike. The Chinese authorities harshly 
cracked down on the movement. An estimated 8,000-10,000 Southern 
Mongolians have been arrested, detained, jailed, and placed under house 
arrest. Eleven Southern Mongolians lost their lives in defense of the 
right to use their mother tongue.
    What followed this heavyhanded crackdown was a full-scale and full-
speed cultural genocide campaign, the scope of which has extended far 
beyond the simple switch of medium of instruction from Mongolian to 
Chinese in schools.
    On January 1, 2021, all government mouthpieces, including the Inner 
Mongolia Radio and Television Mongolian language services, were ordered 
to start replacing Mongolian cultural programs with Chinese ones in 
order to promote ``the strong sense of Chinese Zhongguo nationality 
common identity.''
    ``Learn Chinese and become a civilized person'' has been an 
official slogan publicly promoting Chinese supremacy over Mongolian 
language, culture, and identity. Slogans of ``mutual interaction, 
mutual exchange and mutual assimilation of all ethnic groups to firmly 
establish the Chinese nationality common identity'' have been aired 
repeatedly from television and radio stations across the region.
    In schools, Mongolian students are subjected to military-style 
training and propaganda activities. Mongolian college students are 
forced to wear Mao suits and sing Communist ``red'' songs to extol the 
greatness of China. Mongolian teachers and professors are brought to 
the Chinese Communist red base Yan'an to receive patriotic education.
    In a move to justify the total elimination of Mongolian languages 
from the entire educational system in Southern Mongolia, the Chinese 
National Congress announced recently that ``education in minority 
languages as local legislations stipulated is unconstitutional,'' 
according to the Chinese official press People's Daily. This overwrites 
Article 4 of the Constitution of the People's Republic of China, which 
states, ``All ethnicities have the freedoms and rights to use and 
develop their own spoken and written languages and to preserve or 
reform their own folkways and customs.''
    Local authorities in the Autonomous Region reacted promptly to 
implement this directive. Classes on Mongolian culture and history 
taught in Mongolian in local schools are considered to be 
``underemphasizing the Chinese nationality common identity and 
deliberately overemphasizing [an] individual ethnic group's `ethnic 
identity' and `ethnic sentiment,' '' and hence are removed from the 
curriculum across the region.
    In an effort to completely block all avenues of learning Mongolian, 
on January 9, 2021, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Department of 
Education issued a document banning ``any school from gathering 
students to offer extracurricular learning courses or teaching new 
courses.'' It strictly prohibited middle and elementary school teachers 
from organizing or participating in any training organizations outside 
the campus or any paid make-up courses organized by teachers, parents 
and parents' committees, or inducing students to participate in any 
paid make-up courses organized by themselves or others; introducing 
student sources and providing relevant information to any training 
organization outside the school campus is strictly prohibited, 
according to Xin Lang Wang, one of the Chinese official presses.
    Flagrant cultural annihilation is most visible in the series of 
arts and cultural performances put together by the Chinese authorities 
for the Mongolian Tsagaan Sar, the traditional Mongolian new year. 
Peking operas have replaced the traditional Mongolian art performance 
in TV programs. In some programs, traditional Mongolian dances have 
been converted to hybrid ones that exhibit full features of Chinese 
operas. The horse-head fiddle, a traditional Mongolian musical 
instrument, has been played in concert with the suona, a distinctively 
high-pitched instrument often played in Chinese traditional music 
ensembles.
    The most sacred Mongolian sites, like Oboo, a stone altar devoted 
to the worship of Eternal Sky and local gods, have also been targeted 
by this campaign. Chinese traditional performers like Yangge dancers 
have frequently shown up on Oboo sites to mock the Mongolian Oboo 
ritual ceremony.
    Sculptures of Mongolian historical figures have been taken down and 
smashed; signs in Mongolian have been removed from schools, buildings, 
streets, and parks. The latest footage we received shows a group of 
construction workers removing the Mongolian letters from the official 
sign of the Hohhot City People's Procuratorates in the regional 
capital. In another photo, a group of Mongolian students stand next to 
a sign in Mongolian at their school entrance; the sign was scheduled to 
be removed the next day.
    Mongolian publications are banned altogether, and Mongolian books 
are taken down from bookstore shelves. Printing and copy services on 
the street are ordered not to provide services of printing and copying 
any materials in Mongolian. Postal and courier services are instructed 
not to deliver any Mongolian books and publications.
    On the official front, a regionwide intensive training program was 
launched. According to the Inner Mongolia News official website, the 
first session of the Region-wide Educational System Special Training 
for the Firm Inculcation of the Chinese Nationality Common Identity 
started on December 8, 2020. Although the exact details of the training 
and the total number of trainees remain unknown, the report confirmed 
that a three-phase training program will be completed by the end of 
March 2021. Other regional and local news revealed that the 
synchronized training sessions were held in all schools, colleges, and 
universities throughout the Autonomous Region.
    A 47-page internal document entitled ``Propaganda Pamphlet for 
Inculcating the Chinese Nationality Common Identity to Push for the 
Usage of Nationally Compiled Textbook and National Common Language 
Education'' was issued by the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region 
Department of Education in January 2021. According to a trainee who 
asked not to be identified, all the lectures, discussions, reflections, 
and quizzes are centered on this document.
    Quoting Xi Jinping's remarks, the document ``urges the masses to 
communicate and train together to take up the work of interfusing the 
feelings, to strive hard to create a social condition of living 
together, learning together, working together and enjoying together, 
and urges all ethnic groups to accept the great mother country, Chinese 
nationality, Chinese culture, Chinese Communist Party and socialism 
with Chinese characteristics.'' The document also warns the Southern 
Mongolians that ``the wrong path of narrow nationalism can easily lead 
to the return of separatist tendency.''
    Another trainee who managed to leave China and who has arrived in 
the United States recently told us that he and all of his Mongolian 
coworkers were forced to receive this training for two months. During 
the training, they had to denounce their ``narrow nationalism'' and 
``nationalistic feeling'' and embrace the ``Chinese nationality common 
identity.'' They were required to provide all of their social contacts 
and the details of their social media activities to the authorities. 
Toward the end of the training, they were forced to confess their 
supposed ``mistakes,'' including their past gatherings where they wore 
Mongolian traditional clothes and sang Mongolian songs. They were 
warned that these mistakes went against the spirit of ``Chinese 
nationality common identity.'' They had to answer multiple 
questionnaires designed to assess their ``ideological improvement.'' 
One of the questions, the trainee said, was, ``How many Chinese friends 
do you have?'' Those who answered ``none'' or ``few'' participated in 
extended trainings before they were qualified to ``graduate.'' Before 
the release, all trainees signed a paper promising that they would not 
engage in any activities highlighting ``Mongolian characteristics'' or 
expressing ``nationalistic feeling.''
    From what is happening to the Uyghurs and what is happening to the 
Mongolians and Tibetans, it is apparent that the Chinese authorities 
are engaging in different forms of genocide campaigns on multiple 
fronts. While in East Turkistan, millions of Uyghurs and other Muslim 
peoples are locked up in concentration camps, in Southern Mongolia, a 
full-scale cultural genocide campaign is taking place. In Tibet, a 
similar campaign has been launched to eradicate the unique Tibetan 
culture and religious beliefs. Whatever form the campaign takes, the 
ultimate goal of the Chinese authorities is the same: wipe out the 
language, culture, and identity of these three peoples and force them 
to adopt the so-called zhong hua, or, simply put, ``Chinese'' 
nationality. This goal is publicly stated and advertised by the Chinese 
Government across China.
                            recommendations
    Considering the deteriorating human rights conditions in Southern 
Mongolia; China's determination to erase the Mongolian language, 
culture, and identity; and the lack of support from the international 
community, I would like to make the following recommendations to the 
United States Congress:

    1. Conduct further hearings and testimonies to investigate the 
gross human rights violations in Southern Mongolia, particularly the 
ongoing cultural genocide;

    2. Establish a Mongolian language broadcast in Voice of America 
and/or Radio Free Asia to help Southern Mongolians keep their language 
alive and establish a channel to the free and democratic world;

    3. Introduce and pass legislation similar to the Uyghur Human 
Rights Policy Act and Tibetan Policy and Support Act to support the six 
million Southern Mongolians in their efforts to defend their basic 
human rights and fundamental freedoms.

    Thank you.
                                 ______
                                 

                  Prepared Statement of Lhadon Tethong

    Thank you Chairman McGovern, Chairman Merkley, members of the 
Commission and CECC staff for all of your work and commitment to 
support human rights and freedom in Tibet. And thank you for giving me 
the opportunity to speak here today.
    As a Tibetan, and someone who has been working full time on the 
Sino-Tibetan conflict for the past twenty-three years, I can safely 
say: it takes a lot to shock me. But last year, when my colleagues and 
I began research into reports that Tibetan children were being sent to 
state-run boarding schools at an alarmingly high rate, and against 
their parents wishes, we were stunned and alarmed by what we found.
    Over the past decade--under the cover of darkness of China's near 
total information blackout and lockdown of Tibet--the Chinese 
authorities have been constructing a massive colonial boarding school 
system. These schools threaten the very survival of the Tibetan people 
and nation because they so wholly and completely target the future of 
Tibet--our children. And not just some of them, but all of them, even 
the youngest ones.
    China's colonial boarding school system in Tibet is the cornerstone 
of a broader effort to wipe out the current and future resistance of 
the fiercely proud Tibetan people, by eliminating the three pillars of 
Tibetan identity--language, religion, and way of life.
    In essence, the schools streamline and fasttrack this policy by 
ripping Tibetan children from their roots, by stealing the language 
from their tongues, and by turning them into something that they are 
not.
    And together with ``common language'' and ``bilingual education'' 
policies, and other policies purposely named to sound benign when, in 
fact, they are not, they represent an entirely new level of attack on 
the Tibetan people that threatens to irreversibly alter Tibetan life in 
every space in Tibet--on the grasslands, in the monasteries, in the 
universities, in villages, in cities, and even in the privacy of one's 
own home.
    As one Tibetan education policy expert from Tibet who was raised 
during the cultural revolution told me recently: ``What is happening 
now is actually worse than the Cultural Revolution. At that time, they 
destroyed so much physically, but now they are trying to destroy the 
entire foundation of who we are as a people on the inside.''
    In our report, released in December, we found that:

      At least 800,000 to 900,000 Tibetan children in all of 
historical Tibet--representing nearly eighty percent of all Tibetan 
school children ages 6 to 18--are now separated from their families and 
living in colonial boarding schools.
      This number does not include four- and five-year-olds 
being made to live in boarding preschools because China is actively 
trying to hide their existence. We believe this number is also very 
high.
      These children are forbidden from practicing religion and 
cut off from authentic Tibetan culture--beyond, of course, what the 
Chinese Communist Party approves of.
      They are being taught almost entirely in Chinese, by 
mostly Chinese teachers, from Chinese textbooks that reflect Chinese 
life and history, culture and values, while completely denying Tibet's 
own rich and ancient history and culture.
      On top of this, they are subjected to intense political 
indoctrination which says they must be loyal to the Chinese Communist 
Party and the Chinese nation first and above all else.
      Most Tibetan parents have no choice but to send their 
children away to live in these state-run schools because the 
authorities have closed the local village schools, along with most 
privately run Tibetan schools and monastery schools.
      Parents who try to resist or refuse are threatened with 
fines and other serious consequences. And, of course, the children also 
have no choice.

    One person from Tibet described the situation like this: ``I know 
of children aged four to five who don't want to be separated from their 
mothers. They are forced to go to boarding schools. In some cases, the 
children cry for days, sticking to their mother's laps, begging not to 
be sent away and even refusing to go back. Both the children and the 
parents are unwilling.''
    This insidious policy--to isolate children from their families so 
as to erase their Tibetan identity and replace it with a Chinese 
identity--was developed at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist 
Party. And it is blatantly racist.
    Of course Tibetan parents want their children to receive the best 
possible education, but they don't want to have to send them away to 
get it. Nobody wants to send their children away. Chinese people don't 
want to send their children away.
    A backlash against school consolidation policies in China led the 
State Council to rule, in 2012, that all levels of school should be, in 
principle, non-residential, especially for young children in grades one 
to three.
    Three years later, after Xi Jinping came to power, the same State 
Council issued a decree for so-called ``minority areas'' to 
``strengthen boarding school construction'' and ``achieve the goal that 
students of all ethnic minorities will study in a school, live in a 
school and grow up in a school.''
    Unlike in the past, where middle and high school students in Tibet 
had to attend boarding schools where we have heard firsthand accounts 
of horrific abuse and political indoctrination, now it's primary and 
even preschool children who are also being targeted.
    Any of you with kids, grandkids, nieces, and nephews will know that 
children at the age of four, five, and six, and even those seven, 
eight, nine, and ten are not that far off from being babies. They are 
sweet and vulnerable and they need their parents and their families 
just to manage daily life.
    My five-year-old son started kindergarten this year and I was 
surprised to find both of us quite nervous and emotional over this rite 
of passage. But I walk him to school each day. And I pick him up each 
evening. Every day he gets to come home and be enveloped into the love, 
safety, and comfort of our family where I can protect him and look out 
for his best interests.
    And I can teach and share with him--together with his father, 
grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins--Tibetan language, stories, 
songs and dances, prayers and customs, and all of the other important 
cultural and religious practices and traditions of our family, our 
people, and our ancestors.
    That this precious time of social and emotional growth--where the 
basic building blocks of identity are transmitted and cemented--is 
being denied to the vast majority of Tibetan children, and to their 
parents and families, is truly devastating. And that it is being done 
intentionally is enraging.
    In the U.S., Canada, Australia and other countries, policies that 
separated Native American, Indigenous, and Aboriginal children from 
their families and made them live in residential boarding schools 
designed to erase or change their identity is something we think of as 
a terrible and shameful mistake of the past. We think of now as the 
time for inquiries and apologies--like the historic apology just given 
by the Pope to First Nations, Inuit, and Metis people for the Catholic 
Church's role in Canada's residential school system.
    It is the time for trying to repair some of the tremendous harm 
that was done and that continues to reverberate. Not a time when any 
government would be knowingly and deliberately replicating this heinous 
model, and on such a massive scale. And the reason China is doing this? 
The reason Xi Jinping is taking this genocidal approach in Tibet? To 
eliminate dissent and difference once and for all, by transforming 
Tibetans into Chinese.
    But this is a genocidal project that is bound to fail because even 
after 70 years of a vicious and violent occupation, Tibetans continue 
to fight for their rights and freedom.
    Because generation after generation of Tibetans--even those with no 
memory of a Free Tibet--have shown their love and allegiance to Tibet--
to the mountains, the grasslands, to our mother tongue, the teachings 
of the Buddha, and our great sages, spiritual teachers, and leaders, 
most especially His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama--and not to China.
    Just last month, 25-year-old Tsewang Norbu, a famous Tibetan pop 
star who was just signed, in December, by Warner Brothers China, 
reminded us all of this undeniable fact when he self-immolated in front 
of the Potala Palace in Lhasa. He had every reason to live. He was 
young, successful, college educated. He had a family and resources. His 
whole life was ahead of him.
    But he gave it all up, in the ultimate sacrifice at the most 
meaningful and political location and moment, on the eve of the 63rd 
anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan Uprising in Lhasa, when security in 
Tibet is at its absolute tightest. He again demonstrated that no matter 
China's economic, military, or political might, everything Chinese 
leaders have done to try to convince, co-opt, coerce, and force 
Tibetans to submit to Chinese rule has failed.
    After looking at Tsewang Norbu's lyrics and life story, I think he 
took this action because he wanted to remind us all that no matter what 
personal success we may achieve as individuals, what matters the most 
is your roots. Your homeland. Your culture. Your language. The freedom 
to be who you are. To live as you see fit in your own land and on your 
own terms.
    But, of course, this is not possible in Tibet today under Chinese 
rule. Tibetans are being blocked from even speaking Tibetan on Chinese 
social media apps like Kuaishou and Douyin, the Chinese version of 
TikTok. And even young children trying to defend their right to study 
and speak in Tibetan are being severely punished.
    Recently, we learned that three students, 16-year-old Palsang, 15-
year-old Sermo, and 11-year-old Yangkyi, were sent from a colonial 
boarding school in Markham County to a detention center for expressing 
their sadness over the removal of Tibetan language classes from the 
school. They are reported to have been arrested and taken away 
forcefully under the pretext of needing psychological counseling. It 
has been five months since they were taken away, and still we know 
little to nothing about their condition.
    I think it is hard for people to fully understand what is at stake 
here for Tibetans. What this all means for our nation. Our history. Our 
survival. Language rights. Assimilationist policies. These are words 
that not everyone can relate to. They can feel quite cold or technical, 
perhaps even alienating to the average person who lives in a free and 
open society.
    What I would like to do today is to explain the battle for Tibet's 
existence in a way that perhaps everyone can relate to better, and 
while this example and its parallels are not perfect, I believe it 
helps to illuminate what is at stake.
    Imagine that Russia not only invades, but occupies Ukraine, as 
China has done to Tibet for the past 70 years. Imagine the beautiful 
Ukrainian children we see on TV, trying to flee the war with their 
mothers or hiding from Russia's bombs in basements, are trapped by 
Russian forces. Their parents and grandparents are killed, imprisoned, 
or ultimately, and only by sheer force, made to submit to their foreign 
rulers. After some time, these children are taken away from their 
parents. Not just a few of them. Eighty percent of them. Nearly all of 
them.
    And they are made to live in boarding schools designed by Russians, 
taught mainly by Russians in Russian language, and with a curriculum 
that celebrates Russian culture and history and Moscow's military 
conquests in Crimea, in Georgia, Chechnya, Syria.
    They are taught that Russia's invasion was for their benefit--that 
Ukrainians were liberated from Nazi rule. Every day these children have 
to raise the Russian flag. Every day they have to sing the Russian 
national anthem. After some time, most do not even realize that Ukraine 
was ever an independent nation. They do not know Zelensky's name. Or, 
if they do, they are taught he is an evil terrorist.
    I know any good and moral person can see how wrong this would be. 
On every level. It's pretty much crystal clear at this moment while we 
all bear witness to the horror and injustice of Russia's war of 
aggression in Ukraine.
    We would never accept it. We would fight against it and use every 
tool in our toolbox to make Russia stop. To save Ukrainian children. To 
reunite them with their parents. We would know we must refuse to let 
Russia erase Ukraine from our world and from history. That would be the 
course of action we would take. That would be the right thing to do. 
That should be the course of action we take with China. There is so 
much we can do. The world's opposition to Russia's invasion of Ukraine 
has shown us how much power people and governments, both individually 
and collectively, have. Just as Putin's actions have shown us that a 
totalitarian state with imperial ambitions cannot be allowed to invade, 
occupy, and endlessly terrorize its neighbors--because a state that so 
blatantly flouts international rules and norms, and indeed actively 
seeks to undermine them, no matter what its propaganda says are its 
intentions, threatens us all.
    Chinese imperialism must be stopped. Xi Jinping must be stopped. 
The fate of Tibetans, Uyghurs, Southern Mongolians, Hongkongers, 
Taiwanese, affects us all. I will end my remarks here and save my 
specific recommendations for the Q&A. I would also like to submit our 
report on China's colonial boarding school system in Tibet for the 
record. Thank you.
                                 ______
                                 

                  Prepared Statement of Ayup Abduweli

              When a Language Stands Up against Atrocities

    Uyghur was recognized as an official language, together with 
Mandarin, after the arrival of Communist rule in October 1949. This did 
not change when the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region was set up in 
1955--Uyghur was preserved as the main language of instruction in the 
region, as it was before 1949. However, Uyghur orthography was treated 
as the remains of pre-Communist backwardness. This meant that the 
Uyghur Arabic script, which had been used for almost one thousand 
years, stopped being used, and was replaced with a new spelling system. 
This caused hundreds of thousands of people to become illiterate, and 
it also made a thousand years of written legacy unreadable.
    Furthermore, beginning in 1956, the CCP treated the Arabic Uyghur 
script as representative of Islam, and a competitor and cultural threat 
to Mandarin. Officials set out to ``revolutionize'' the Uyghur writing 
system, and the Xinjiang language committee was ordered to change the 
Uyghur Arabic script into a Cyrillic one.
    Uyghur linguists who didn't agree with the language policy were 
imprisoned, such as Ibrahim Muti, Abdurehim Otkur, Mirsultan Osmanov, 
and Reveydulla Hemdulla. Ibrahim Muti and Abdurehim Otkur, Uyghur 
scholars educated during the Kuomintang period, were imprisoned for 20 
years. Uyghur teachers, publishers, editors, and professors were also 
arrested for the same reasons.
    The alphabetic change in 1956 resulted in thousands of Uyghurs 
being imprisoned and thousands of books becoming unreadable, and 
millions of people becoming illiterate. Uyghurs were forced to learn a 
brand-new writing system.
    Then, in 1962, the Uyghur alphabet was changed to a sinicized Latin 
script, aimed at unifying all ethnic languages under a Han Chinese 
phonetic alphabet. This created illiteracy, miscommunication, and 
discouragement among the Uyghurs. It also led to book burning and mass 
arrests of Uyghur intellectuals.
    From 1966 to 1976, the Uyghur language experienced a Cultural 
Revolution which was imposed by the CCP. Most of the Uyghur elite 
escaped to the Soviet Union within ten years. There were more than 
100,000 Uyghurs and Kazakhs who escaped to Turkic-speaking Soviet 
republics because they were afraid of imprisonment and other types of 
physical and mental torture.
    During the Cultural Revolution, every aspect of Uyghur life was 
``revolutionized''. Uyghur was ``enriched'' with ``red'' Mandarin 
revolutionary words. Millions of copies of books were burned. The 
Cultural Revolution treated the Uyghur script as the remains of the 
``feudalistic backward old society.''
    At that time, books in the Uyghur Arabic script were treated as 
anti-revolutionary yellow books. The books were all collected from 
every Uyghur family and then burned in front of mosques. My father kept 
some yellow books in secret boxes, and when I was young he read some 
books to us from those boxes.
    The Uyghur language was treated as an object of the revolution, and 
it was revolutionized by the Chinese phonetic alphabet. Based on my 
study of Chinese loan words in the Uyghur-language Xinjiang Daily of 
October 1st, 1970, the level of loan words reached 62 percent. This 
made Uyghurs feel marginalized, threatened, and endangered.
    The Uyghur language enjoyed a short period of a golden age from 
1982 to the early 2000s. However, the Uyghur language was treated as an 
obstacle to the modernization of Uyghurs. During this time, Chinese 
symbolized modernity and Uyghur symbolized being outdated, feudal, and 
backward. In order to reach the goal of modernization, the Uyghur 
language was forced to change its orthography in order to absorb 
Chinese loan words.
    After the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, the international 
war against terrorism not only changed the fate of the world, but also 
the fate of the Uyghurs' language. China has employed the international 
outcry against terrorism to curb Uyghur cultural practices, especially 
the Uyghur language, and has erased it as a language of instruction in 
universities, colleges, and technology schools. The Uyghur language has 
also been restricted in health care and other bureaucracies. This 
creates disagreement among the Uyghur community.
    In 2005, Memtimin Elyar, a website administrator and IT engineer, 
started an online campaign to protect and recover the legal rights of 
the Uyghur language as stipulated by the Chinese constitution and the 
Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law. However, Elyar was arrested and sentenced 
to 12 years in prison. More than ten intellectuals were arrested at 
that time. In 2016, the intellectuals who signed the petition were also 
targeted by the government. All of the scholars who signed the petition 
have been arrested--Perhat Tursun, Kuresh Tahir, Kamil Rehim, and 
Qurban Mamut are among them.
    In September 2011, another campaign was started to protect the 
legal rights of Uyghurs and preserve the Uyghur language as a language 
of instruction in education. I established the first mother-tongue 
kindergarten in Kashgar on September 15, 2011. My mother-tongue 
movement became so popular online that 500,000 followers followed it.
    In September 2012, together with my friends Dilyar Obulqasim and 
Memetsidiq Abdureshit, I decided to establish a new mother-tongue 
kindergarten in Urumqi. Unfortunately, the application for this 
kindergarten was rejected by the authorities.
    On March 19, 2013, we decided to start a joint campaign with 
Mongol, Kazakh and Kyrgyz intellectuals, because those languages were 
also in danger. We decided to hold a conference about how to protect 
ethnic minority languages in Xinjiang within the framework of the 
Chinese constitution, and how to strengthen the mother-tongue 
protection movement, and to base it on a legal foundation. We declared 
our slogan to be ``If the Chinese constitution protects our language, 
then it is our turn to protect it.'' For the conference, we invited 
Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Mongol scholars who worked for the Chinese 
government to discuss how to protect ethnic minority languages in 
Xinjiang under the Chinese constitution. After the conference, our 
slogan was popular in every city of Xinjiang, possibly because people 
thought it was a safe slogan to use. I think it was our last 
opportunity to try using this kind of action.
    On August 19, 2013, Chinese security personnel arrested four of 
us--Memetsidiq Abdureshit, Dilyar Obulqasim, Abdusalam Abdurahman and 
me. Dilyar Obulqasim, Memetsidiq Abdureshit and I were held in a 
detention center for more than 15 months, 18 months, and 24 months, 
respectively.
    Since 2017, language policy towards Uyghur has changed 
dramatically. Uyghur was banned from education at the end of 2016, 
Uyghur textbooks were forbidden, and textbook editors were heavily 
sentenced. All Uyghur books were banned, and Uyghur books in homes, at 
libraries and at bookstores were collected and burned.
    Uyghur publishers have also been sentenced--30 percent of Uyghur 
publishers have been sentenced, private bookstores have been shut down, 
and the owners of the bookstores have also been sentenced.
    Uyghur is not allowed at schools, even in schoolyards. Uyghur 
language teachers have also been sentenced, and textbook editors have 
been sentenced, with three of them sentenced to life imprisonment. 
According to the documentation of Uyghur Hjelp, more than 400 Uyghur 
textbook editors have been sentenced. Three editors-in-chief of Uyghur 
textbooks have been sentenced to life imprisonment, and one editor-in-
chief was sentenced to death.
    There are now 900,000 Uyghur kids in Chinese boarding schools. 
Uyghur children from the age of six are forced to live in boarding 
schools. Boarding kindergartens are mandatory for Uyghurs throughout 
the countryside. Millions of Uyghur kids have been separated from their 
families and their homeland, and they are victims of indoctrination 
under the name of education.
    Han Chinese officials have been appointed to Uyghurs' homes to 
force Uyghurs not to speak Uyghur at home. Unqualified Han Chinese 
teachers have been recruited from Chinese provinces, just to force 
Uyghur students not to speak Uyghur in the classroom. These extreme 
measures put the Uyghur language at the edge of extinction.
                                 ______
                                 

                Prepared Statement of Hon. Jeff Merkley

    Before we turn to the subject of this hearing, I want to 
acknowledge that this is our first hearing since the publication of the 
Commission's annual report on human rights conditions and rule-of-law 
developments in China. Every year, the rigorously researched and 
sourced work of the Commission's nonpartisan research staff makes a 
profound contribution to the understanding of these issues in Congress, 
the executive branch, the academic and advocacy communities, and 
elsewhere, and that is certainly true again this year. When the Chinese 
government seeks to mislead the world about the treatment of Chinese 
citizens and the government's critics, the fact-based reporting of the 
CECC Annual Report shines a light and helps document the truth.
    Increasingly, this work informs and catalyzes meaningful action. 
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is the latest example in a 
string of significant laws that grew out of the CECC's reporting. As 
Congress now works to advance China-focused legislation, it's crucial 
that it include tangible steps advocated by this Commission on a 
bipartisan and bicameral basis, such as expanded humanitarian pathways 
for Hong Kong residents and Uyghurs fleeing Chinese government 
persecution, as well as the creation of a China Censorship Monitor and 
Action Group to protect U.S. businesses and individuals from censorship 
and intimidation.
    I'd like to thank the Commission's staff--incredible team--for its 
tireless, professional, and expert work preparing such a high-quality 
report. While it is truly a team effort with significant contributions 
from everyone on the staff, I'd like to especially recognize Megan 
Fluker, who played an integral role in eight of these annual reports 
and managed production of the last several before leaving the 
Commission last fall. Megan, I know you're on your next chapter, but we 
really appreciate your many years of dedicated effort.
    Some of the most heartbreaking reporting details the genocide being 
perpetrated against Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities 
in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, as well as elements of 
eugenics in population control policies directed at ethnic minorities. 
These are not the only ways in which the Chinese Communist Party seeks 
to destroy religious and ethnic minorities. Chinese authorities have 
engaged in a years-long campaign of ``sinicization,'' requiring greater 
conformity with officially sanctioned interpretations of Chinese 
culture.
    One of the most pernicious aspects of this campaign targets ethnic 
minorities' language and identity. Under a policy that promises 
``bilingual education,'' authorities in fact largely replace 
instruction in ethnic minority languages with instruction in Mandarin 
Chinese. Meanwhile, only a fraction of the languages spoken or signed 
in China today receive official recognition and support, threatening 
the ability and rights of unrecognized language communities to use and 
develop their languages.
    These policies break promises made to ethnic minorities under 
China's constitution, under the Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law, and under 
international standards such as the International Covenant on Civil and 
Political Rights, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the 
UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
    In this hearing, we will hear from expert witnesses about the 
sinicization campaign that runs afoul of these standards for protecting 
linguistic rights. We'll hear about recent substantial reductions in 
the use of Mongolian language instruction and the harsh crackdown on 
Mongolian culture that followed protests over these policies. We'll 
hear about insidious and widespread efforts to separate Tibetan 
children from their parents, placing them in boarding schools to 
disrupt the intergenerational transmission of mother languages. And 
we'll hear about the detention and imprisonment that often befalls 
those who stand up for language, who stand up for cultural rights, 
including the personal experience of one of our witnesses after he 
opened a Uyghur language kindergarten.
    This coercive assimilation erodes language, culture, and identity 
for ethnic minorities in China. I look forward to today's witnesses 
helping the Commission better understand the costs to communities of 
these policies as we work with Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongolians, and 
others to protect their cultures from destruction.

              Prepared Statement of Hon. James P. McGovern

    Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing on language and 
identity in the People's Republic of China.
    First, I join the Chair in welcoming the release of the 
Commission's Annual Report for 2021 last week. It comprehensively 
documents the Chinese government's appalling human rights record. The 
report takes countless hours to research, write, fact-check, and 
publish.
    I particularly want to praise the Commission's professional staff 
of researchers for their expertise and skill in producing each annual 
report. They do amazing work and are a valued resource for this 
Commission and the entire Congress. These researchers do their work 
objectively. They check out every single fact. The reporting is 
impeccably accurate, which makes this report especially powerful. I 
can't thank them enough. Those of both parties who care about human 
rights ought to recognize their incredible work.
    Let me quote from author James Baldwin in a 1979 essay. He writes, 
``Language is a political instrument, means, and proof of power. People 
evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their 
circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they 
cannot articulate. And, if they cannot articulate it, they are 
submerged.''
    Baldwin was writing in a different context, but his message is one 
that anthropologists and political scientists confirm: that language is 
the core of a people's identity.
    The People's Republic of China is a multilingual society. There are 
56 official languages, and hundreds more that are not formally 
recognized by the state. On paper, language is protected under Chinese 
law. The PRC constitution gives ethnic minorities ``the freedom to use 
and develop their own spoken and written languages, and to preserve or 
reform their own ways and customs.''
    In practice, however, we are witnessing the exact opposite. 
Government policies appear to promote standard Mandarin at the expense 
of other languages. This is happening as the Party under Xi Jinping 
imposes a coercive conformity across all facets of society.
    This trend provides the context and the central question for this 
hearing: Is the Chinese government and Party deliberately eroding the 
language rights of ethnic minorities in a quest for majoritarian 
political control? And in so doing, isn't the government violating 
rights guaranteed under the Chinese constitution and law?
    This Commission has documented protests by Tibetans, Mongolians, 
and others against restrictions on their own languages. These protests 
are often suppressed. People are jailed for simply asking that their 
guaranteed rights be respected.
    I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today about the 
threats to the Mongolian, Tibetan, and Uyghur languages under PRC 
policies, and what this means for the concept of ethnic autonomy. I 
also look forward to hearing about the vulnerability of the hundreds of 
unofficial languages that also deserve protection and preservation.
    So again, Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding this hearing.
                       Submissions for the Record

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                          INTENTIONALLY BLANK


                          Witness Biographies

    Gerald Roche, anthropologist, Senior Research Fellow, Department of 
Politics, Media and Philosophy, La Trobe University

    Gerald Roche is an anthropologist who is currently a Senior 
Research Fellow in the Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy at 
La Trobe University, a La Trobe Asia Fellow, and a co-chair of the 
Global Coalition for Language Rights. His research contributions have 
been recognized in several awards, including a La Trobe University Mid-
Career Research Award and an Australian Research Council Discovery 
Early Career Research Award. His work focuses on issues of power, the 
state, colonialism, and race in Asia, particularly in the transnational 
Himalayan region. Much of his research explores how these issues 
manifest in the language politics of this linguistically diverse area, 
through state-sponsored language oppression and the social movements 
and community practices which seek to resist it. He has also researched 
and written on issues of racism, ethnicity, urbanization, popular 
music, and community ritual in the region, and how these are shaped by 
both state power and transnational flows.

    Enghebatu Togochog, Director, Southern Mongolian Human Rights 
Information Center

    Enghebatu Togochog is the Director of the Southern Mongolian Human 
Rights Information Center. In 2001, he established the Southern 
Mongolian Human Rights Information Center (SMHRIC), a New York-based 
human rights organization dedicated to promoting and protecting the 
rights of the Mongolian people in Inner Mongolia. Currently he is the 
Director of the SMHRIC and the chief editor of the organizational 
newsletter ``Southern Mongolia Watch.'' He has testified before the 
United Nations Human Rights Council, United Nations Permanent Forum on 
Indigenous Issues, United Nations Forum on Minority Issues, United 
Nations Committee against Torture, and European Parliament. In 2002, he 
testified before the CECC. His work includes the translation of ``Way 
Out of Southern Mongolia'' and ``Genocide on the Mongolian Steppe.''

    Lhadon Tethong, co-founder and Director, Tibet Action Institute

    Lhadon Tethong is the co-founder and Director of the Tibet Action 
Institute where she leads a team of technologists and rights advocates 
in developing open-source technologies, strategies, and training 
programs for Tibetans and others living under extreme repression. 
Formerly the Executive Director of Students for a Free Tibet 
International (2002-2009), Lhadon led the high-profile global campaign 
to condemn China's rule of Tibet in the lead-up to and during the 2008 
Beijing Olympic Games. As China prepared for the Games in 2007, she 
made international headlines as she posted real-time accounts of her 
travels through Beijing on her blog--one of the first in the Tibetan 
world--BeijingWideOpen.org.

    Ayup Abduweli, Uyghur writer and linguist

    Ayup Abduweli is a writer and linguist specializing in Uyghur 
language education. Born in 1973 near Kashgar in the Uyghur region, he 
completed his bachelor's studies in Turkic literature at Minzu 
University in 1997 and earned a master's degree at Xinjiang University 
in 2001. He was a professor at Northwest Minzu University and Xinjiang 
Financial and Economic University for nine years. He obtained a 
master's degree in linguistics in 2011 from the University of Kansas in 
Lawrence. He was a proponent of linguistic rights and an active 
promoter of Uyghur language education, returning to Xinjiang in 2011 
after graduation. Abduweli opened language schools and kindergartens in 
the cities of Urumchi and Kashgar. During this time, he was subjected 
to repeated interrogations and harassment by Chinese authorities. He 
was arrested in August 2013 and accused of promoting separatist 
activities. After 15 months in detention, he fled to Turkey from China 
with his family in August 2015. In Turkey, he collected camp detainees' 
stories and documented the plight of the Uyghur diaspora, especially of 
Uyghurs in Turkey. Since 2019, Abduweli has lived in Bergen, Norway, as 
a writer-in-residence through the ICORN program. In September 2016, 
Abduweli founded the organization Uyghur Hjelp, advocating and 
documenting the Uyghur plight with his team and providing aid to 
Uyghurs in Turkey.
      
      

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