Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) testified at a congressional hearing March 28 on China's aggressions against Tibet that included statements by actor and Tibet advocate Richard Gere and Penpa Tsering, the leader of Tibet's Government-in-Exile.
Smith, chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), spoke of the urgent need for the United States and other countries to confront China and its enablers, according to a press release from Smith's office, as well as companies and other entities that enable human-rights abuses by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Smith has chaired more than 85 congressional hearings and markups on China’s egregious human rights abuses, the release states.
“All of us need to do a better job exposing and reversing—or at least mitigating—the ugly, hate-filled campaign by the Chinese Communist Party to erase an entire people—the people of Tibet,” Smith said at the hearing, the press release reports.
Smith spoke specifically about the American company Thermo Fisher Scientific, which he accused of aiding China's efforts to obtain and store DNA samples and other genetic data taken by force from Tibetans.
“Biometric data — DNA and iris scans — of over a million Tibetans have been harvested and stored by the CCP,” Smith said, according to the release. “Blood samples were drawn even from children in kindergarten.”
Smith said what is "even more shocking" was the part Thermo Fisher Scientific played in the genetic data collection by selling DNA kits and DNA sequencer replacement parts to police in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) and called for stricter oversight of the company.
Richard Gere, the chairman of the Board of Directors for the International Campaign for Tibet, and as the Sikyong, or head of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, according to the release. Gere said Chinese police have collected approximately 920,000 to 1,200,000 DNA samples in the past 6 years.
“China’s surveillance no longer halts at the Tibetan border,” Gere said, the release reports. “The CCP's techno-authoritarianism and fear tactics extend to Tibetan communities abroad. This oppression is being perpetrated behind a digital iron curtain to hide reality on the ground. The development of these systems of repression, reaching all the way around the world, reflects the lengths the CCP will go to dismantle the Tibetan civilization.”
The press release cited a 2021 report by Tibet Action International which said 80% of children in the TAR are separated from their families through boarding schools in forced assimilation of ethnic and religious minority groups.
Penpa Tsering, the exiled Tibetan government's Sikyong, or leader, testified at the hearing on the CCP's efforts to eradicate Tibetan identity.
Tsering said at the hearing that “to speed up assimilation," the CCP has forced "large-scale" relocation of Tibetans from their traditional homeland to Chinese territories and within Tibet, and the "mass transfer" of young Tibetans for labor, the release reports. He stated also that the CCP has "incentivized" Hans Chinese to migrate into Tibet.
"Moreover," Tsering testified, "Tibetan children across Tibet are not only being coerced into colonial boarding schools but transferred to areas across China on a massive scale.”
The hearing also included expert testimony from Lhadon Tethong, director of the Tibet Action Institute, and Tenzin Dorjee, senior research and strategist at the Tibet Action Group, according to the release.
“China is committing genocide in Tibet,” Tethong testified. He said China has spent decades working to change history, and to distort and obscure the present situation on the ground so Tibet gets erased from the world stage, both in the past and in the present”
“The U.S., and the West in general, has conceded so much ground to China in the last three decades and moved the equilibrium so far toward Beijing’s baseline,” Dorjee said, the release reported. “It is time to liberate ourselves from the tragically misguided notion that sweeping human rights under the rug would somehow make China more likely to cooperate on issues of geopolitical interest.”
