Chinese consul-general Huang Ping, Beijing’s most senior diplomat in New York, this week defended the Chinese Communist Party’s forced assimilation of Tibetan children.
A report by the Tibet Action Institute, a nonprofit focused on human rights in the region, recently published a report detailing Beijing’s policy of forcing children to attend Chinese-government boarding schools, where they are effectively stripped of their Tibetan identity and required to parrot CCP propaganda. Estimates say that some 1 million Tibetan children have been forced into the schools.
In response to those findings, Secretary of State Antony Blinken this week announced that the State Department would impose visa restrictions on officials involved in the forced-assimilation campaign. “These coercive policies seek to eliminate Tibet’s distinct linguistic, cultural, and religious traditions among younger generations of Tibetans,” Blinken said in a statement. He didn’t name the specific officials to whom those restrictions would apply.
That seems to be what prompted Huang to speak out yesterday on Twitter. “Read this article and learn about the true picture in #Xizang (#Tibet),” he said, sharing an article by the CCP’s propaganda arm China Daily. “Boarding schools in Tibet are considered to be the ‘optimal choice’ for students, and they ‘offer specialized courses on excellent Tibetan culture’. The so-called ‘forcible assimilation of Tibetan children’ is totally unfounded.”
It’s wholly unsurprising that Huang is promoting Beijing’s propaganda line. He’s a relatively senior Chinese diplomat. It’s his job to do that, and he has previously, on everything from Xinjiang to Taiwan.
What’s noteworthy about his tweet is that it is a reminder that his hard-line stances have not prevented him from maintaining relationships with politicians in New York. Earlier this month, he appeared on the same stage with over a dozen prominent New York Democrats, including Mayor Eric Adams and Representative Grace Meng, at a festival hosted by Hong Kong government agencies in Flushing, Queens. Earlier this year, he marched with Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul at a parade in Chinatown, and the office of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg held a ceremony with the Chinese consulate-general to mark the repatriation of looted antiquities to China.
These days, most members of Congress wouldn’t be caught dead next to a Chinese Communist Party official. Unfortunately, recent history suggests that the opening of this new front in Huang’s campaign to convince New Yorkers of the merits of Beijing’s extreme, ethnonationalist policies won’t alienate these New York officials one bit.