Amid clampdown on minorities, China censors all Tibetan language content on TikTok, says report

China has started censoring all content in the Tibetan language on TikTok-equivalent Douyin, according to a report.

While ByteDance runs TikTok in the rest of the world, the app’s equivalent in China in Douyin.

While China has always censored political content about Tibet, now China has started censoring all content in Tibetan language, according to France 24.

For most of the history, Tibet had been an autonomous region even though it had some sort of relationship with Beijing. Then, in 1950-51, China under the new Communist Party regime invaded Tibet and occupied it and began its ongoing repression of its culture and heritage.

Since occupying China, the Communist regime has sought to replace the Tibetan language with Mandarin and has also renamed Tibet as ‘Xizang’. It is part of its ongoing agenda to suppress the cultures of ethnic minorities in the country with that of majority Han Chinese. Following the Chinese repression, the Tibetans mounted an uprising in 1959 which failed. Following the failure, the Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama fled to India along with his followers.

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Tibetan users on Douyin have been questioning why Tibetan language content is being removed.

One user by the name of Youga Ga posted the question in a video in Mandarin: “Aren’t all ethnic groups supposed to be equal? Why, then, is the use of our language, Tibetan, being restricted?”

France 24 reported that the video, even though it was in Mandarin, was quickly removed. It was removed as it concerned Tibet. China, which is run by the Communist Party with an iron-fist, allows no free speech in the country and the internet is severely restricted. Several issues like Tibet, Taiwan, and the Tiananmen Square (the massacre in which the Chinese regime killed thousands of protesters) are out of bounds for discussions.

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Tenzin Dawa, the Executive President of the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD), said the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) evolved policy has also harmed economic prospects for Tibetans as several of them use the app for a living.

“Some of them make a living from the platform, and are now facing sudden restrictions. Many of them spoke about things that were strictly non-political. It’s just that they were using the Tibetan language. Doctors, entrepreneurs, monks, or content creators, they were using Douyin for non-political purposes - for example, to teach Tibetan to non-Tibetans. Or in the case of doctors, to communicate with people in areas such as remote villages where they only speak Tibetan,” said Dawa to France 24.

Dawa further said that while videos may take days to be removed, the live-streams are removed within minutes and users are banned.

Communist China’s harassment of minorities

The harassment of ethnic minorities is not new in China. It is a policy.

While the Communist regime has occupied Tibet since 1950-51, similar systemic harassment is also happening in Xinjiang province of native Uighur Muslims.

In Xinjiang, China runs internment camps where millions of Muslims have been forcefully kept to ‘reeducate’ them. China has ‘sinicised’ Islam where tenets of Islam as well as Islamic buildings like mosques have been given Chinese characteristics at the behest of the state.

Estimates of detained Muslims ranged from 8 to 30 lakhs. In an investigative piece, Vox noted that China has kept up to 3 million Muslims in the so-called re-education camps’ in which they are forced to undergo “psychological indoctrination programs, such as studying communist propaganda and giving thanks to Chinese President Xi Jinping”. The report says that detainees are also abused, such as waterboarding and sexual abuse.

Even though the communist regime describes these places as ’re-education camps’, these camps are in essence internment camps of the kind Nazis ran for Jews during the World War-II era.

France 24 has reported that the Chinese Tik-Tok Douyin is not the first platform to ban Tibetan language content. Previously, Talkmate, a language-learning app, deleted its content in Tibetan along with video streaming platform Bilibili and another TikTok-like app Kuaishou, according to the report.