Deepak Dwivedi
NEW DELHI: In an age when authoritarian regimes engineer silence as deftly as they engineer steel, the written word remains among the most defiant of weapons. China’s Colonial Games in Tibet, edited by veteran journalist and Tibetologist Vijay Kranti, is precisely such a weapon – painstakingly forged over years of scholarship, testimony and moral urgency. At 486 pages, housing 60 essays by 39 domain experts from across the globe, this is not merely a book. It is an act of collective courage.
The central challenge it addresses is one that haunts every critic of Chinese hegemony: how does one counter a propaganda apparatus so vast, so resourced and so deeply embedded in global media that almost no unflattering truth about the Xi Jinping regime can reach the world community unfiltered? For the colonised peoples of Tibet, East Turkistan, Southern Mongolia and Hong Kong, this battle for information is not an academic exercise – it is a matter of survival. Kranti’s book tears through this iron dome of silence with the precision of a scholar and the passion of a humanist.
Collective scholarship
Arising from a remarkable chain of international webinars that Kranti organised and moderated over three years, the book draws on the testimony of some of the most formidable voices in Tibetan and Sino-political studies. Among them are Prof Robert Destro, former US Assistant Secretary of State; Prof Samdhong Rinpoche, elected Kalon Tripa (Prime Minister) of the Central Tibetan Administration; Sikyong Penpa Tsering, its current elected President; international law scholar Prof Michael Van Walt Van Praag; and distinguished China-Tibet experts, including Jayadeva Ranade, Claude Arpri and Pierre Antoine Donnet.
Arising from a remarkable chain of international webinars that Kranti organised and moderated, the book draws on the testimony of some of the most formidable voices in Tibetan and Sino-political studies
Structured across 12 thematic sections, the volume guides the reader logically from the deep history of Tibet’s sovereignty and the institution of the Dalai Lama, through to the harrowing realities of contemporary colonial rule. This careful architecture makes the book as accessible to the uninitiated reader as it is indispensable to the seasoned expert.
Among the book’s most illuminating and disturbing revelations is its forensic treatment of President Xi Jinping’s campaign of cultural assimilation. The chapters devoted to residential schools lay bare a systematic effort to sever Tibetan children from their language, faith and identity – moulding them, in the book’s own devastating phrase, into beings who are “Tibetan only in looks but patriotic communist Hans in their thinking and conduct.” This is not incidental policy; it is the deliberate de-Tibetanisation of an entire generation.
Further chapters examine Xi Jinping’s signature concept of ‘Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion’, exposing it as the ideological vehicle for the erasure of Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongol and other minority identities. Three chapters document the suppression of Tibetan women’s rights; seven address the relentless onslaught on Tibet’s already fragile natural environment; and six reveal how the Covid-19 pandemic was cynically exploited to further tighten the CCP’s grip over its colonial populations.
The book also examines, with disturbing precision, the CCP’s manipulation of the sacred Tibetan tradition of reincarnation – Beijing having enacted laws that arrogate to the Party the authority to identify and control the next Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama.
The darkest chapter
Yet it is the section on forced organ harvesting that strikes the most profound chill. Four meticulously documented chapters expose a state-sanctioned industry in which incarcerated populations – Tibetans, Uyghurs and others held in China’s colonial prison system – are subjected to DNA profiling and maintained as living repositories for organs available on demand.
Wealthy clients from the Middle East, Europe and beyond can, the book reveals, procure transplants of heart, liver, kidney or spleen within as little as three to four days – a monstrous ‘business’ operating openly under the protection of Communist Party officials, PLA commanders and corrupt functionaries. These chapters alone make this volume essential reading for every human rights advocate and policymaker.
China’s Colonial Games in Tibet is a landmark contribution to the literature on Chinese colonialism and human rights. It is at once a historical record, a moral indictment and a call to conscience. Vijay Kranti has given voice to the voiceless and delivered to the world a document that Beijing would very much prefer did not exist. For that reason alone, it commands the widest possible readership – among policymakers, legal scholars, journalists, diplomats and every citizen who holds that truth, however inconvenient, must be spoken and heard.