It’s not new for the Chinese Communist Party to censor any social media content about Tibet that has a political bent. However, in recent weeks, Tibetan users of Douyin, China’s TikTok equivalent, have said that any and all content in the Tibetan language is being censored, whether it is political or not. We spoke to a Tibetan woman in exile who also works for an NGO fighting to defend the human rights of Tibetans.
“Aren’t all ethnic groups supposed to be equal? Why, then, is the use of our language, Tibetan, being restricted?” asks a TikTok user who goes by Youga Ga in a video in Mandarin published on the Douyin video platform. The video quickly disappeared from the platform before being republished on other social media sites not censored by the Chinese Communist Party and accessible from abroad.
The Chinese Communist Party has a long history of censoring any political content about Tibetans and other ethnic and religious minorities. At the same time, the Party encourages what might be called cultural content about tourist-friendly things like music, dance and cuisine.
“They were using Douyin for non-political purposes”
However, in recent weeks, Youga Ga is far from the only person to complain about Douyin’s so-called “ban” on content in the Tibetan language. But like Younga Ga’s video, these posts were quickly removed by the platform.
Douyin hasn’t made a public declaration about banning the Tibetan language, but many posts in Tibetan have been deleted – as have posts about Tibetan culture, according to the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD), an NGO based in Dharamsala, India, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile. Tenzin Dawa, the executive president of the TCHRD, spoke to the Observers about what is happening online:
A huge number of Tibetans active on Douyin have expressed their frustration that they suddenly cannot use Douyin the way they used to. 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.
It’s a huge platform. In most cases, the posts are not removed immediately, but a few days after they are published. But any live-streamers speaking in Tibetan get banned and removed within minutes.
Douyin isn’t the first platform to ban Tibetan. Talkmate, a language-learning application, deleted its content in Tibetan, as did the video streaming platform Bilibili. In 2022, a video sharing app called Kuaishou, which is very similar to Douyin, started deleting videos in Tibetan.
A “folkloric” image of Tibet
The links between ByteDance, the company that owns the video platform Douyin, and the Chinese Community Party are widely documented (such as in this report by an investigative committee of the French Senate). And like all social media platforms in China, Douyin is supervised by Party censors. In the past few years, for example, Douyin has been censoring content linked to the Uighur Muslim minority. The only content about the Uighurs that remains online is cultural in nature and paints a picturesque portrait to bring in tourists.
Read moreThe Uighur ‘influencers’ working for Beijing’s propaganda machine
Videos in Mandarin that promote Tibetan culture have also met certain success in China, like those made by Tenzin Tsondu. The young shepard reached near-celebrity status after a video of him wearing traditional garments went viral on Douyin in 2020.
Historically, the Chinese Communist Party tends to like this kind of cultural content, and the Tourism Board of Litang recruited Tsondu as an “ambassador”.
“The Communist Party sees the culture of ethnic minorities as a threat”
What looks like a concerted effort to remove the Tibetan language from social media would be aligned with the political drive for cultural assimilation. Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, his government has pushed for minorities to assimilate to the Han ethnic majority. Historically, these assimilation measures have targeted the most autonomous ethnic groups like the Uighurs, the Mongols and the Tibetans. Even just speaking Tibetan can be seen as an act of defiance, says our Observer:
The Communist Party often talks about “ethnic harmony” and “ethnic unity”. In China, there are more than 85 ethnic minorities. “Ethnic unity” is used as a euphemism to assimilate other groups that are not ethnically Chinese to one Chinese nation, by which they mean one language, one nation. The Party sees the culture of ethnic minorities as a threat, as a form of subversion.
The aim is to eradicate other languages, cultures and religions. One of the reasons is because in Tibet we had widespread peaceful protests in 2008, which got a lot of international attention. In order to avoid a repeat of that, the Party is trying to erase our language and culture, and assimilate the younger generation of Tibetans so there is no criticism from inside.
A number of dissidents reported that the government goes after people who try to protect Tibetan culture and that some young Tibetans are pushed to go to boarding schools to learn Mandarin.
