An other day, an other rejected job offer. This time not because I am not qualified or content to work for ’adult entertainment’ which opportunity I refused a few days ago, but due to my unwillingness to participate in human rights violations. I have been called picky in a very different context on many occasions but I prefer thinking that I simply stick to certain principles. Which means I am picky.

I was offered a project to contribute to the 2022 Winter Olympics. You might have heard about the controversies surrounding the event and the diplomatic boycott which the US, Australia, Canada and Britain all support. My response was a straight refusal, offering further explanation should they be interested in why I am against the event. They were not but I didn’t expect otherwise.

When I started doing Tibetan studies, it was common knowledge that obtaining a visa to Tibet (well, to China) as a researcher or even as a student within this field, is more than challenging. In addition, scholarships didn’t exist for obvious reasons and we were too young to have the financial background to support such trip, so noone from my class was able to visit the country during their studies or after. Forgive my terminology, I will keep calling Tibet a country, although officially it is a region of China. There were a couple of students who did Chinese studies too, and that made things easier, they were provided funding to travel and study at least in China. However, none of them reached Tibet. I know about only a few people from other classes, who at a later stage found their way to the country and hats off to them, it wasn’t an easy feat. Then there were those, who, as a kind of substitute, travelled to Bhutan or Ladakh, to these ancient Buddhist territories where they could find similar circumstances to those found in Tibet before its annexation by the People’s Republic of China. It was much easier to visit Dharamsala in India, where the 14th Dalai Lama lives in exile until today, together with a huge Tibetan diaspora.

Such is the significance of this Indian diaspora is that the centre of Tibetan culture is now outside of its birthplace. Can you imagine that? When the 14th Dalai Lama escaped from Tibet in 1959, many of the highest ranking and most educated religious leaders followed him simply to be able to preserve their knowledge. Later even more of them decided to take refugee in India or elsewhere in the world. The destruction that followed is indescribable. It is important to note that education was in the hands of monasteries. Traditional arts, which were also strongly connected to Buddhism and therefore to daily life, were practised by monks, or by laypeople working under the direction and mainly within the monasteries. In lack of teachers, due to the destruction of written and material resources, and the devastating purge of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, those who stayed behind were unable to access traditional knowledge and more and more they were deprived of their heritage. The work that is done until today in Dharamsala and elsewhere, in terms of maintaining this heritage, is invaluable. Families still risk their lives by smuggling their children out of China to give them a chance to live like Tibetans. Understand it correctly. The parents stay where they are, they only send their children away, and there is a good chance that they would never be united again. Issues between those who have recently arrived and those more settled, are inevitable in these circumstances. The identity of the newcomers is often questioned and it leads to serious gaps between the various groups of the community.

This is only one of the examples of human rights abuses committed by China. You might have heard more about the Uyghurs’ plea recently, the so called ’re-education camps’ where they are detained and tortured. History repeats itself. There always seem to be an other and other ethnicity which the Chinese leadership wishes to eradicate. Oppression is not restricted to minorities though. Chinese intellectuals, artists, whoever opposes the system, are persecuted in various forms.

Although the gesture above mentioned world-powers made towards the Uyghurs and other affected people, is only symbolic and unlikely to end human rights violations, this is the least we can do. The only way I am able to contribute to some kind of change or at least to support the cause from the distance, is that I remain picky about where my knowledge and skills are used. I am all for sport and the values it represent (at least in theory), but standing by an oppressive regime cannot be an option.