Chinese Communist Party officials in Tibet this month reaffirmed Beijing’s hardline policies pushing for Tibet’s complete assimilation into China’s dominant Han culture, calling for “political education” to further weaken Tibetans’ loyalty to exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, according to state media reports.

Meeting in Tibet’s regional capital Lhasa on July 16, executive committee members of the Chinese Communist Party in the Tibet Autonomous Region reiterated declarations made by China’s president Xi Jinping in special high-level meetings on Tibet in August 2020.

Among these were that China had “liberated and reformed” Tibet and set the region on the path of economic progress during the last 70 years, and that Tibet’s traditional Buddhist religion should be made to adapt to socialist society and be “developed in a Chinese context.”

Also emphasized in the July 16 discussions were the “patriotic re-education” of the Tibetan people and the need to further undermine the influence in Tibet of the Dalai Lama, now living in India after fleeing Tibet into exile in 1959 following a failed national uprising against Chinese rule.

Read the full report here.