Dystopian Prospects For Tibet As Xi Jinping Puts ‘Butcher Wang’ In Charge Ahead Of Crucial Party Plenum

Barely two weeks ago, on October 19, 2021, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) suddenly announced that its supreme leader, general secretary Xi Jinping, had abruptly appointed a new CCP secretary for the far-away Himalayan region of Tibet, known officially as the “Tibet Autonomous Region” (TAR)

Dystopian Prospects For Tibet As Xi Jinping Puts ‘Butcher Wang’ In Charge Ahead Of Crucial Party Plenum
Via News18

Issue Brief 02

By Frank Lehberger

Barely two weeks ago, on October 19, 2021, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) suddenly announced that its supreme leader, general secretary Xi Jinping, had abruptly appointed a new CCP secretary for the far-away Himalayan region of Tibet, known officially as the “Tibet Autonomous Region” (TAR). Wang Junzheng (王君正) is the name of the 58-year-old boss, who is now sitting in the TAR capital Lhasa. He is a member of China’s 1.3 billion strong ethnic majority of Han-Chinese, who has been appointed to lord over an ethnic community consisting of just 3.6 million Tibetans, who are living in the geopolitically important TAR.


Wang’s transfer to Tibet is of particular concern because he has already committed serious human rights violations in the neighboring Chinese province of Xinjiang, known officially as the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” (XUAR). Due to his abusive role dealing with the ethnic Uyghur Muslim community while holding the post of CCP vice-secretary of the XUAR, Wang Junzheng has since March 2021 been put on international sanction lists in Canada, the US, the UK and the EU.


In July of last year, Washington has started to enact the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act that requires every branch of the federal government to report on all ongoing Chinese human rights abuses in the XUAR. In addition, the U.S. government has slapped Global Magnitsky Act sanctions on Wang, as well as on several other top CCP cadres, including the current CCP boss of the XUAR and member of the Central Committee in Beijing, Chen Quanguo, (陈全国). According to a press release of the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), of March 2021, the OFAC has sanctioned Wang, “in connection with serious human rights abuses against ethnic minorities in the XUAR”.

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