Nepal Nixes an Academic Conference

In less than a week, the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu was to be the host of an international conference on Tibetan studies, gathering more than 720 participants from nearly 40 countries. The conference will instead be moved online after senior Nepalese officials, bowing to pressure from China, urged organizers not to proceed with the live event, scheduled for August 23-29. 

While the conference organizer, Oxford University’s International Association for Tibetan Studies (IATS), made no mention in its August 8 announcement of pressure from China’s government as a key factor, saying that it “[had] not yet been given any explanation for this last-minute decision,” independent reporting two days earlier had already made China’s involvement clear. On August 6, the Kathmandu Post, Nepal’s English-language daily newspaper, had reported that government officials had halted the in-person event in response to lobbying from Chinese diplomats and other representatives that had intensified since June. 

The case, which follows the sudden closure of the RightsCon digital human rights conference in Zambia in May this year, has again focused concerns on the Chinese government’s application of pressure on countries globally to halt international events at which critical discussion might turn to China’s policies — particularly on Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Xinjiang. 

“Beijing has already become suspicious that the present [Nepalese] government is tilted toward the West,” the Kathmandu Post quoted one unnamed government official as saying. “The seminar became a test of the government’s neutrality. To assuage China’s concerns, the decision was taken to cancel the event.” 

The local Nepal News, an English-language online news portal, reported that Zhang Maoming (张茂明), China’s relatively new ambassador to Nepal, met with Foreign Secretary Amrit Bahadur Rai on July 21 and voiced his concern that the conference might be used as a platform for criticism of China’s government by the “Tibetan exile administration” — a reference to the Central Tibetan Administration, the government-in-exile of Tibet that is based in Dharamshala, in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.