Tenzin Dorjee, Board Advisor at UNPO Academy, Senior Researcher and Strategist at Tibet Action Institute and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University, delivered a statement at the World Uyghur Congress reflecting on the experiences and contributions of minority communities. Drawing on his personal experience as a Tibetan refugee and immigrant, Dorjee emphasized the everyday resilience, cultural knowledge, and societal insights that minorities bring, as well as the challenges they face under policies of forced assimilation and repression.

His intervention underscores the importance of protecting minority rights, ensuring cultural and linguistic autonomy, and supporting civil society organizations, highlighting minorities as essential contributors to stability, justice and inclusive societies.

I have been a minority my whole life. I grew up as a Tibetan refugee in India. Then after high school, I was a college student in Delhi, where I looked a bit different from the other students. Finally, as an adult, I became an immigrant in America.

So I know from personal experience that minorities don’t ask for much. They usually want to be left alone so they can go to work and come home each day. Once their material needs are met, they try to keep some aspect of their culture alive in their home. 

These are simple needs, they don’t strain the resources of any state, nor do they threaten the stability of society. 

To the contrary, minorities contribute so much to society, and in fact to humanity at large. 

Most of the good food in the world comes from minorities. Especially in places like England or America, minority cuisines save millions of people everyday from continental food. 

Most of the good roads are built by minorities. The Western portion of America’s transcontinental railroad in the 19th century was built by Chinese laborers. The high altitude roads in the Indian Himalayas were built by Tibetan refugees after 1959. 

More importantly, many of the scientific innovations come from minorities. Try imagining Silicon Valley without Indian Americans. You can’t.

But the most important contribution by minorities is not food, it’s not roads, it’s not even science and technology. It’s the minority perspective. Minorities offer a new way to see the world — a window as well as a mirror through which a society can simultaneously see the world and see itself. 

I live in New York, a city made up of minorities. We just elected Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor of a major American city. But I’m not going to quote him; I want to quote his father, Mahmood Mamdani, who’s a renowned scholar at Columbia University. 

He said that the minority is uniquely positioned to see the true nature of society, all of its flaws, all of its promises. That is the superpower of the minority – to be able to see society in its most naked form, and therefore to give us our most accurate diagnosis.

So the lesson is obvious: all societies should embrace minorities and states should empower them. 

Sadly, a growing number of states today are doing the opposite. From Europe to America to Africa, we’re seeing a rise in exclusive nationalism and internal colonialism, where powerful but insecure states are disempowering and disenfranchising minorities. 

One place where minorities have been most persecuted is the People’s Republic of China. Since 2012, Beijing has adopted a range of hardline policies that seek to achieve the wholesale conversion and forced assimilation of Tibetan, Uyghur and Mongolian peoples into the Han ethnic group. 

All because the government believes that the only path to political stability is through cultural uniformity and ethnic homogeneity. In order to ensure national stability, minority ethnic identities must disappear.

In Xinjiang, Beijing has rounded up more than a million Uyghurs into detention camps. It breaks my heart whenever I see my Uyghur friends, because every single one of them has at least one family member in the camps. 

In Inner Mongolia, Beijing has banned the use of Mongolian language in schools as well as public and social life. Thanks to this policy of cultural and linguistic erasure, about 30% of Mongolians in PRC can no longer speak their mother tongue. 

In Tibet, including TAR plus Kham and Amdo, Beijing is using the classic colonial tool of residential schooling to strip children of their language, culture, and identity. The government has placed 3 out of every 4 Tibetan students in colonial boarding schools, where 800-900,000 Tibetan kids aged 6-18 are methodically being turned into Chinese. 

If this is news to you, I invite you to look up a report titled “Separated from their families, Hidden from the World: China’s Vast System of Colonial Boarding Schools inside Tibet.” 

Sometimes states attack minorities because they view multiculturalism as a problem. But here’s the thing about multiculturalism.

If your society is multicultural because of immigration, you are actually lucky, because immigrants contribute so much to society and demand so little. They’re often willing to assimilate if that helps them succeed in other domains of life. 

But if your society is multicultural because you invaded or displaced some other nations in the past, then you have a much greater moral and legal obligation to provide them cultural autonomy and linguistic accommodation. These peoples have the right to self-determination under international law.

Some argue that ethnic diversity leads to collective action problems, hampering the creation of an overarching civic identity. Others disagree. But here is what we know for sure: A hardline top-down approach to creating unity never works, it backfires. 

We know that states worry about secessionism. But we also know from countless studies that it is not diversity but the forced imposition of cultural homogeneity that triggers secessionism. It is not the fulfilment of self-determination but the denial of self-determination that paves the way to secessionism, radicalization, even terrorism. 

So every state should remember this: If you have one terrorist in your country, you have a problem. If you have a million terrorists, then perhaps you are the problem. 

In conclusion, I recommend that: States should allow national minorities to exercise their right to maintain and develop their own languages, traditions, and cultural practices. Reconciliation comes from respect, not repression.

Second, if you want stability, then legalize and protect true bilingual education. (Remember: bilingualism saved Canada, and multilingualism saved India from fragmentation.)

Third, PRC should close its colonial residential schools and reopen local schools so that Tibetan, Uyghur, and Mongolian children are not separated from their families. 

Finally, we should invest in civil society groups who do incredible work as truth tellers and peace builders. I know many amazing groups, like the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, Tibet Action Institute, Students for a Free Tibet, World Uyghur Congress. Civil society groups are the true voices and vanguards of minority rights, and they need all the support and resources they can get. 

Thank you.