Tibet Today, Daily Brief March 10, 2025

Every year on this day, March 10, Tibetans around the world commemorate Tibetan Uprising Day. It marks the 1959 rebellion against Chinese rule in Tibet.

But, of course, Tibetans in China can’t mark the occasion publicly. Beijing’s repression of Tibetans in their homeland is extensive. And, in fact, it’s been getting worse under Chinese President Xi Jinping.

You don’t hear much about Tibet in international news these days. In large part, this is by design – that is, by design of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. It’s a consequence of China’s increasing efforts to seal off information from the region, through intense surveillance and censorship.

It’s the part of China’s repression in Tibet that keeps the outside world from seeing all the other parts of China’s repression in Tibet.

And there are many other parts to that repression.

In Tibet, there is no freedom of expression, no freedom of association, no freedom of assembly, and no freedom of religion.

Independent civil society – that is, people peacefully organizing themselves around shared interests – simply cannot happen. The Chinese government has decimated what little Tibetan civil society remained.

It shut down Tibetan websites that promote Tibetan language and culture. It essentially forced the use of Mandarin Chinese as the medium of instruction in schools. It closed privately funded schools, even those that followed the government-approved curriculum.

In “whole-village relocation” programs, authorities have evicted tens of thousands of people en masse from their long-established villages to new government-built and managed settlements. Hundreds of thousands more were moved under “individual household relocation” schemes.

Taken all together, these repressive policies seem intended to hollow out and erase Tibetans’ unique culture, language, and identity.

And anyone who questions any of this in Tibet is risking being disappeared, being imprisoned, and/or being tortured.

The Chinese government’s abuses don’t end at its borders either. They have silenced Tibetans in Nepal and targeted those living in Western countries.

What can be done?

First, on the larger scale, governments that profess support for human rights should step up their assistance to Tibetan groups worldwide. In particular, Tibetan groups that document human rights abuses in Tibet and seek to preserve Tibetan identity and culture need support now more than ever.

Second, on the individual level, let’s all keep talking about Tibet. As with other crimes committed by China’s authorities, like crimes against humanity in Xinjiang or the Tiananmen Massacre, the Chinese government wants the world to ignore and forget its abuses in Tibet.

Every public mention, every social media post, every shared video, is a show of support – one small act of memory against forgetting.