
Excerpt from “China’s Himalayan Hustle: Revisionism Resistance Must be the Order of the Region“
The phrase “Free Tibet” is so ubiquitous to so many, that it has almost lost its meaning. Why does Tibet need to be freed, and from whom? Tibet has been occupied by Communist China since 1950, after the controversial Seventeen Point Agreement created a semi-independent state, although signed without the authorization of the 14th Dalai Lama. So worried were the Tibetans, that in 1959, a rebellion began where the Dalai Lama escaped and remained in exile. The consequence of that rebellion was an undoing of the tenets of the Agreement and the beginning of decades of social, cultural, and political repression.
Perhaps the most famous Tibetan case was that of Tashi Tsering, the late and well-known educator who in August of 1999 attempted to raise the Tibetan flag in a public square, before being severely beaten by security forces and sentenced to 15 years in prison. The case became a focal point for human rights abuses in Tibet, where, at the time, hundreds of political prisoners languished behind bars, many for their religious beliefs. More than 20 years later, the depth and breadth of Chinese human rights abuses across much of its territory that contains national minorities has increased, as has international pressure on Beijing to adhere to international norms. Human rights in Tibet has since then become both a cause célèbre in continental Asia as well as a matter of international urgency, but Chinese repression of Tibetans remains largely unchanged according to the U.S. State Department in 2023, yet issues of enforced disappearance, torture, or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment by the government, arbitrary arrest or detention, a highly politicized judiciary, and a rise in transnational repression against Tibetans now residing in another country have become normalized through regime propaganda, security policies, and persistent interference at the international level.
Recently, the trend of academic and political discussion has seen the issue of transnational repression become a growing concern for China’s many minority groups, including the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang region of Western China, Hong Kongers who fled the once cosmopolitan city after the Umbrella Revolution of 2014 and the implementation of the draconian “Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region” in June 20204, and now as many as 150,000 Tibetans that live outside the Tibetan Autonomous Region, including those who have fled to the United States, India, France, Australia, and Canada. According to a 2024 report by the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD), the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing puts significant pressure on variety of communities to which it labels “the five poisons.” Tactics include the weaponization of relatives in Tibet by means of threats, harm or various forms of manipulation, as well as instances of surveillance conducted on foreign soil by Chinese nationals, particularly of diaspora groups. As is the case in Hong Kong, intimidation also includes attempts to undermine the livelihoods of Tibetan exiles, including the prohibition of foreign remittances or money transfers from relatives.
Tibet, like Xinjiang and Hong Kong, is of major significance to Beijing, even though individual and group identities are not characteristically Chinese. In the years after Hong Kong’s reunification with China after 99 years of British control, Hong Kongers developed an identity of their own, rather than categorizing themselves as Chinese. Uyghur Muslims from Xinjiang, a sparsely populated, far-flung region which borders the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are of Turkic heritage, and often refer to the region as East Turkistan. Likewise, Tibetans do not consider themselves Chinese and also inhabit a vast, largely unpopulated region. The commonality of the three—which are all distinct—is that each poses both an internal and external security risk to Communist China and each contains assets of irreplaceable value to Beijing and the world.
“Mapping China’s Himalayan Hustle” is a Stockholm Paper published by the Stockholm Center for South Asian and Indo-Pacific Affairs (SCSA-IPA) at the Institute for Security and Development Policy.