30 September 2026
Executive Summary
The places in Tibet where people have protested against a dam, gathered to pray or set out across the Himalaya for exile now have something else in common. Police drones fly over them, and anyone else who wants to fly needs the state’s permission.
Tibet Watch has traced this build-out through the Chinese state’s own paperwork: tenders, award notices, police bulletins, flight bans and training reports published between June 2017 and July 2026. The documents show security agencies buying drones, automated docking stations and counter-drone (counter-UAS) systems at every level, from the region’s anti-terror reconnaissance
unit down to county police stations. They show pilots being trained for “stability maintenance” (维 稳), a political term for suppressing dissent and enforcing compliance with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policy, and the term under which DJI trained police in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) in 2017. Documents uncovered by Tibet Watch show the air over Lhasa and parts of four other prefecture-level areas closed to all but approved flights in August 2025, and procurement documents naming equipment made by DJI, the Shenzhen company that makes most of the world’s civilian drones, including in Britain. DJI faces major regulatory restrictions and import bans in both the United States and India.
This report is about who controls the sky over Tibet. The Chinese Party state has given itself the means to watch Tibetans from above, and over the same years has taken that vantage point away from everyone else. Since May 2026 a new civilian drone in China will not take off until it is registered to its owner’s identity, and authorities in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) urge citizens to report “black flights”. The documents do not show a drone flown against a named person or over a particular protest. They show, in the state’s own words, where it chose to put its aircraft and surveillance apparatus.
In 2022 Britain ordered Chinese-made surveillance cameras out of sensitive government sites on national security grounds. Drones made by companies subject to the same Chinese intelligence law were left untouched. The Tibet record did not exist then. It does now.
Key Findings
- Police have bought drones for the places where Tibetans resisted, gathered for religious ceremonies or tried to leave. Derge (德格) was the site of peaceful protests against the construction of the Kamtok (Gangtuo) dam, set to submerge entire villages and ancient monasteries, in February 2024. Fifteen months later its county police bought four autonomous DJI Dock stations, with fleet control software, for the checkpoint on the Sichuan–TAR road, as part of a ¥4.43 million (£499,000) checkpoint upgrade in which the DJI items came to ¥602,000 (£68,000). Driru (Chinese: Biru, 比如) in Nagchu (Chinese: Naqu), TAR, where Tibetans have faced tough reprisals and crackdown since peaceful protests of 2013, has the largest county police fleet in the dataset: 18 aircraft across five models, flying daily patrols. Kardze prefecture includes Serthar, where demolitions at the major Larung Gar Buddhist institute resumed in July 2026, and Drago, where a monastic school and a large Buddha statue were destroyed in 2021–22. There the prefectural anti-terror SWAT unit bought a rapid 3D modelling system built around a DJI laser-scanning (LiDAR) camera in November 2025, and the prefectural police tendered for drones and a command vehicle. In Lhasa, restrictions on Tibetans at the Jokhang and the Barkhor in spring 2021, days before the anniversary of the 10 March Uprising, were followed within months by a counter-drone system and a 15-aircraft fleet for the district police. On the routes to Nepal, the dataset records a border police drone station at Everest, a dedicated low-altitude policing unit in Tingkye, and an all-DJI platform with the Shigatse border detachment. None of these documents says a drone was bought because of a protest, and protective security for state occasions could explain the Lhasa purchases on its own. The pattern is one of placement, and the state chose the places (Section 10.1).
- Police drones and airspace controls are also building up in the counties where China is damming Tibet’s rivers. News of the Derge protests reached the outside world because phone footage emerged from Tibet, and the repression that followed was severe: more than 100 Tibetans were detained, two senior monks of Yena monastery were jailed, and one of them, Gonpo Tsering, was tortured in custody and remains critically ill. On the far bank, in Jomda (江达), county police tendered in September 2025 for all-terrain drone reconnaissance and countermeasure equipment: the means to watch, and the means to stop anyone else watching. On the Yarlung Tsangpo, the lower Yarlung Tsangpo hydropower project in Nyingtri, near Medog, officially broke ground on 19 July 2025. Seven months later Nyingtri reported the most developed drone control system in the dataset. Upstream in Gyatsa (加查), site of the huge Zangmu dam, authorities required drone flights to be registered with and reported to local police in July 2025, weeks before the region-wide anniversary controls; it is the only county notice of its kind in the dataset.
- Beijing is running one security playbook across its two most strategically sensitive ‘ethnic’ regions, the most advanced version yet of a surveillance feedback loop. The grid policing system that Chen Quanguo built as Party Secretary of the TAR from 2011 was transferred to Xinjiang in 2016, where it became the scaffolding of mass internment. Aerial surveillance is now moving the other way, carrying the same mission language. The TAR police drone course of 2023 trains pilots for patrol, emergency rescue and “stability maintenance” (维稳) after DJI trained police in Xinjiang in 2017, also for “stability maintenance and counterterrorism” purposes. Xinjiang public security bodies went on to place seven orders for DJI drones between 2019 and 2022, and US sanctions against DJI in 2020 and 2021 rested on the surveillance of Uyghurs. Both regions are borderlands that Beijing treats as core to national security, and in both it has made the drone an instrument of state control. The Tibet record differs in one respect: DJI equipment reaches the police there through resellers, not a direct contract. Whether a single institutional pathway links the two programmes is an inference the record does not yet prove.
- DJI equipment appears in 12 confirmed awards to security and government buyers in Tibetan areas. The awards run from December 2020 to January 2026, in packages with a combined published value of about ¥24.79 million (about £2.8 million). That figure includes non-DJI equipment bundled in the same packages, and 41 per cent of it is a single ¥10.18 million Lhasa police emergency-equipment award from 2023 whose lot and supplier attribution is still being checked. Six awards are inside the TAR. Six are in Tibetan areas of Sichuan and Yunnan, among them a ¥2.07 million Dechen (Diqing) prefectural police package that pairs DJI aircraft with counter-drone equipment and the Derge checkpoint upgrade. The buyers include the TAR anti-terror special reconnaissance unit; Chengguan district police, who cover central Lhasa and the Jokhang and bought 15 DJI Inspire 2 aircraft in a single order; the Shigatse border detachment on the Nepal frontier; and the People’s Armed Police Tibet Corps headquarters, alongside fire, forestry, emergency and agencies representing scenic areas for tourism. In every award the equipment comes through a reseller or integrator, four of them registered in the TAR. The record does not show that DJI contracted directly, knew the end use or authorised each dealer. It does show demand for the brand: the TAR Ecology Department issued a request for quotations for a DJI drone by name.
- The state has bought the means to deny the air to everyone else. The second largest award in the dataset is not for drones but against them: ¥8,631,435 (£973,000) for detection and countermeasure equipment for Lhasa police in July
2021. Since then buyers have paired watching with blocking in the same package, from the Ngari SWAT unit to Jomda county. Enforcement has moved from a ¥500 fine in 2024 to counter-drone vehicles for technical interception. A national standard now ties flight to a registered identity, and the Ministry of State Security directs the public to its 12339 hotline over “illegal aerial photography”. Police aircraft are outside the registration standard, and approved police flights continued through the flight bans. - The authorities ran a ‘counter-terror’ drill – in the absence of any insurgency – then closed airspace, at the time of the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday and his statement on succession. In June and July 2025, as Tibet Watch documented checkpoints and heightened militarisation in Lhasa around the 6 July birthday and the Dalai Lama’s statement confirming the Dalai Lama institution would continue, Chengguan SWAT ran a combined “drone plus ground unit” counter-terror drill and Lhasa SWAT added drone reconnaissance, including indoors, to its summer training. In August Lhasa and parts of four other prefecture-level areas closed their airspace to all but approved flights, and on 21 August Xi Jinping attended the ceremony in Lhasa marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of the TAR. Chamdo’s notice, as reproduced online, warned that unauthorised drones would be shot down. Protective security for a head of state would explain the August closure on its own. What sets Tibet apart is that the closure sat on top of a permanent apparatus that was there before the visit and is there now (Section 10.3).
- On the Indian border, the military has a say in who flies. Nyingtri (Chinese: Nyingchi), bordering Arunachal Pradesh, runs a named “low-altitude defence network” (低空防御网) combining radar, AI recognition, electronic fencing, five drone airports and a drone registration module inside the city’s policing data platform. It is overseen by a leading group that includes the military, and it runs a full chain from detection and identification to driving intruders off, investigation and sanction. No other city-level drone control body in the dataset has military participation. Police in Bayi District report routine drone patrols, and Lulang police have used drones in rescues. In 2026 the Lhoka border detachment reportedly published procurement notices for drones and permanent drone airfields on the Indian and Bhutanese approaches. In Ngari, facing Ladakh, a test base above 4,300 metres has unveiled a fixed-wing drone reported to have four and a half hours’ endurance, and the prefecture’s SWAT unit drills “drone mountain pursuit”.
- Police drone operations are routine and counted in thousands. In one Shigatse district, Samzhubze (Chinese: Sangzhuzi), police report 5,723 duty activities and more than 22,700 km flown since May 2024, from automated nests fitted with thermal imaging, laser ranging and loudspeakers. “Crowd flow monitoring at large events” is a standing mission, and in Samzhubze the large events are the festivals at Tashi Lhunpo, seat of the Panchen Lamas, where the CCP seeks to promote their installed Panchen Lama, Gyaltsen Norbu. The account does not name the manufacturer. The TAR police drone programme began with a single DJI Phantom donated to a county police bureau near Lhasa in 2017; by 2025 it had an accredited training institution at the Tibet Police College and a Police Aviation Management Battalion inside Lhasa SWAT.
- Aerial surveillance joins an already dense technological layer. The drones sit on top of grid management and “convenience police stations”, camera networks reaching into monasteries, routine phone checks, and mass DNA collection that included children. What drones add is reach. A docking station with a 10–15 km radius, or a fixed-wing drone that stays aloft for more than four hours, can follow herding families on the Changtang and cover the passes to Nepal, where no fixed camera reaches. The same aircraft find lost yaks and missing teenagers, and those rescues are the public face of the programme.
- Drone capacity on the plateau is being developed with military and border security uses explicitly in view. People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Western Theatre Command drones surveyed the Tingri (Chinese: Dingri) earthquake epicentre before ground troops arrived in January 2025. A plateau drone research centre at Tibet University opened near the Everest approaches in July 2026 with senior military officials in attendance, and state coverage lists border patrol among its purposes.
Recommendations
To the UK Government
- Extend the November 2022 Cabinet Office instruction, which required government departments to cease deploying visual surveillance equipment produced by companies subject to the PRC National Intelligence Law at sensitive sites, to uncrewed aerial systems, and state whether UAVs are within its scope. The instruction did not name manufacturers and did not address drones; the removal of the equipment it covered was reported complete for all originally identified sensitive sites in November 2025.
- Issue guidance to police forces on UAVs manufactured by companies subject to the PRC National Intelligence Law, drawing on the National Protective Security Authority’s vendor-neutral, risk-based UAS protective security guidance; and open an assessment of whether DJI meets an exclusion ground under the Procurement Act 2023 (potentially Schedule 7, paragraph 14, national security), following the Act’s investigation and debarment procedure. DJI is not on the current published debarment list.
- Once the vendor-related direction power in the Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill is enacted and commenced, use it on the UAS already in service. The power lets the Secretary of State direct a specified operator to stop using, or to remove, disable or modify, a named vendor’s goods where their use gives rise to a risk to national security. The new power is modelled on the Telecommunications (Security) Act 2021 powers used to force Huawei equipment out of Britain’s 5G networks. Specify UAS operators in essential sectors, including policing, in the regulations that define who may be directed; assess DJI against the national security condition on its National Intelligence Law obligations and on the airspace controls enforced on its aircraft in Tibet (Section 9); and name the vendor in the published notice of any direction rather than withholding it under the commercial interests exclusion. Unlike the two measures above, this power would reach equipment already in service, and operators outside central government: ministers could direct an organisation running an essential service to stop using, remove or modify a named supplier’s technology. It is not yet law. The Government added the clauses to the Bill ahead of its Lords committee stage in September 2026; the Bill has yet to complete its Lords stages and receive Royal Assent, and the power would then need regulations to bring it into force. Police forces are not currently within its scope, which is why we ask that they be added.
- Publish the Government’s response to the Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner’s 2023 survey of police drone use, and invite the current Commissioner to revisit its recommendations in light of the Tibet record.
To the US Government
- Add a Tibet-specific human rights record to the evidentiary basis of the two existing US measures that rest on human rights grounds, Commerce’s December 2020 Entity List designation and Treasury’s December 2021 NS-CMIC investment restriction, both tied to surveillance of Uyghurs, and reflect it in any future review of DJI’s FCC Covered List and Section 1260H status.
- Add the TAR public security bodies that this report shows buying drone and counterdrone equipment, including the Lhasa Public Security Bureau and its Chengguan District branch, the TAR Public Security Department’s anti-terror special reconnaissance unit and the Ngari Prefecture SWAT detachment, to the Commerce Department’s Entity List, as the Xinjiang public security bureaus were added in October 2019 and as the chairs of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China asked for TAR public security bureaus to be added in October 2023.
To the EU and like-minded governments
- Apply procurement restrictions to PRC-manufactured drones in police and sensitive site use; treat the TAR security bodies that the procurement record shows buying drone and counter-drone equipment, including the Lhasa Public Security Bureau and the Ngari Prefecture SWAT detachment, as leads for assessment under the EU Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime, which can reach violations of the freedoms of peaceful assembly, expression and religion where they are widespread or systematic; and raise the TAR airspace restrictions through UN Special Procedures on freedom of religion or belief, minority issues, and privacy.
To retailers, investors, and police forces operating DJI equipment
- Suspend stocking of, and investment in, DJI products and securities pending enhanced human rights due diligence, commensurate with the severity and context of the risk, on the company’s channel relationships with public security buyers in Tibetan areas and Xinjiang, mirroring the Uyghur Human Rights Project’s March 2024 ask to retailers to suspend stocking; and conduct and publish fleet audits (manufacturer and model), review whether aircraft, controllers or software connect to manufacturer servers, require manufacturer accounts, cloud activation or firmware channels, and adopt replacement planning consistent with the approach already taken for visual surveillance equipment at sensitive government sites.
