Tibet Watch Interviews

Tibet Watch conducted a series of interviews this year with a group of newly arrived Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala, northern India who escaped from occupied Tibet.

This interview was conducted on 21 September and is the sixth in the series. The refugee is a forty-year-old woman from central Tibet. Born into a family labeled as “class enemies” by the Chinese Communist Party, her father, the first in her village to serve the Tibetan Army, was sent to prison after the 1959 Tibetan Uprising, and she was denied rights.

This interview was conducted on 20 September and is the fifth in the series. The refugee is an eight-year-old refugee girl from Ngari in western Tibet, from where news rarely emerges compared to Tibetan areas in the east.

In this fourth interview, a refugee from Golog, eastern Tibet, recounts the forced installation of the Chinese phone app National Anti-fraud Centre. The app was developed by the Ministry of Public Security and launched in March 2021 to detect spam calls and texts but has raised numerous concerns about user data and privacy.

This third interview was conducted with a 15-year-old from Kham in eastern Tibet. She completed her elementary education in July 2022 in Lhasa alongside around 800 students of both Tibetan and Chinese descent.

This interview reveals how the Tibetan language is disappearing from public life in Tibet at the expense of the Chinese. The following account is in their own words. Their identity has been withheld.