In many ways, Tibet is a case study in just how far authoritarian power can reach. But the Tibetan Freedom Movement is a case study in just how far resistance will go.
I don’t remember my first protest. I was too small to see through the forest of bodies and flags, so someone lifted me onto their shoulders. Bundled up in the New York cold, I wore a kid-sized hat that read “Free Tibet.” I didn’t understand why my parents took me out of school early one day or why our weekends were spent amongst crowds outside the United Nations or the Chinese Consulate. I just knew that this mattered to my family and that something precious had been taken from us. Something so precious that over 160 Tibetans had self-immolated, set their bodies on fire, in protest of Chinese rule.
Those faces — framed on the walls of a small room in New York City, illuminated only by vigil candles — bewildered me. What compelled over 160 Tibetans to light their bodies on fire, I couldn’t understand. I still can’t. No one should ever have to imagine the desperation that would drive a person to inflict such pain upon themself. However, that act is a snapshot of what over 60 years of colonial occupation has looked like.
Tibet was an independent country until 1959, when Mao Zedong’s army invaded and forcibly occupied it. The People’s Republic of China has since occupied Tibet with an iron fist. Today, Tibet ranks among the least free places on earth, with a freedom score of 0 out of 100, according to the freedom watchdog Freedom House.
Tibet sits at the intersection of the defining crises of the 21st century: the rise of authoritarianism, resource exploitation, ecological collapse, and biometric repression. What China does in Tibet rarely stays within its borders. The policies enforced in Tibet are not only enabled by global institutions, but also are eventually exported elsewhere. In many ways, Tibet is a case study in just how far authoritarian power can reach. But the Tibetan Freedom Movement is a case study in just how far resistance will go.
Inside Tibet today, the Chinese government maintains one of the most sophisticated and destructive authoritarian regimes in the world. Surveillance systems, which include facial recognition, police checkpoints, and biometric data collection, transform Tibetan villages into virtual prisons. Religious leaders and teachers are imprisoned. Mountains are blasted apart to mine critical minerals for the batteries that power our smartphones. Tibet’s rivers, which provide freshwater to 2 billion people across Asia, are choked by Chinese hydropower dams under the guise of green energy development.
Perhaps the most harrowing is the colonial boarding school system. At present, one million Tibetan children as young as four years old have been forcibly separated from their families and sent to Chinese state-run boarding schools. Much like the residential schools that assimilated indigenous children in Canada and the US, Tibetan children are taught exclusively in Mandarin, stripped of their culture, and forced into pledging allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). There are reports of physical abuse so severe that it has led to death. This, coupled with the mass closure of Tibetan schools, is the CCP’s attempt to eliminate Tibetan identity within a single generation. The CCP knows that as long as Tibetans exist, we will resist. So the strategy becomes targeting identity at the source: the youth.
But exile has allowed over 140,000 Tibetans — those forced to flee or born outside Tibet — another chance to plant new roots. And, like so many Tibetan youth who fight for a home they have never once seen with their own eyes, it’s not an opportunity I take for granted. For those of us living in exile, resistance is not a choice, but an inheritance. Still, my whole life, I’ve encountered skepticism: the pitying nods, the sympathetic shoulder pat, the patronizing “Well, good luck with that.” To many, Tibet seems like a lost cause, an impossible dream up against the world’s second-largest economy and a global superpower. China has everything we don’t: embassies, armies, trillions of dollars in resources.
However, through my experiences at Students for a Free Tibet (SFT)—a grassroots organization that fights for Tibetans’ right to freedom and independence—I’ve come to understand that none of that matters as much as it seems. We have something arguably more powerful. It’s not just moral high ground, that is, the truth on our side. It’s strategy.
I saw this first-hand in our campaign against Thermo Fisher.
In 2022, reports confirmed that Chinese police were building the largest DNA database, and they were doing it in Tibet. By forcibly collecting DNA samples from as many as 1.2 million Tibetans, including children as young as five, without consent or legitimate justification, the Chinese government was engineering an unprecedented tool of surveillance and control. Under this system, even the quietest gesture of dissent — or a family connection to someone found to possess a photo of the Dalai Lama or a Tibetan flag — is a criminal act. The program was enabled in part by equipment sold by an American company: Thermo Fisher Scientific. A global corporation was profiting from a system of biometric surveillance designed to criminalize an entire population.
So SFT launched a campaign.
The ask was concrete: end the sale of DNA equipment to Chinese police in Tibet. We, a group of mostly student activists on a shoestring budget, aim to persuade the world’s largest bioinformatics company to terminate its contract with China, one of the most well-resourced regimes on earth. Where to even begin?
As thinkers and practitioners of strategic nonviolence, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Gene Sharp, have taught us, power is not monolithic. The power of oppressive regimes relies on the cooperation of companies, institutions, and ordinary people. They are pillars. If you remove the pillars, the structure cannot stand. Even seemingly invincible systems can crumble.
For the Chinese government, Thermo Fisher was one of those pillars. Its cooperation was indeed crucial to the Chinese government’s biotech operation, but even more essential in lending it international legitimacy. We set out to withdraw that support.
At the time, I had just completed my second internship with SFT. But the campaign didn’t wait. Within weeks, I was outside Thermo Fisher’s New Jersey office, and soon after, I helped organize a political theatre in front of their headquarters in Massachusetts. Across the U.S., SFT chapter members mobilized. Students canvassed their campuses and protested outside their local Thermo Fisher offices. They refused to go to school in good conscience, knowing the biotech equipment they used in their chemistry lab was the same equipment being weaponized against Tibetans in Tibet.
Any successful campaign requires the involvement of a broad spectrum of stakeholders. Over 70,000 petition signatures were collected. We made contact with company employees, scientists, customers, and shareholders. We wanted to make the issue impossible to ignore. And that’s precisely what we did. National and international bodies, including the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, condemned Thermo Fisher’s complicity.
By the end of 2023, Thermo Fisher conceded. The company publicly committed to halting all sales of DNA equipment in the so-called Tibet Autonomous Region.
The decision didn’t undo the harm already done, nor did it put an end to China’s DNA collection program inside Tibet. However, it proved something essential: strategic grassroots organizing can persuade the world’s largest biotech company to walk away from a contract with an economic superpower. And we did so not through statecraft or economic sanctions, but through students and everyday people who refused to be complicit.
Thermo Fisher was just one node in a vast cooperation network the CCP is building. But the CCP’s reach extends far beyond Tibet’s borders. Across the world, authoritarianism is on the rise. It no longer only wears the uniform of boots and rifles, outright terror and violence, but now operates through more insidious means: economic coercion, sophisticated propaganda campaigns, and the rewriting of international norms. China is at the forefront of this transformation. Universities censor Tibet-related discourse. Museums drop the word “Tibet” to secure Chinese funding. Corporations become complicit in unethical supply chains.
But while on every front, the Chinese government advances in Tibet, we’ve learned to build one of our own. At Students for a Free Tibet, our resistance is designed to meet authoritarianism wherever it operates—whether it’s inside Olympic stadiums, on university campuses, or on the walls of world museums.
Take the Beijing Olympics of 2022. In the lead-up to the Games, SFT and other Tibetan organizations launched the “No Beijing 2022” campaign. Our goal was twofold: to pressure the International Olympic Committee to relocate the Games, and to expose how the Chinese government was using the Olympics as a tool of “sportswashing” to launder their crimes in Tibet, East Turkestan, and Hong Kong under a dazzling facade of global harmony and cooperation.
SFT led a multi-pronged effort. We targeted all corporate enablers — from sponsors, such as Mars Candy and Allianz, to broadcasters like NBC — whose branding helped sanitize the Chinese government’s crimes. In Athens, I joined Hongkonger activist Joey Siu in scaling the Acropolis to raise Tibetan and Hong Kong flags as the torch was passed to Beijing in Athens. At the official torch lighting ceremony, SFT members and allies disrupted the carefully choreographed spectacle, unfurling banners and chanting “Free Tibet” and “How can Beijing be allowed to host the games given that they are committing a genocide against the Uyghurs?”.
During a virtual summit between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, we camped outside the White House for 57 consecutive hours, chanting until our voices were hoarse, speaking to the media and distributing flyers to the public. A friend who had been in the summit room on multiple occasions told us there was no doubt about it: they could hear us. Just days later, the U.S. announced a diplomatic boycott of the Games, citing human rights violations. 13 other countries followed suit. Ultimately, the Games proceeded, but the illusion of unity and harmony that the Chinese government worked so hard to build was shattered.
The Chinese government also relies on academia to maintain power. Confucius Institutes — Chinese state-funded centers hosted by universities worldwide — offer language and cultural programming, but prohibit discussions on Tibet, Taiwan, or the Tiananmen Square incident. When they do, it’s the CCP’s version of history. In other words, Beijing used the banner of cultural exchange to embed vehicles of propaganda and censorship into campuses across the globe. SFT and Tibetan students were among the first to sound the alarm. Under the Say No to CI campaign, across the U.S. and beyond, our chapters organized petitions, held teach-ins, and pushed university administrations to reconsider their partnerships. We exposed how these institutes fundamentally compromised academic freedom. And it worked. Almost every Confucius Institute in the U.S. has now shut its doors. Another pillar, withdrawn.
Tibet sits at the intersection of the defining crises of the 21st century: the rise of authoritarianism, resource exploitation, ecological collapse, and biometric repression. What China does in Tibet rarely stays within its borders. The policies enforced in Tibet are not only enabled by global institutions but are also eventually exported elsewhere. In many ways, Tibet is a case study in just how far authoritarian power can reach. But the Tibetan Freedom Movement is a case study in just how far resistance will go.
I have never stepped foot in Tibet, but I believe our movement will outlast the regime that made it so. We don’t have state recognition, military power, or a seat at the UN. But we have something they fear even more: memory that endures and a strategy that works.
Image Credit: Jean-no, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
