Tibetan ex-pat, Nam Kyi spent three years in prison for expressing her religious beliefs.Her story is told by the Wall Street Journal
Here is a new piece by the Wall Street Journal (May 5 2025) of a Tibetan activist - Nam Kyi - who has already spent 3 years in prison for carrying a photo of The Dalai Lama at public protest. Native Tibetans are devout followers of Tibetan Buddhism, and some in the past fifteen years, in particular, have resorted to self-immolation to protest the heavy-handed nature of Chinese officials. Still, others have immigrated to India to flee the cultural oppression, bias towards Han Chinese, and assault of their faith. Tibetan emigrants to India were 12,093 in 1999 to a low of 85 in 2024 as Chinese officials tighten control over the Tibetan Plateau, creating a large Chinese gulag in Tibet. Kyi story has become a common reaction to the Chinese occupation, while, unfortunately, this brand of apartheid has become accepted by the international community. As China weakens financially, the political figures inside the Communist Party, will have to capitulate to the will of the Chinese people to avoid mass uprisings as are happening, currently with youth unemployment, the housing crisis, and generations of boomers losing their retirement savings as the market has fallen since COVID and now Donald Trump's tariffs.
Click below for this compelling story of Nam from the Wall Street Journal.
How Images of the Dalai Lama’s Hands, Feet Landed a Tibetan Woman in China’s Dragnet
How Images of the Dalai Lama’s Hands, Feet Landed a Tibetan Woman in China’s Dragnet
May 5, 2025 11:00 pm ET
DHARAMSHALA, India—Nam Kyi, a young Tibetan activist, had been out of prison for only a few years when she was picked up by Chinese police in 2022.
At the station in her hometown high in the Tibetan plateau, officers showed they had printouts of her messages on the Chinese social media app WeChat that referred to the Dalai Lama, regarded by China as a dangerous separatist.
Authorities had previously imprisoned Nam Kyi for three years for carrying the Tibetan Buddhist leader’s photo at a public protest. Now, over hours of questioning, they drew her attention to her WeChat account where she had posted visual hints of the Dalai Lama—his hands, his feet, a hat worn by high lamas—and the words, “Uncle, we are waiting for you.”
“Why are you posting such garbage?” asked one police officer. “Demon, weren’t three years in prison enough for you?” he asked.
China asserted its control over the Tibetan plateau in 1950, maintaining that the region had always been a part of China. But despite decades of harsh policies to assimilate the region, many Tibetans continue to see their land, with its unique ethnic identity, religion and language, as distinct from China and remain devoted to the Dalai Lama, who fled into exile in India in 1959.
Today, China is tightening its grip on Tibet. Street cameras, police checkpoints and increasingly sophisticated monitoring of digital devices have helped enforce Chinese rule and tamp down on even the faintest hint of support for Tibetan independence.
Firsthand accounts from Tibetans about what is happening there, such as those provided by Nam Kyi, have become increasingly rare because of China’s expanding clampdown. Since 2020, fewer than 100 people have escaped to India, the most common destination for people fleeing, according to Tibetan exile leaders. Nam Kyi’s descriptions of the surveillance provide fresh evidence of how Beijing is tightening the screws.
Many Tibetans are made to download an antifraud app, according to Human Rights Watch and other rights groups, which gives authorities sweeping access to their phones and communications. In recent years, Tibetans caught communicating with people outside China have faced lengthy sentences. Posters across Tibet offer rewards for informants with tips about these kinds of violations.
The surveillance also makes it harder for critics of Chinese authority to leave. China has fortified the border with an extensive network of security infrastructure, including large surveillance drones with live video monitoring, according to papers published by Chinese border-security officials. In the most remote areas, radar systems and motion-sensor wiring have been installed, they wrote.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs didn’t respond to a request for comment. Beijing has for years portrayed the Dalai Lama as a political exile who uses the cloak of religion to oppose China and promote separatism. It also says Tibet is an internal matter.
A brief protest
As a teenager from a herding family, Nam Kyi, who is now 25, said she became aware of growing Chinese control over Tibetans’ traditional culture and religious beliefs.
Nam Kyi’s region, which Tibetans know as Amdo and part of which falls in China’s Sichuan province, was home to a monastery at the center of many self-immolations, a form of protest adopted by some Tibetans following a 2008 uprising against Chinese repression. Locals called the road leading up to Kirti Monastery “Martyrs’ Road.”
Tibetans surreptitiously circulated CDs showing some of these acts of protest, which they sometimes referred to online as “a lamp offering” to evade Chinese censorship.
“My heart could not bear it,” said Nam Kyi, who had a family member who was among those to protest in this way. After seeing such videos, “I thought that I couldn’t just stay like this, doing nothing.”
In 2015, she participated in a brief protest that lasted a matter of minutes, walking down a street carrying the Dalai Lama’s photo, and was arrested by police. It was a bold act, given that China has criminalized the possession of the religious leader’s image.
For nearly a week afterward, police beat and interrogated her about where she got the photo and whether she belonged to separatist groups. They were horrified when she said she had seen Tibet’s red, blue, white and yellow flag, which is also banned, and described it to them.
Under surveillance
Upon her release, Nam Kyi found that she and her family and villagers had become the target of unrelenting police scrutiny. Village leaders were warned they would be punished if she protested again. She still occasionally sent messages to friends that referenced the Dalai Lama. She knew she was being watched. At times, messages she had posted didn’t reach people. One and then another of her social-media accounts were blocked from posting.
She was summoned by police over her online activity in 2022.
It was clear they had been monitoring her WeChat account and had seen images and texts she had shared. The police eventually let her go, but only after she signed a statement saying she understood she would go to prison if she again posted online or joined any groups.
She decided she had to leave Tibet, something she had been thinking about since her imprisonment years earlier.
A bold escape
Thousands of Tibetans used to flee China for India every year. Since the wider deployment of police and surveillance, however, doing so has become harder, with anyone who gets caught facing imprisonment or the possibility of being sent to re-education camps. Most Tibetans aren’t allowed to hold passports.
Undeterred, Nam Kyi saved the $9,000 she would need for a guide and other costs by gathering and selling herbs used for Chinese traditional medicine.
She embarked on her journey from Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet autonomous region, with her aunt in May 2023, carrying just a small backpack. The two carried out prayers and protective rituals at a monastery before setting out.
As a child, Nam Kyi found it easy to wander the mountains with her animals. But after her three years in prison, she found the physical exertion of her escape from Tibet draining and faced severe altitude sickness.
At one point, the two women had to skirt around a military camp whose floodlights swept across the terrain. When the spotlight shined in her direction, she recalled, they would dive onto the ground and lie flat; when it passed by, they would keep moving. She was afraid of other Tibetans who might spot her along the way and report her. Some herders accept payments from the authorities in exchange for such information, she said.
She declined to provide some details of the passage out of concern it could tip off authorities to the route and to people who helped her.
When she crossed into Nepal after a two-week journey, she saw the Dalai Lama’s photograph and the Tibetan flag openly displayed for the first time in her life.
“Getting that first taste of freedom was overwhelming,” she said.
Now, in exile, Nam Kyi is enrolled in a school in the Indian city of Dharamshala for young exiles. It used to be full, but nowadays, only a handful of students study there. In her dorm room, a shrine on a desk has a Dalai Lama photo at its center.
