Home and away, China putting tight new squeeze on Tibet

Asia Times

05-05-2025

China is tightening control over Tibet and flexing its strategic roof of the world advantage by cyber-spying on the Dalai Lama's supporters 'worldwide from Lhasa to London,' opening Tibet's international airport to Singapore and Nepal, and building the world's biggest hydroelectric dam on a glacier-fed river.
China prizes resource-rich Tibet's lofty Himalayan heights, which allow the People's Liberation Army to 'look down' on India, China's regional rival, and provide a formidable buffer between Beijing and New Delhi.
The United Kingdom's GCHQ intelligence agency, meanwhile, is warning Tibetan and foreign activists, researchers and supporters of the self-exiled 14th Dalai Lama that they are in danger of infection from 'malicious actors' who created international surveillance malware identified as MOONSHINE and BADBAZAAR.
The British government's National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), which is part of the GCHQ, said the Chinese also created snooping apps deceptively resembling WhatsApp and Skype, which allow text, audio and video.
Other surveillance tools are packed into a standalone app such as Tibet One, which operates in the Tibetan language, the same source said.
Chinese hackers made the Tibet One messaging app shareable on Telegram channels and Reddit forums where Tibetans and their supporters exchange information, the NCSC said.
'We are seeing a rise in digital threats designed to silence, monitor and intimidate communities across borders,' NCSC director of operations Paul Chichester said in a statement.
Targets can be anyone 'considered by the Chinese state to pose a threat to its stability,' the NSCS said.
The NSCS said it shared the warning with the US National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation, plus cybersecurity officials in Australia, Canada, Germany and New Zealand.
'The malicious software – dubbed MOONSHINE and BADBAZAAR – hides malicious functions inside otherwise legitimate apps in a technique known as 'trojanising',' the NSCS said.
'Once installed, the apps have been observed variously accessing functions including microphones, cameras, messages, photos, and location data, including real-time tracking, without the user being aware,' it said.
China's government-owned digital forensics company Meiya Pico, meanwhile, is penetrating deeper into Tibetan society.
'Digital forensics technology, training, and services as provided by Meiya Pico can play a role at both ends of a repression pipeline, facilitating the long shadow of transnational repression beyond the Belt and Road corridor – helping Beijing track, intimidate, and silence Tibetan dissent worldwide, from Lhasa to London,' reported Turquoise Roof, an online Tibetan research site.
'When Chinese police in Tibet seize a phone from someone suspected of sharing information with Dharamsala, [they] exfiltrate and analyze that phone's contents,' Turquoise Group said in an April 16 report titled, 'A Long Shadow: The Expansion and Export of China's Digital Repression Model in Tibet.'
Turquoise Group, in partnership with Canada-based SecDev Group, said it traced some of Beijing's alleged spyware to 'SDIC Intelligence Xiamen Information Co Ltd, a digital forensics company better known as Meiya Pico, [which] won a contract in mid-2023 to build two labs at the Tibet Police College – one on offensive and defensive cyber techniques, and the other on electronic evidence collection and analysis,' Turquoise Group said.
In 2021, the US Treasury said Meiya Pico was using 'biometric surveillance and tracking of ethnic and religious minorities in China.' The US Commerce Department blacklisted the company in 2019.
'For Tibetans, simply using a cellphone has become dangerous, and everyday activities like posting a humorous video or contacting loved ones abroad can bring arrest, detention, and torture,' said Human Rights Watch's associate China director Maya Wang on April 13.
'Tibetans, particularly those living in remote areas, once celebrated the arrival of cellphones so they could stay in touch with friends and family, but their phones have effectively become government tracking devices,' Wang said.
Crimes include praising the Dalai Lama, demanding Tibet's autonomy or independence, or opposing the Chinese Communist Party. Beijing has been crushing dissent in Tibet for decades.
A fresh crackdown is being waged against supporters of Tibetan Buddhist abbot and author Tulku Hungkar Dorje, 56, who fled to Vietnam in September 2024, fearing imprisonment in Tibet.
Among his alleged pro-Dalai Lama activities, the abbot was 'not enforcing Chinese state education policies in schools established under his guidance,' said Tibet's India-based parliament-in-exile, which is allied to the Dalai Lama.
Vietnamese authorities arrested Tulku Hungkar Dorje in March in Ho Chi Minh City, where he died on April 3 under Vietnamese police custody, according to media reports. Vietnam reportedly said the abbot died from a heart attack but provided no public evidence, sparking allegations that he was killed.
He was cremated on April 20 'without family consent…raising serious questions regarding China's involvement in his apprehension and death,' reported Free Tibet, an activist news site based in Britain.
'Tulku Hungkar Dorje's body was secretly transferred late at night to Sakya Vietnam temple under heavy Chinese and Vietnamese security – the monks present having their phones confiscated, and no family allowed,' said Zoe Bedford of the Australia Tibet Council.
'This is not a sacred rite, it's a forced cremation that looks like an attempt to destroy evidence and erase the truth,' Bedord claimed.
Meanwhile, to utilize Tibet's strategic high ground, China recently expanded Lhasa Gonggar International Airport on the outskirts of the Tibetan capital, enabling its first round-trip flight to and from Singapore in December 2024.
The airport's upgrade is part of Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure development program.
Planes operated by China's government-owned West Air, a unit of HNA Aviation Group, are scheduled to fly three times a week round-trip to Singapore with a stopover in China's southern city Chongqing, according to the company. Future international routes are to include Lhasa-Hong Kong and elsewhere in the region.
Lhasa's previous flights were only to and from next-door Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, and Chinese cities, including Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing, Xian, Guangzhou, Kunming and Shanghai.
'Looking ahead, West Air will expand its investments in Belt and Road countries, and open additional routes to meet growing passenger demand while supporting national strategies and regional development,' the company said.
Beijing's real money-maker in Tibet, however, is expected to be its planned hydroelectric dams on rivers flowing down from the roof of the world, where Mount Everest and other peaks soar.
Rivers originating in Tibet reach hundreds of millions of consumers in plains across India, Bangladesh and Southeast Asia, when the glaciers' waters flow into the Brahmaputra, Salween, and Mekong rivers.
China is building the world's biggest hydroelectric dam on the country's longest river, Tibet's Yarlung Tsangpo, with expectations it will pump out three times more energy than the nearby Three Gorges Dam, which is currently the mightiest hydroelectric dam on earth.
The US$137 billion Yarlung Tsangpo Hydroelectric Project would include four tunnels, each 12 miles (20 kilometers) long, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
The Yarlung Tsangpo River already hosts several hydropower stations as it twists from Tibet south toward India. The river's value is its huge waterfalls, making it attractive for hydroelectric plants despite the zone's earthquake-vulnerable tectonic plates.
'The sacred river is home to the deepest canyon on the planet, with a vertical difference of 25,154 feet (7,667 meters),' reported New York-based Interesting Engineering's website.
'The Chinese government intends to use this to its advantage and generate nearly 300 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of hydropower from the project, sufficient to meet the energy needs of 300 million people every year,' the engineering site said.
The Yarlung Tsangpo cascades east across Tibet before bending south across the China-India frontier through Himalayan valleys into India's Arunachal Pradesh and Assam states.
In India, the river bleeds southwest into the Brahmaputra River, which empties through Bangladesh's delta into the Bay of Bengal.
'Control over these rivers [in the Tibetan Plateau] effectively gives China a chokehold on India's economy,' warned the Australia-based Lowy Institute think tank.
China's vigilance over Tibet stems from the old Cold War. The US CIA began training Tibetans in combat and operations skills in 1957 – two years before the Dalai Lama escaped – and dropped them into Tibet as insurgents against Communist Chinese.
'The CIA had piloted the project with a group of [Tibetan] fighters who were trained at Saipan, Northern Mariana Island,' Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported.
'The first radio team to be dropped back into Tibet by Operations St. Circus took place in September, 1957, but the training grounds were moved to Camp Hale [Colorado] when it became apparent that the Tibetans were not used to the hot weather conditions of the island, and Colorado was selected because its terrain and weather conditions resembled that of Tibet,' RFA reported.
The CIA trained at least 259 Tibetan insurgents in Camp Hale from 1958 to 1964.
'The Tibetans were trained in radio operation, surveillance and combat maneuvers, parachuting…intelligence collecting, clandestine exchange of written material, and film, world history, and geography, and small armament training with bazookas, grenades, and rifles,' RFA reported.
In July 1959, 'the CIA began using C-130s, flying from a secret CIA base in Takhli, Thailand, to airdrop arms, ammunition, and US-trained Tibetans into their occupied homeland,' Newsweek reported in 1999.
Nine out of every 10 guerrillas who parachuted into Tibet were killed by Chinese or committed suicide to evade capture, the Smithsonian Institution's Air & Space Magazine reported.
The Tibetan Buddhists' CIA-backed insurgency ended in defeat against China's revolution-hardened People's Liberation Army when President Richard Nixon visited Beijing in 1972, shook hands with Chairman Mao Zedong and improved their frosty relations.
The Dalai Lama lives in self-exile in McLeod Ganj, a small town nestled next to Dharamsala in India's forested northwest Himalayas, after escaping Tibet in 1959 aided by the CIA.
China's Communist government opposes the Dalai Lama, portraying him as a 'splittist' working with foreigners to recreate an independent Tibet after China annexed it in the 1950s.
The Dalai Lama has described himself as a 'Marxist' and consistently said he is agreeable to Tibet's autonomy within China, a stance Beijing does not trust.
Richard S Ehrlich is a Bangkok-based American foreign correspondent reporting from Asia since 1978, and winner of Columbia University's Foreign Correspondents' Award.
Excerpts from his two new nonfiction books, 'Rituals. Killers. Wars. & Sex. — Tibet, India, Nepal, Laos, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka & New York' and 'Apocalyptic Tribes, Smugglers & Freaks' are available here.