As a child growing up in a remote village in the mountainous region of Kham, Tsewang Dhondup loved to listen to the heroic fables recounted by the local elders. But Tsewang's own story is the stuff of legend, and might well end up woven into local lore and marveled at...

Apart from crackdowns in its ethnic minority regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, in recent months Beijing has been busy targeting home-grown adversaries--Chinese civil rights lawyers--in a series of moves that has been described by the group Human Rights in China as "an all-out attack."

On the morning of Friday,...

Sometimes bravery comes in heroic cinematic moments. Sometimes it takes on a far more modest guise. A group of legal scholars from a Chinese think tank fall into the second category, putting their careers and reputations on the line by daring to try to shed some reasoned light on the...

There's something very uplifting-sounding about Serf Liberation Day. Rather like baby seal rescue day, or treat an underprivileged kid to the circus day. Doesn't sound like much there to argue with. But that is just what Tibetans--the 'liberated serfs' and their descendants--are doing. Back in January, Beijing announced its plans...

Photo by Lhakpa Kyizom

It's standing room only in the modest hall of the Dharamsala Welfare Office. People are sitting cross-legged on the floor, so tightly they're almost in each others' laps. The over-flow has spilled out onto the street. Monks...

Photo by Ken Lee

"Chinese political circles get very worried about anniversaries." So says Professor Perry Link, an expert on Chinese human rights at the University of California, Riverside. And this year they have plenty to worry about with 2009 marking the 30th...

Sometimes I have to smile when American politicians talk as if they invented freedom, passing over the other democracies in the world that also paid for liberty with the blood of their forefathers. But even though freedom isn't American, no other country in the world symbolizes freedom like America.

Norzin Wangmo got five years
for talking on the phone

"You have the wrong house. I have no son." This is what 19-year-old Legdup heard when he called his mother in Tibet from Dharamsala, India. Sitting in a dark café...

Photo by Jenn Hsu

If you tuned in to Tibet TV this October, you would have heard an announcer proudly report that from the early hours of the morning of the 18th the residents of Trunglha village near Lhasa, were busy "gaily...

Why is China afraid of 27-year-old
Tibetan nun, Tsering Tsomo?

Tibet has slipped away from the world's headlines. But even though no foreign journalists are allowed into the region to report on it, Tibetans have continued to protest China's repressive...

Wen-Yan King listens to Devendra Banhart, The Temptations and The Beatles. She likes hash browns. She drinks too much coffee. The Lion King is her all time favorite feel-good movie. Her hobby is photography.

Born in Taipei, Taiwan, her parents moved to...

"Many questions were asked of people who are not guilty of anything. They are just guilty of being Tibetan."

"The Chinese government has leveled false allegations against the monks of Kirti Monastery for leaking state secrets to the outside world... I do not want to live under Chinese oppression even for another minute, let alone a whole day." Suicide note of 32-year-old Lobsang Jinpa,...

Selden, a monk living in exile in Dharamsala, India, received a static-filled call from Tibet at 10:30 at night on May 15th. On the other end was a Tibetan man from Kirti Monastery in Sichuan, the province where China's devastating earthquake took tens of thousands of lives.

The man told...

According to Tibetans, after death the consciousness takes at least 49 days to travel from one life to the next. Prayers conducted by the living can assist the dead through this journey and can help to guide them toward a good rebirth, and so it is a period that is...

The global Olympic Torch relay has at various times been described as "farcical" "disastrous" and "troubled". In Delhi, India, it was described to perfection by one Indian journalist -- "spiritless". While the Indian government breathed a long sigh of relief that they avoided the clashes seen in other cities, the...

'The most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle'.
- Pierre de Coubertin, Founder of the modern Olympic Games

Seven years ago, I was nursing a sunburn in a tent on a sidewalk outside the offices of the Vice President of the United States Olympic...

"Non-violence is ingrained in Tibetans, it's part of our way of life. But we are also human."

Lately, Dharamsala -- a North Indian town that houses thousands of exiled Tibetans -- has been a hot bed of activity, with daily sympathy...