Rebecca Novick has conducted hundreds of interviews with exiled Tibetans, particularly with elders, exploring their experiences and life histories. She has written and edited six books on Tibetan Buddhism and culture, and has produced and edited numerous radio documentaries. Before founding The Tibet Connection, radio program, she co-hosted and produced the weekly radio show Experience Talks. She is currently based in the Tibetan community of Dharamsala, India.

Blog Entries by Rebecca Novick

Tibetans Take to the Streets Over "Terrorist" Monk

Posted December 11, 2009 | 03:23 PM (EST)


2009-12-11-http:-blogger.huffingtonpost.com-mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&id=388755&blog_id=3&saved_changes=1#livepreview_iframe_container-TenzinDelek.jpg
"I have always taught people that one should not harm any life, not even that of an ant. How could I then possibly be responsible for such an act?" Tenzin Delek Rinpoche

Last week, hundreds of Tibetans, young and old, began gathering...

Read Post

Technology of Liberation? Activists Get their Own Smartphone

Posted December 9, 2009 | 08:23 AM (EST)


You're in a jail in a remote region of southwestern China. The men who arrested you have confiscated your mobile phone, which contains photos of a Public Security Bureau official brutally beating a young man who organized a protest over the working conditions in a local salt mine. No one...

Read Post

The Will to Survive: One Man's Harrowing Escape from Tibet

1 Comments | Posted July 30, 2009 | 12:49 PM (EST)


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...

Read Post

China's Civil Rights Lawyers: The New Enemies of the State

Posted July 20, 2009 | 12:44 PM (EST)


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,...

Read Post

The Tibet Question: A Chinese Think Tank Dares to Ask

7 Comments | Posted June 10, 2009 | 10:45 AM (EST)


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...

Read Post

China Makes a Song and Dance About Tibet's 'Liberation'

Posted March 25, 2009 | 07:57 PM (EST)


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...

Read Post

Tibet's Unlikely Defender: A Chinese Journalist's Change of Mind

Posted March 3, 2009 | 11:15 AM (EST)


2009-02-24-http:-blogger.huffingtonpost.com-mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&id=169372&blog_id=3&saved_changes=1#livepreview_iframe_container-zhu_rui.JPG
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...

Read Post

Why Tibetans Won't Come to the Party

Posted February 18, 2009 | 03:56 PM (EST)


2009-02-17-http:-blogger.huffingtonpost.com-mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&blog_id=3#livepreview_iframe_container-0163butterlamps2.jpg
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...

Read Post

World to Obama: Thanks for Giving Us Back Our America

Posted January 21, 2009 | 02:18 PM (EST)


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.

...
Read Post

Calling Tibet? Please Hang Up and Try Again

Posted January 13, 2009 | 06:09 PM (EST)


2009-01-13-http:-blogger.huffingtonpost.com-mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&blog_id=3#livepreview_iframe_container-Norzin_Wangmo.jpg
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...

Read Post

China's Propaganda in Tibet: Plenty of Viewers, Few Believers

Posted November 10, 2008 | 03:54 PM (EST)


2008-11-10-http:-blogger.huffingtonpost.com-mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&id=142642&blog_id=3#livepreview_iframe_container-monks_tv.jpg
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...

Read Post

Tibet's Secret Weapon: An Opinion

Posted October 23, 2008 | 11:04 AM (EST)


2008-10-23-http:-blogger.huffingtonpost.com-mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&blog_id=3#-tsering_tsomo.jpg
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...

Read Post

Arrested in Tibet: A Young American's Journey of Fear

Posted August 12, 2008 | 11:32 AM (EST)


2008-08-12-http:-blogger.huffingtonpost.com-mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&id=118342&blog_id=3&saved_changes=1-Wen1.jpg

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...

Read Post

Guilty of Being Tibetan: Scenes from a Lhasa Prison

Posted July 31, 2008 | 03:20 PM (EST)


"Many questions were asked of people who are not guilty of anything. They are just guilty of being Tibetan."
"Before, this was the best place, but now it's like a prison. When I watch TV, everything is lies. So I walk in the streets where the soldiers ask for...
Read Post

Leaking State Secrets: Beijing Finds Nothing Noble in Speaking Out on Human Rights

Posted July 29, 2008 | 10:33 AM (EST)


2008-07-31-http:-blogger.huffingtonpost.com-mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&id=115535&blog_id=3&saved_changes=1#-lobsang_jinpa.jpg

"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,...

Read Post

Tibetan Monks Sealed in Monastery in Sichuan Request Permission to Pray for Chinese Quake Victims

Posted May 19, 2008 | 04:37 PM (EST)


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...

Read Post

49 Days, 49 Years: Dalai Lama Leads Prayer Service for Tibetans Killed in Protests

Posted April 30, 2008 | 12:25 AM (EST)


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...

Read Post

Searching For the Olympic Spirit in New Delhi

Posted April 21, 2008 | 11:44 PM (EST)


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...

Read Post

Why China's Olympics is Good for Tibet, Darfur, and Puppies and Kittens

Posted April 4, 2008 | 12:39 PM (EST)


'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...

Read Post

"We're Also Human": Cell Phone Conversations Give Dramatic Accounts of the Reality on the Ground in Tibet

Posted March 19, 2008 | 06:14 PM (EST)


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

2008-03-19-novick1.jpgLately, Dharamsala -- a North Indian town that houses thousands of exiled Tibetans -- has been a hot bed of activity, with daily sympathy...

Read Post