(TibetanReview.net, Feb17’25) – A reporter working for UK’s ITV spent a year secretly filming while avoiding police checkpoints to show the plight of the more than seven million Tibetans trapped under Beijing’s rule, and China demanded that it be cancelled ahead of its airing on ITV1 on Feb 16 evening.
China’s UK embassy demanded the cancellation of the exposé, claiming documentary Inside China: The Battle for Tibet was “filled with bias and false accusations”, without having even seen it.
Embassy officials have insisted the tightly guarded occupied country has seen “continued and sound economic growth, social harmony and stability”, adding “human rights are at their historical best”.
However, telling an entirely different story, the documentary reveals up to a million children have been placed in boarding schools where they are taught in Mandarin and “moulded” into citizens loyal to China and the Communist Party, reported express.co.uk Feb 16.
One mother is shown saying her children “don’t speak our language. We can’t teach the kids Tibetan. They don’t listen to us.”
The report said disturbing footage appeared to show widespread child abuse, with a headmaster seen beating a boy around the head in one clip, while another showed a teacher hitting a child on the hands with a stick, attacking him with a chair and throwing him on to a table.
In other aspects of the conditions in Tibet, the documentary reveals how in capital Lhasa, the filmmaker – known simply as Chang to protect his identity – explains that there are police checkpoints with high-tech surveillance “every 500 metres”.
Cyber security expert Greg Walton has said: “Everyday activities, such as language preservation and passing on traditional Tibetan practices, are being criminalised.
“Surveillance is at the heart of this process of subjugating the Tibetan people, of making them Chinese.”
Chang has also interviewed a high-ranking official, who says that government employees are no longer allowed to practice their religion as part of a crackdown on Buddhism.
A young Tibetan woman named Namkyi has told Chang she was arrested, beaten and sentenced to three years in jail at 15 years of age, simply for being in possession of a photo of the Dalai Lama, who turns 90 in July. She now lives in exile and recently testified in Geneva during the ongoing 58th UN Human Right Council.