Occupying Tibet’s rivers: China’s hydropower ‘battlefield’ in Tibet
Rare protests against the construction of a new hydropower dam in Tibet that risks catastrophic impacts on the world’s highest and largest plateau and downstream in China have been met with violent paramilitary reprisals. The planned Kamtok (Chinese: Gangtuo) dam in the sacred mountains of Gèndong threatens the displacement of villages and ancient Buddhist monasteries in the upper reaches of the Drichu or Yangtze river (Jinsha in Chinese).
The protests draw urgent attention to China’s extractivist plans that are carving up the Tibetan landscape, risking landslides, earthquakes and food insecurity, and impacting tens of millions living downstream in China, India and elsewhere in Asia. State-owned conglomerates are accelerating the construction of mega dams and associated infrastructure in Tibet despite the inherent dangers of a seismically unstable region where river systems are increasingly unpredictable due to climate change.
For the first time, China’s dambuilding is now reaching upriver to the sources of Asia’s great wild mountain rivers in Tibet in landscapes that were previously among the least disturbed habitats on earth. Tibet is described by Chinese engineers as “the main battlefield of China’s hydropower construction”,1 while a Chinese chief engineer warned that the process of constructing a dam in the upper reaches of the Drichu river is like building “high-rise blocks on tofu”.
The construction of the Kamtok dam is a central government plan being carried out by Chinese state-owned company Huadian, one of the world’s biggest coal-fired carbon emitters which signed a strategic partnership agreement with Germany’s Siemens last month and has assets and businesses established in countries involved with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
The plans involve the entire population of the area – monks and lay, old and young – being uprooted and displaced in their thousands from villages and monasteries that have flourished upstream in the sacred mountains of Gèndong alongside the Drichu2 or the upper Yangtze River, the longest and largest river on the Eurasian continent.
Paramilitary forces have imposed a lockdown after February protests in the Derge area of Kardze (Chinese: Ganzi) in Sichuan (the Tibetan area of Kham) against the construction of the 1.1 million kilowatts hydroelectric dam.
Even Chinese scholars and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials have underlined the importance of monasteries with “invaluable” 14th century CE Buddhist frescoes of “artistic splendour” that survived the Cultural Revolution but are now threatened with demolition and the displacement of hundreds of monks.
Video footage providing a rare glimpse of the situation in the area documented a peaceful gathering of Tibetans outside the county government headquarters in Kardze on 14 February, appealing for dam construction to be stopped. Just over a week later, teams of county officials and police arrived at two monasteries in Wonpotoe Township (Chinese: Wangbuding) to prepare for demolition. Footage sent out of Tibet – despite the extreme danger of doing so – showed the abbot of a monastery and elder Tibetans on their knees, crying and appealing to officials to stop the dam project and not remove them from their land. Other videos show monks being encircled and detained by police. Tibetan protesters were beaten so badly they were injured and hospitalised, and hundreds detained, with some facing criminal charges.
Party officials have now warned Tibetans that the massive hydro project on the upper reaches of the Yangtze – a river that is known downstream as an important cradle of Chinese civilisation – will go ahead regardless. The development reverses an order in 2009 by China’s Environment Ministry to Huadian Corp to suspend “illegal” construction of dams in the middle reaches of the Yangtze in Tibet because of environmental concerns.
The construction of the Kamtok dam risks a cascade of adverse consequences both on the plateau and in China, serving as a reminder that China’s policies in Tibet – where water is regarded as a ‘strategic asset’ by the Communist Party state – affect global climate systems already challenged by food and water insecurity involving glacial melting and erratic monsoon cycles. A leading Tibetan professor based in Beijing has revealed data showing that the rivers of Tibet are becoming more and more unpredictable.
As a storehouse of freshwater and the source of the earth’s eight largest river systems, the Tibetan plateau – a global climate change epicentre – is a critical resource for the world’s 10 most densely populated nations surrounding it. But China has accelerated implementation of detailed plans to steadily move dam building upriver into steeper terrain.
On a visit to Sichuan last July, Xi Jinping underlined China’s priorities in using the Tibetan plateau as major extraction zones for water, electricity and lithium, urging provincial officials “to write a new chapter in advancing Chinese modernization”.4 The completion of the world’s highest altitude high-voltage power grid in 2018,5 linked to the construction of a fully electrified high speed rail line from Chengdu in China’s Sichuan Province to Lhasa,6 demonstrates the CCP’s demand for hydropower-based energy resources and plans to intensify infrastructure construction in Tibet.
Now, these long-term plans focus on connecting hydro in the upper reaches of Asia’s wild rivers with extraction of solar energy, windpower, hydropower, lithium, copper, gold, silver and molybdenum. China already leads globally in PV (photovoltaic) solar, wind turbines, hydro dam construction and the power grids that connect them to distant industrial users. It also fulfils a nation-building agenda, establishing Chinese uses for Tibetan landscapes and rivers, just as China seeks to break and reshape Tibetan inner landscapes, eradicating a separate sense of identity and history and compelling compliance with Chinese cultural nationalism.
China’s plans involve raising captive water levels high enough to lap at the bottom of the dam wall of the next dam upriver, with most of the scheduled construction on the Dri Chu (Jinsha, upper Yangtze). This is a cascade, a series of pondages that reduces a racing mountain river to a chain of man-made lakes, each positioned exactly to butt up against its upriver neighbour. This plan requires dam walls that will be among the highest dam walls worldwide, as much as 300-400 metres high. At worst this risks a chain reaction as dams successively fail, causing the next to fail too, swept away by a tsunami wall of water 12 metres high.
In 2018, construction work on another massive dam in Tibet, the Lawa Batang dam over the Drichu river in the Tibetan area of Kham, was held up by a massive landslide, an entire mountain face rushing into the Drichu/upper Yangtze with such speed and force that one of the world’s great rivers was stopped. Then, as waters banked up behind the natural dam, the dam broke. Thousands of houses collapsed and roads and infrastructure destroyed.
The sheer scale of dam construction heightens the risks. Dam-building raises the water level of rivers which increases the pressure of the water on the ground, which in turn increases the number of geological catastrophes especially since the valleys of the Himalayas are so young, its river still incising. Seismic waves caused by earthquakes can shake dam walls from unexpected angles, turning concrete and rock to tofu in a moment.
Although the hydro dams in the steep valleys of the eastern Tibetan mountains are described as clean and green energy, their construction involves carbon emissions generated from processing and transport of fossil fuel-intensive raw materials. Building the high walls of the dams requires importing vast amounts of cement made by fossil fuel burning, blasting rock from nearby steep valley walls, trucking and compacting those rocks as the fill comprising most of the weight of a wall intended to hold back the world’s great rivers.
As well as affecting people downstream in China, the dam building shift upriver into Tibet also impacts farmers and fisherfolk down river in Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos and Myanmar. This is linked to the announcement last year of a major hydro dam near Markham (Chinese: Mangkang) in Kham Sichuan on the Za Chu/Mekong/Lancang Jiang in Tibet built by China’s Huaneng, one of the big five state-owned power corporations providing electrification for China.
The announcement of relocation in Derge comes at the same time as monks were being forced to comply with orders to relocate from another monastery in Tsolho, Qinghai. Similar footage emerged from Tibet of Tibetans appealing to officials against relocation to make way for construction of a new hydropower project that is underway on the Machu (Yellow) River. The massive construction project involves the destruction of the 19th century monastery of Atsok, rupturing the Tibetan community and its spiritual centre. Before issuing orders to relocate, affecting around 15,000 Tibetans, Chinese authorities announced the removal of Atsok Monastery from the list of recognized cultural and historical sites in the county.
SPYWARE-AS-A-SERVICE: What the i-Soon files reveal about China’s targeting of the Tibetan diaspora
The pervasive spread of digital surveillance technologies and their deployment against vulnerable communities has garnered high-level attention from prominent Western governments, including those of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Canada. Incidents involving targeted surveillance executed by entities like Israel’s NSO Group through Pegasus malware have ignited widespread concern. These cases have spotlighted the potential of such technologies to undermine human rights and to erode the democratic fabric of societies.
Governments are increasingly incorporating cyber operations into the arsenal of statecraft. This sophisticated integration combines open-source intelligence, geospatial intelligence, human intelligence, and cyber espionage with artificial intelligence, allowing for the gathering and analysis of everexpanding data sets. Increasingly, such operations are being outsourced. This report scrutinises one instance of outsourced cyber intelligence capabilities, brought to light by the leak of internal documents from a Chinese cybersecurity firm.
In February 2024 a leak of documents from i-Soon, a Chinese cybersecurity firm tied to the nation’s security apparatus, gave new evidence of People’s Republic of China’s (China or PRC) large-scale and shadowy cyber espionage activities. The data dump provides valuable insight into the priorities of the Party state in hiring hackers to target peripheral communities, including the Tibetan exile administration in Dharamsala, Uyghurs in the diaspora, pro-democracy advocates in Hong Kong, as well as official entities in neighbouring countries such as the Mongolian police, and India’s customs agency.
The leak demonstrates both operational continuity and a steady evolution in China’s strategic deployment of targeted surveillance technology. For long-time observers, the leak provides significant evidence confirming that China’s targeting of vulnerable individuals and groups through commercial Chinese cybersecurity companies extends well beyond PRC borders, infiltrating hundreds of official and individual systems.
Examination of the i-Soon files reveals that the Tibetan administration in exile and the Dalai Lama’s Private Office in India were among the targets of sophisticated cyber espionage. i-Soon, whose biggest clients included the Chinese police, the People’s Liberation Army, the Ministry of State Security and the Tibetan regional authorities based in Lhasa, harnessed advanced technological capabilities for data mining and communication pattern analysis.
Data from the i-Soon leak has been linked to previous Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) campaigns targeting the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), the Private Office of the Dalai Lama, and Tibetan and Uyghur civil society networks. Palo Alto’s Unit 42 were the first to report, with a high degree of confidence, that i-Soon is connected to an APT group known as Poison Carp. This attribution is based on forensic evidence surfaced in the i-Soon dump linking the company to targeting infrastructure attributed by Citizen Lab to Poison Carp, a Chinese threat group hitherto principally known for targeting the mobile phones of Tibetan and Uyghur social movement networks.
The targeting of the mobile phones of CTA officials from 2018 onwards represents a significant shift in the tactics used by threat actors, signalling an adaptation to modern communication methods and an understanding of the increasing reliance on mobile devices for both personal and professional activities. i-Soon’s compromise of mobile devices would facilitate the collection of large amounts of highly sensitive information about civil servants, which would put them, and those in their social network, at significant risk.
A key white paper found in the i-Soon data delineating its product’s capabilities utilises the compromised email inboxes of exiled Tibetan individuals as a case study, demonstrating the product’s ability to manage and analyse “massive” data collections on a “terabyte-scale.” This capability is tailored to satisfy the extensive demand of China’s intelligence agencies, domestic- and foreign-facing (i-Soon’s clients) to mine through substantial volumes of intercepted email data and to intricately map the social networks of targeted individuals.
The use of novel intelligence tactics against diaspora populations before global deployment also suggests an approach to cyber operations in which vulnerable populations serve almost as laboratories for China to refine its espionage capabilities. When applied to operations directed at Dharamsala, such testing could not only yield intelligence about Tibetan exiles, but also enhance the sophistication of China’s cyber arsenal, reducing the risk of detection and attribution in global operations against better resourced defences.
The analysis of the interpersonal relationships of target networks of Tibetans in exile deployed by i-Soon mirrors the oppressive securitisation methods used in Tibet. As i-Soon’s customers include the Public Security Bureau of the Tibet Autonomous Region, it is feasible that the web of personal and professional connections surfaced from compromised inboxes of senior Tibetan civil servants in India could have been later ingested into a known big data policing platform. This platform is instrumental in a campaign that criminalises even moderate cultural, religious expressions, language rights advocacy, and crucially, surfaces links to exile Tibetan networks.
The Central Tibetan Administration and the Dalai Lama’s personal office have been under digital threat for twenty five years, with the GhostNet operation that infected computers in the Dalai Lama’s office making global headlines in 2009. The first public recognition of these security challenges in the early 2000s predated warnings from Western intelligence services about such intrusions. Today’s threats, however, are defined by their complexity and stealth, exploiting both known and unknown vulnerabilities in networked systems.
i-Soon data files offer a glimpse, perhaps for the first time in the public domain, of the upstream APT analytics capabilities of the Party state, offering a new understanding of the processing and utilisation of data exfiltrated by APT groups for i-Soon’s Chinese intelligence and military customers. This also highlights the involvement of commercial enterprises in cyber espionage activities including significant insight into Beijing’s use of complex AI-driven surveillance systems5 to enforce political controls over PRC ethnic minority populations, not just within its own borders, but also internationally, in the diaspora(s). Demonstrating sophisticated technologies on vulnerable peripheral communities like Tibetans and Uyghurs appears to be a strategic move for corporate entities like i-Soon to advance their corporate interests.
The i-Soon leak highlights the cybersecurity threats faced by the Tibetan administration in exile, which not only emphasise the imperative for cybersecurity but also the profound consequences of cyber espionage on vulnerable populations. They accentuate the need for heightened vigilance and international cooperation to fortify the digital defences of those at risk.
Digital transnational repression targeting the Tibetan and Uyghur diaspora serves as a “canary in the digital coalmine” for democracies. Early warning capacity built into these digital diasporas could have surfaced these threats and led to a coordinated response in the West much sooner. Reports by Tibetan and Uyghur sources detailing digital threats from Beijing predated by several years Western intelligence’s public warnings of China’s cyber espionage targeting the corporate sector.
[kaya_qrcode title_align="alignnone" ecclevel="L" border="0" color="#9d5454" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" align="alignnone" download_align="center"]
Weaponising Big Data: Decoding China’s digital surveillance in Tibet
This report uncovers the Chinese government’s escalated digital surveillance in Tibet, marked by the compulsory installation of the ‘National Anti-Fraud Centre’ app on smartphones. Initially presented as a fraud prevention tool, the app is in fact a crucial element of a larger surveillance network. This report, developed in collaboration with Tibet Watch, London, is based on accounts from a Tibetan refugee in Golog in eastern Tibet1 (present day Qinghai province).
Our investigation conducted a dynamic analysis of the Android and Windows Desktop versions of this app, finding that data collected could extend beyond internet fraud detection, feeding into broader control mechanisms. This includes integration with databases managed by the Criminal Investigation Bureau, reflecting wider strategies of surveillance and oversight in the region.
The report also investigates the ‘Tibet Underworld Criminal Integrated Intelligence Application Platform’, a sophisticated big data policing platform. Analysis of government procurement notices revealed that this system amalgamates data from various existing Public Security Bureau systems in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) into a central Oracle database. This database system, developed on top of U.S. technology, is instrumental in a campaign that criminalises even moderate cultural, religious expressions, language rights advocacy, and social work in Tibet.
This investigation into the weaponisation of big data analytics in Tibet by the Chinese security state sheds new light on the reach of Party mechanisms into the personal sphere. This is not only changing the way people communicate, but having a society-wide ‘chilling effect’ on the way they think, feel and relate to each other, in many cases leading to a complete breakdown of contact.
The integration of a panoply of advanced technologies in Tibet - AI-driven systems fusing facial recognition with internet browsing and app-based monitoring, to DNA and genomic surveillance, and GIS tracking data - underlines the emergence of a terrifying approach to governance in the 21st century. It uses machine learning to power systems that prioritise state control and suppression over individual liberties and self-determination.
There are clear parallels in the deployment of spyware and Universal Forensic Extraction Devices (UFEDs) at police checkpoints in both Tibet and Xinjiang. Similarly, sophisticated big data analytics platforms are in operation in both regions, and although specific systems might differ, the same overarching strategy of control and suppression through intelligence-led policing is evident in both regions. Civilian AI-driven surveillance systems deployed in Tibet and Xinjiang find their origins in military Command and Control (C4ISR) systems-ofsystems, and integrated PLA joint operations doctrine. Chinese software developers have acknowledged this evolution in which cities and towns where people live are treated like a battlefield.2
[kaya_qrcode title_align="alignnone" ecclevel="L" border="0" color="#9d5454" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" align="alignnone" download_align="center"]
Leading Tibetan businessman fights for life in prison as siblings seek to secure release
A leading Tibetan businessman serving a sentence of life imprisonment in Tibet was repeatedly tortured whilst in custody in Tibet due to charges that were reportedly fabricated against him and his brother by a top official in the Chinese Communist Party.
Dorje Tashi, 50, one of Tibet’s richest businessmen who had won multiple awards from the Chinese Communist Party, has provided the most detailed account of torture and interrogation known to have emerged from a Tibetan prisoner who is still incarcerated. As a member of Tibet’s wealthy super elite, Dorje Tashi’s case is a Tibetan ‘Red Roulette’ - similar to those of more well-known wealthy Chinese Party members such as businessman Desmond Shum who received death threats after revealing networks of wealth, power, corruption and vengeance in today’s China.
This report covers new aspects of the case, detailing:
- The rejection of Dorje Tashi’s appeals despite Chinese lawyers’ legal opinions and the cursory treatment of the evidence, which supports the lawyer’s allegations that the appeals court and the Supervision Commission were acting under political instructions;
- The glaring contradiction with a previous case involving Chinese defendants, who got shorter sentences, and the reported detention of a key witness until he gave evidence to suit the police;
- Evidence from inside the prison and other Tibetan sources point to the existence of a specialist team or unit in Beijing of the feared ‘Guobao’ or secret police, who carried out the most severe torture;
The first 12 days of Dorje Tashi’s torture and interrogation occurred outside of official detention centres, believed to have been a military camp in Lhasa - a ‘black jail’. His mistreatment continued after transfer to an official detention centre, although here security personnel attempted to prevent the interrogation team from excessive brutality. International rights organisations have documented numerous cases of deaths following extreme torture in Tibet and China.
Fifteen years on, after exhausting official routes, Dorje Tashi’s siblings have turned to bold public appeals and advocacy to demand justice for their brother. Dorje Tashi’s elder sister Gonpo Kyi has staged sit-ins in front of the People’s Court in Lhasa and in July released a video message saying: “It is 2023 and I am still prohibited from writing a letter to my brother.”
In an open letter, Dorje Tashi’s older brother Dorje Tseten (Duoji Cidan) - who served six years in prison - gave a forensic account of how powerful officials have distorted the facts of the case to frame him.
Officials in Tibet have been accused before of fabricating serious criminal charges against Tibetans for little or no apparent reason, leading to lengthy sentences for several members of a family. Karma Samdrub, who was, like Dorje Tashi, one of the wealthiest Tibetan businessmen in China, received a 15-year sentence for an ‘unauthorised’ purchase 12 years earlier of an antique carpet from a shop in Xinjiang, also an inexplicably severe sentence for a minor offence.
Turquoise Roof has consulted more than 12 documents relating to Dorje Tashi’s case for this report, providing insights into the workings of the courts and lawyers in China. This includes eight statements by Dorje Tashi, his brother, or other family members; one court document; two statements by Chinese lawyers about the case, an interview with an informed Tibetan official, and interviews with several of Dorje Tashi’s relatives now living in exile.
[kaya_qrcode title_align="alignnone" ecclevel="L" border="4" color="#9d5454" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" align="alignnone" download_align="alignnone"]
Tibet a new frontline of ‘white gold rush’ in global race for renewable energy
A lithium boom is underway in eastern Tibet as China’s geologists have established that at least 85% of the PRC’s reserves of the critical mineral are to be found on the plateau.
China’s scientists deployed new remote sensing technologies for the first time to detect hard rock lithium deposits in remote areas of Kham and Amdo in Sichuan Province. Satellite imagery viewed for this report reveals a vast ore belt “sleeping in high mountains and deep valleys”, according to Chinese state media, which describe this as the largest lithium deposit in Asia.
Both Tesla, the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer, and its competitor China’s BYD (which will enter the electric car market in the UK this year) are becoming increasingly reliant on Tibet’s lithium exploitation and production as they expand their corporate operations worldwide. Bigger, faster electric cars require larger capacity lithium batteries – which cannot be done without a hidden footprint in Tibet.
This acceleration of lithium mining involves high risk and energy-intensive forms of processing in the seismically active and heavily securitised landscape of the world’s highest and largest plateau, a global epicentre of climate change. Tibet is crucial to China’s efforts to achieve dominance in securing not just lithium, but also a wide range of critical minerals and rare earths in the global race to a decarbonised future.
Chinese producers dominate lithium processing globally and the PRC secures much of its lithium from other countries such as Australia and Chile. This report, the first in a series produced by new research network Turquoise Roof, reveals by contrast the extent of lithium reserves newly identified by China in Tibet, the implications of new processing methods and the link with the EV industry.
- For decades, little effort went into exploring for hard rock lithium deposits in Tibet due to difficulties in mining in remote high altitude locations among other factors. But excitement grew among geologists and the Tibetan plateau has now been assessed to hold at least 3.655 million tons of China’s estimated 4.047 million tons of lithium.
- Lithium extraction involves a polluting, waste generating and energy-intensive processing at the mine itself, in an area known for its rich biodiversity encompassing subtropical, temperate and alpine landscapes abundant in medicinal herbs. In May, thousands of bids by Chinese investors were registered for one slice of Tibetan landscape, with initial price offerings being exceeded hundreds of times.
- U.S. investor Warren Buffett’s purchase of BYD shares enabled the company to exploit the Chabyer (Chinese: Zabuye) salt lake in Tibet, closer to India’s border than mainland China. As production intensifies, the future of Elon Musk’s Tesla gigafactory outside Shanghai looks increasingly dependent on access to the hard rock lithium (spodumene) of mountainous eastern Tibet and its processing plants.
- Cheap and polluting methods of processing the rock from Tibet’s first lithium mining area are now likely to be underway in a factory that had previously been closed after poisoning of local rivers and livestock. Tibetan protests in both 2013 and 2016 against the mining at Jiajika in Kham, which is in a district prone to earthquakes, were ruthlessly crushed. This report reveals the new methods of processing underway and the new lithium deposits revealed by satellite imagery and Chinese sources.
- Tibetans who express any concern about the mines or protest peacefully are at risk of being killed, tortured, imprisoned and the loss of their livelihoods. And many of the mechanisms of the authoritarian state used to silence and shut down Tibetans – notably surveillance through smartphones, and other tools of big data predictive policing – are powered by lithium batteries.
- China’s dominance in lithium processing enables it to set the new normal of battery-powered cars, which are getting bigger, faster and more lithium-intensive, with the current demand driving the world towards more intensive energy consumption at a time when a focus on using less is imperative. While China proclaims itself a leader of clean, green energy, it is committed, openly and publicly, to increasing its carbon emissions each year to 2030 and is actively building many new coal-fired power stations
Under Xi Jinping’s Made in China 2025 campaign, China already leads globally in PV (photovoltaic) solar, wind turbines, hydro dam construction and the power grids that connect them to distant industrial users. It uses its inside knowledge and profits from mining Tibet to speculate on future prices via the London Metals Exchange, which it bought in 2012. Xi Jinping has ordered the intensification of critical minerals exploitation.
Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and S Korea are at the forefront of a new global alliance aiming to redefine critical minerals supply as a security issue and seeking to end dependency for supply on China. The ‘Minerals Security Partnership’ (MSP) is in theory open to all countries that are committed to “responsible critical mineral supply chains to support economic prosperity and climate objectives”. China and Russia are not on the list of the grouping, which is being dubbed the ‘metallic NATO’.
[kaya_qrcode title_align="alignnone" ecclevel="L" border="4" color="#9d5454" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" align="alignnone" download_align="alignnone"]
Cartographies of coercion in Tibet
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is rapidly transforming the physical, digital, and social landscapes of Tibet. Although colonization efforts are occurring in plain sight, they are concealed from international public scrutiny.
One reason for the lack of visibility is that it is simply too risky for Tibetans in Tibet to publish openly about PRC investments, much less triangulate and validate locally available information. New technologies are starting to break the PRC’s monopoly on information in Tibet. Today, independently verifiable data and analysis can be leveraged from multiple open and unconventional sources and analyzed by Tibetan researchers and others outside China. New research alliances made-up of digitally connected scholars are starting to leverage remote sensing platforms to powerful effect. Informed by Tibetan researchers, this study combines data generated from official Chinese sources and satellite companies, including Planet Labs. It exposes the many encroachments into Tibet – from critical mineral exploitation including lithium mining and the building of hydro-electric dams to networks of high-speed rail, highways, and data centers. The assessment also considers the vast outlay of policing, detention, and ‘re-education’ facilities together with the deletion of religious and cultural institutions. Taken together, the study demonstrates how geospatial analytics and open-source research can provide an objective and unvarnished view of the cartographies of coercion in Tibet.
