which is celebrating its centenary this year and you’ve considered settling in Tibet or Beijing we’d find you in the Šluknov Hook [northern Czech Republic] instead The Šluknov region is more a matter of chance My family and I were looking for a place to live between Berlin and Prague and I wanted my son to attend a Czech school So the Czech-German border region was a possible choice When I first saw the vast meadows and pastures there they greatly reminded me of the Tibetan plains I could immediately picture a herd of yaks there And there is indeed a herd of yaks grazing behind your house But you took your imagination even further I’ve spent several years in the Tibetan regions Mostly among pastoral nomads and their herds so I guess I wanted to bring home at least a piece of Tibet and share it with others A stupa is a Buddhist structure that is meant to symbolise peace and tranquillity I knew exactly what it’s supposed to look like and contain What if the bricks don’t align due to their size and what should the interior look like I’ve consulted with builders and read through instructions I even consulted the issue with the monk who accompanied the Dalai Lama on his 2006 visit to the Czech Republic He ended up drawing me a diagram and explaining what was important for the construction of the stupa officially called the Centre for Exploring Asian Regions Bringing a piece of Asia into my own home was an idea I had even before I started working at the Oriental Institute The Culture and Information Center for Asia allows us to bring our work closer to people to share our research and findings with them We host lectures for schools and the general public So you’ve managed to transplant a bit of Asia to your homeland The COVID-19 pandemic has made travelling quite difficult When was the last time you were in the region With the outbreak of the covid crisis in 2020 I came to realise that the only Asia in my reach at that moment was in my backyard The last time I visited China and Tibet was in 2019 I managed to go to Nepal for a while in 2021 but travelling to China is complicated at the moment Are these difficulties with travel caused by the COVID-19 pandemic or the increasingly more restrictive regime of the People’s Republic of China It’s interconnected; the covid crisis has come in handy for the regime The pandemic can be used as an excuse for many things China completely isolated itself for a while and it’s practically impossible for researchers of my kind to get into the country right now How do you get information directly from Tibet if you can’t go there We all now have to find new ways of accessing information it’s hard to follow and understand exactly what’s going on I visited Tibet every year for a few weeks or months at a time and even then you could see how the situation in the peripheral regions of China was changing dynamically Just an absence of half a year was enough for the situation to change completely How was life changing in the areas inhabited by Tibetans at that time and many places lacked electricity and network coverage Tibetans have woken up to a whole new era and are struggling to find their place in it We can read about what’s happened the past two years from official sources like the Xinhua News Agency but what they present is a very distorted view A visit in person to verify the facts is therefore absolutely essential you refer to your “informants” on the ground That’s also why I avoid getting information via email because any outgoing communication abroad can bring with it sanctions from the government China is significantly ahead of the curve when it comes to technology and its usefulness in controlling its own people Let’s clarify which areas we’re talking about The ethno-cultural region of Tibet covers a much larger area than just the Tibet Autonomous Region It is vast and represents about half the total expanse of historic Tibet Tibetans also make up the majority of the population in the Chinese province of Qinghai which lies to the north-east of the autonomous region and is called Ambo It is the region I specialise in and visit most often The third cultural and linguistic Tibetan area is the Kham eastern province of Tibet which has for the most part been administratively incorporated into the Chinese Sichuan province we see him as the exiled representative of Tibet But which part of Tibet does he actually represent The current Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile represent all Tibetans the Dalai Lama still embodies the ultimate authority what springs to mind is typically the image of a monk a person who draws their wisdom from their spirituality But what does it really mean to be a Tibetan in the present day The Czechs have a certain awareness of Tibet especially thanks to Václav Havel and his contacts with the Dalai Lama He was the world’s first head of state to officially welcome the Dalai Lama as a state representative Us Czechs know roughly where Tibet is located our notion of ordinary Tibetans is quite distorted We tend to think that people there live in harmony; in touch with nature and spirituality the ordinary Tibetan is not so different from me and you and the opportunity to send their children to a good school How important is religion to Tibetans today In the modern world that the Chinese government has developed in the Tibetan areas over the past twenty years People can now earn money and buy whatever they want More and more people are employed or are trying to run businesses Life has sped up and there is less and less time to practice religion it is undergoing a process of modernisation instead young entrepreneurs don’t have time to frequent temples or spin a prayer mill at home they purchase a solar-powered prayer mill and put it in their car or office Here we should explain how such a prayer mill works to better understand.  Picture a cylindrical hand-held prayer mill that is attached to a metal or wooden handle Inside is a rolled-up piece of paper inscribed with prayers Even Tibetans are adapting their religious practices to today’s needs which actively discouraged people from practicing their faith Religious freedom is a problem throughout China As part of the fight against anything foreign the Chinese government is restricting especially Christianity and Islam the question is whether you can consider it domestic or foreign influence There is a great deal of room for interpretation Tibetan Buddhism has become the target of a campaign to ethnicize the religion in recent years Red Chinese flags flutter outside monasteries slogans and portraits of Xi Jinping hang on the walls The government is calling on Tibetans to stop making financial donations to monasteries – this What power does the current regime have over Tibetan monasteries The government has tried to seize control of the monasteries from the very beginning it had to retain a certain amount of freedom to express religion to maintain peace the Chinese government has definitively incorporated the peripheral areas into a functioning infrastructure that allows the regime virtually unlimited oversight and ability to intervene the influence of monasteries and other religious institutions as parallel sources of authority to the centralized government and the Chinese Communist Party and monastery abbots are required to undergo patriotic education Tibetan is quite different from Standard Chinese (Mandarin) Are Tibetans “allowed” to use their own language These are two completely different language families Lhasa Tibetan falls under the Tibeto-Burman languages Tibetans do not use Chinese characters for writing the use of Tibetans’ own language should be guaranteed when it comes to official affairs and education the government is now trying to universally impose classes in schools taught only in Chinese and even official documents are not always made available in translation nomads – who had to relocate from the grasslands to newly built housing developments – being given a contract to sign that was only in Chinese They had to sign something they didn’t understand at all But many of them wouldn’t have been able to read the one in Tibetan either; a large part of the older generation cannot read or write it’s not easy to just say “I am Tibetan”; it’s the identity of “Chinese citizen” that is promoted The Chinese citizen comes first; cultural and ethnic traditions are secondary Chinese citizens should be equal regardless of origin The regime requires everyone to declare themselves as Chinese citizens We’ve mentioned the relocating of Tibetan nomads from the grasslands to housing developments and the construction of infrastructure Let us add that these changes are in line with the ‘Open Up the West’ strategy that the government announced at the start of the new millennium about seventy percent of China’s territory is the coast with metropolises such as Shanghai Money has been pumped into the East since the 1980s when China began to open up to the world and was in need of foreign investments and the region soon became the centre of the economy and contact with the world you could find modern cities booming there That was the first time I visited the area Almost nothing had changed in Tibet from the 1950s to the end of the millennium a journey from a nomadic area to the nearest centre So the government decided to open up to the world and modernise Western China as well The East of China was becoming rapidly wealthier and the economic and social disparities between East and West were starting to become unsustainable Many people migrated from Central and Western China to find work in the East to earn money where they lived without legal status and as a result The government therefore launched a programme to develop the Western part of the country and started heavily subsidising it the streets in towns and deserted roads in the middle of the plains were flooded with slogans about the great opening up of the West about how everything was going to be great The Chinese government is relocating traditional herders into cities to better exert control over them and extract mineral resources found in the areas The proclaimed goal was to catch up with the East But I’m assuming the intent was not as altruistic as presented by official press sources What are the other dimensions of the strategy To catch up with the standard of living in the East was one thing everything was presented as an intention to lift the population in the West out of its so-called backward way of life To turn the pastoral herders into urbanites It was a less publicly mentioned fact that the region was very rich in mineral resources which hadn’t yet been exploited along with the fact that the West is a sparsely populated while the East is overcrowded with tens of millions of people So the aim was definitely not only to support the population in the West the aim was to build infrastructure – roads airports – and to connect the western peripheral regions to Central China and exerting more control and influence over the lives of the local inhabitants One of the phases was the abolishment of pastures and housing development The Communist Chinese government claimed to be helping the locals Is it possible to say how voluntary these relocations were The reasons most often given by the government for sedentarisation are about improving the living conditions of the herders and protecting the environment which is supposedly under long-term threat from livestock grazing the government is subjecting the cleared land to construction and mining relocating people into newly built housing greatly improved population control which became a priority after the 2008 riots that they had a great opportunity to move into a house for free or for a very low fee and they would have access to education and health care But they had to make a decision within the week or lose the opportunity Those who refused to move were sometimes threatened with sanctions Tibetan nomads relocated in rather massive numbers Two decades have passed since this strategy was launched Do we even know how the former pastoral nomads are faring in the cities today?  The housing developments are mostly located on the outskirts of district cities or towns But some of them are completely out of the way Even several years after the construction being finished many housing developments have no electricity or water supply Those who relinquished their right to the government to use the pastures or sold their herds haven’t been able to do so Many of these people feel great frustration They have no means to make a living and are just waiting for welfare They’ve become a plaything in the hands of a government on which they are now totally dependent Alcoholism and other problems are on the rise the People’s Republic of China had set itself the goal of eliminating poverty China announced with fanfare that it had completely eliminated poverty It all boils down to how you define poverty the government includes social welfare in the income of the population the poverty line isn’t necessarily crossed But this says nothing about the stability and sustainability of living standards a large Turkic minority living in China’s western province of Xinjiang information has leaked out about internment re-education camps Do similar detention camps exist for Tibetans There are no re-education camps on such a massive scale as those in Xinjiang but we would certainly find parallels in Tibet It was Tibet which used to be considered problematic it was common for inconvenient people to suddenly disappear and the population to be under permanent control in the wake of the Summer Olympics in Beijing Tibetans wanted to take advantage of the whole world watching China and decided to draw attention to their situation The reaction of the Chinese government was drastic The protests started in March 2008 in Lhasa to mark the anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s departure into exile and unrest broke out in other Tibetan areas The Chinese authorities responded with a brutal crackdown with reports of hundreds of casualties (deaths) and thousands of arrests there were fewer Chinese military bases in Tibetan areas than there are today the infrastructure that the Chinese government ‘gifted’ to the Tibetan people which enabled the rapid relocation of troops to the problematic areas Between March (when the riots broke out) and August (when the Olympics began) trucks with soldiers armed to the teeth would patrol the streets every day Many people ended up in jail during that time some for being found with a picture of the Tibetan flag or for singing Tibetan songs The situation didn’t ease up even after the Olympics The soldiers remained in Tibet and security checks intensified Population monitoring is ubiquitous across the whole of China So governmental control over the population is similar both in Tibet and Xinjiang and there is little to speak of in terms of freedom of movement who imposed strict measures on Tibetans after the Olympics such as thoroughly monitoring people’s movement through ubiquitous camera surveillance and checkpoints Any sort of mobility in China is unwelcome and suspect China uses a system of classifying the population; you fall into different categories according to the number of social points you gain Some citizens earn the right to hold a passport The last Olympics sparked a wave of solidarity with the Tibetans around the world with calls for a boycott of the sports event we found ourselves in the same situation again as the Winter Olympics were held in Beijing in 2022 Does this mean that the world is quietly tolerating the violation of human rights in China It is a surprise that China was able to qualify again Beijing is the first city in the world to ever have hosted two Olympic Games Why the International Olympic Committee chose China in 2008 is understandable the country seemed to be changing and opening up; the world probably assumed that the Olympics would encourage development in that direction China more or less perceives being chosen as the host of the Olympics again as an endorsement of its policies She completed her studies in Sinology and Tibetology at the Humboldt University in Berlin She has been working at the Oriental Institute of the CAS since 2014 as a researcher at the Department of East Asia She is co-investigator of a project (supported by the Lumina quaeruntur fellowship of the CAS) on the context of national and foreign policy in present-day China Along with Ondřej Klimeš and in collaboration with universities in Warsaw Ptáčková has applied for an ERC (European Research Council) Synergy grant concerning a follow-up research focus CAO of the CASTranslated by: Tereza Novická  Texts and photographs labelled (CC) are released for use under the Creative Commons license The primary mission of the CAS is to conduct research in a broad spectrum of natural, technical and social sciences as well as humanities This research aims to advance progress of scientific knowledge at the international level the specific needs of the Czech society and the national culture Prof. Eva Zažímalová has started her second term of office in May 2021 and a Professor of Plant Anatomy and Physiology She is also a part of GCSA of the EU.