Dharamshala, India (CNN) — Cheogyal Dawa couldn’t contain his emotions when he finally came face-to-face with an image he hadn’t seen openly displayed since he was a small child: a portrait of the Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhism’s spiritual leader.
“I was so excited I burst into tears,” Cheogyal said of seeing the large portrait, which is banned from being displayed within China, at a center for new Tibetan refugees in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, earlier this year. “Then I felt that I had reached a safe place, that I was free.”
This was the first time the 25-year-old had left China – his first stop in a journey that’s made him one of just a small number of Tibetans who have fled the country for exile in recent years.
His story is a rare first-hand account of coming of age in the Tibetan region at a time when the area has been transformed by policies under Chinese leader Xi Jinping – and as another flashpoint looms over the future succession of the 91-year-old Dalai Lama.
Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has increasingly stressed the need to “Sinicize” religion and mounted what critics say are intensified efforts to supress dissent and tighten control of China’s ethnic minorities, particularly in Tibet and the neighboring Xinjiang.
China has now codified that drive in a sweeping new ethnic unity law, which came into force July 1. Beijing says the rules aim to “forge a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation.” But rights groups say they deepen forced assimilation and language erasure – and raise the stakes of advocating for minorities, even overseas.
A day after the law came into effect, a Tibetan activist fatally self-immolated in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York, an exceptionally rare act amid mounting alarm in the Tibetan community-in-exile about the impact of Beijing’s policies on future generations of Tibetans.
China’s ruling Communist Party, officially atheist, also insists that it alone holds the authority to decide who will eventually succeed the current Dalai Lama.
Cheogyal shared his story with CNN – and chose to use his real name – in order to give a full account of the changes that he has seen in the Tibetan region during his lifetime.
He fears his generation is the last in China with the kind of opportunities he had to formally study Tibetan history, language and culture throughout their education – a shift that he says is already creating a generational break.
“The older generation can’t communicate with the younger generation now. If grandparents want to tell some stories about Tibet or their own stories, the younger generation can’t understand them,” Cheogyal said. “They’re completely cut off.”
His account tracks with researchers’ and rights groups’ documentation of a years-long government overhaul of how Tibetan children are educated, including a mounting emphasis on Chinese over Tibetan language that’s been codified in the new ethnic unity law.
Thousands of Tibetans used to flee their homeland each year, experts say, but few leave now. Between 2020 and 2025, fewer than 90 Tibetans were received as refugees in India, the Central Tibetan Administration, Tibet’s government in exile, told CNN.
Chinese authorities have made it hard to get passports and land borders securitized well over a decade ago remain nearly impenetrable or too risky. Better economic prospects may weaken incentives to leave.
Meanwhile, digital surveillance has limited people’s ability to exchange information with the outside world from within Tibetan regions in China. Those include not only the provincial-level Tibet Autonomous Region but also parts of neighboring provinces like Sichuan, where Cheogyal is from.
Cheogyal managed to leave by air with travel documents earlier this year. He first arrived in Kathmandu, where he recalls feeling conspicuous because he looked Tibetan – but entered the country without issue.
In the following weeks, with the help of the reception center, he continued on to India, eventually making it to the city of Dharamshala.
Cheogyal recounted his story to CNN from that city, which has been the center of the Tibetan cause since the 14th Dalai Lama fled his home and established a government-in-exile there more than six decades ago.
‘Tibetans must learn Tibetan’
This attempt to flee was not Cheogyal’s first.
In the wake of widespread protests against Chinese rule across Tibet in 2008, Cheogyal, then 8 years old, tried to escape the country and follow the footsteps of his father and uncle, who left around the time of the unrest, he said.
But he was caught by Chinese border patrol in Tibet’s Shigatse region, while making the risky journey to the Nepal border on foot with a guide.
While the guide got away, Cheogyal said he was held in detention for roughly a month and interrogated, before being taken to a local prison, where he stayed for six months – as the only detained child and without contact with his family.
CNN was not able to independently verify his account, but rights groups and activists have long reported that those caught trying to leave Tibet without official authorization face lengthy detention and mistreatment.
CNN has reached out to China’s United Front Work Department, which oversees the implementation of Beijing’s Tibet policies, for comment.
After returning home, Cheogyal restarted his life and education in his home county Drago (Luhuo in Chinese), located in the rolling grasslands and mountains of a Tibetan region of Sichuan, on the southeastern corner of the Tibet-Qinghai plateau.
Cheogyal – a young man who is serious, but quick to smile – said that entering school at that time in 2011, he was able to pursue an education in Tibetan language and culture, attending schools founded by monks.
“Back then, my teacher said, ‘We Tibetans must learn Tibetan… we need to protect our own culture,’” he said of his elementary school, which served hundreds of local students from in and around his home county.
In his secondary school at a prominent Tibetan institution in Qinghai province, Cheogyal said education officials made random inspections to check what students were reading and “whether they’re related to the Dalai Lama or Tibetan politics,” he said.
But Cheogyal and his classmates studied the history of Tibetan dynasties, logic, philosophical systems, poetry, linguistics, and astrology – core subjects in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.
Over the past few years, however, he saw the path for such education close behind him.
His elementary school was taken over by the state in 2021, he said, while his secondary school was shuttered in 2024.
Now, children from his home county attend government primary schools, where Tibetan is taught as a single subject course, he said. And rather than teaching Tibetan culture, even the Tibetan language textbook glorifies the Communist Party and its military, he said.
Similar changes and closures have been documented by observers and rights groups who say the broader trend is driven by a policy shift under Xi – and his call for patriotism to be inculcated “throughout all types and levels of education” in Tibet.
Beijing in recent years has rapidly expanded mandates for schools in ethnic minority regions to adopt primarily Chinese-language education, starting from kindergarten. The shuttering of Tibetan schools has come alongside a national tightening of rules on private schools in 2021.
Now, the new “Law on Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion,” mandates Mandarin Chinese as the “basic language” in schools, despite longstanding laws protecting the use of ethnic minority language in autonomous regions.
United Nations human rights experts have also said a system of residential schools in the region may be intended to “assimilate Tibetans.” Most Tibetan students – an estimated nearly 1 million children – were in boarding schools, a proportion hugely out of step with the rest of the country, they said.
When asked by CNN about the boarding schools last year, Xu Zhitao, a vice chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region, said all government efforts “have effectively safeguarded Tibetan children’s right to receive a high-quality education.”
Beijing has repeatedly pushed back on what it calls a “false narrative” that it is looking to repress Tibetan identity, language or religion. It insists its policies recognize and respect Tibetan cultural heritage and are meant to promote stability, ethnic unity, and shared prosperity. The ethnic unity law, Beijing says, helps ensure equality and support economic development.
Some Tibetan families may support Chinese language for their children as it is now required for China’s college entrance exams – making it a requisite to succeed in the country’s competitive education system and job market.
But Cheogyal says the changes have had a devastating impact on the connection younger Tibetans have to their language and culture.
By his estimation, most of his peers in their early twenties from his hometown can speak Tibetan, even if they may feel more comfortable speaking Chinese.
But only about half of children in their early teens and “very, very few” younger kids can speak the language, due to the rise of government education, including boarding schools, he said. “The younger the child, the less likely they can speak Tibetan.”
In this environment, he added, it feels “more difficult to learn Tibetan in the Tibetan region … than (it is to learn) English.”
A homeland transformed
These rapid changes to education are playing out as Beijing is looking ahead to the future succession of the Dalai Lama, who turned 91 in July.
The spiritual leader and Nobel peace laureate has said his office will have the sole authority to identify his reincarnation, who will be found outside China. But Beijing is expected to use the moment to consolidate its control over Tibetan Buddhism by naming its own successor.
For decades, China’s ruling Communist Party has waged a campaign against support for the Dalai Lama and what it sees as separatism in Tibet, which was seized by its forces in the 1950s.
Beijing has appointed its own senior monks, maintained close surveillance and controls on religious expression, and faced allegations of cracking down on peaceful dissent and forcing the large-scale relocation of rural and nomadic Tibetans.
Xi came to power after the 2008 protests in Tibet and deadly unrest in Xinjiang, another frontier region of modern China where ethnic minorities have long chafed under Beijing’s rule and witnessed a huge security crackdown. The Chinese leader has since framed a broader push to “integrate” Tibetans and other ethnic groups into mainstream Chinese culture as critical to national security.
While that push has included policies like poverty reduction, it’s also seen China accused of serious human rights violations for the alleged mass detention of Uyghur and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. Beijing has vehemently denied all such allegations.
Cheogyal said he also witnessed a tightening of surveillance and a suppression of daily life for Tibetans as he grew up.
His home county Drago has a history of resistance that’s been met with police crackdowns and enhanced surveillance, researchers say – particularly after the county emerged as a hub of protest in the 2008 Tibetan demonstrations.
Today, residents are regularly called to government meetings, where they received instruction in subjects like listening to the Communist Party and why they shouldn’t send their children to monastery schools, Cheogyal said.
He’s also witnessed the results of what researchers allege was a crackdown on Tibetan religious identity around 2021, when authorities demolished religious sites, statues and objects around Drago.
A large Buddha statue, prayer flags and prayer wheels used for devotional practice were all removed or destroyed in one county town, he said – corroborating parts of a crackdown documented in a 2023 report by research and advocacy group Tibet Watch.
Cheogyal described hearing that people who protested the demolitions were taken to a “re-education center” for “political education sessions” – sometimes “punished … for more than 20 days.”
The sacred site where the Buddha statue had sat by a river has now been paved over with a racing track, he added, while multi-story buildings were under construction where a demolished monastery school once stood.
In May, the local government held a horse racing event at the track celebrating “joint progress among different ethnic groups,” according to a state media report.
CNN has reviewed satellite imagery confirming the construction of a road that looks like a racetrack at the former site of the Buddha statue, which Cheogyal said had been moved inside a monastery. Developments around the site’s new use for horse racing have also been reported by Tibet Watch.
The 2023 Tibet Watch report also documents the use of a “re-education center” in Drago county around the period described by Cheogyal. Experts say it’s difficult to document the extent to which such facilities or practices are regularly used across Tibetan regions – and Cheogyal says he’s not sure if the one in Drago county is still in use today.
For Cheogyal, now, leaving his restricted homeland for Dharamsala has been like stepping into a new world where his culture – and celebration of its spiritual leader – are all around him.
Not long after he arrived in the city, Cheogyal says he had a meeting that was the “most precious and unforgettable” of his life.
There, in the complex where he now makes his home, the Dalai Lama received Cheogyal and listened to his story. Afterwards, as Cheogyal puts it, the spiritual leader stroked his head with compassion.
“I said to him, ‘You must live a long life, the six million Tibetans in the Tibetan regions are all waiting for your return.’”
The-CNN-Wire
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