GreatFire’s recent initiative with its AppleCensorship project delves into the perspectives of developers, end users, and other stakeholders affected by app censorship. In exploring the real-world implications of app removals or unavailability, we spoke with Lhakpa Kyizom, a senior journalist covering Tibet extensively since 2007. She worked as a radio and video journalist at Voice of America Tibetan service, and served as the VOA news bureau chief in Dharamshala between 2019 and 2021.
Lhakpa Kyizom, a seasoned journalist dedicated to covering Tibet, grapples with the challenge of disseminating information from heavily surveilled regions without endangering sources or messengers. The confluence of limited app access, stringent censorship, and severe penalties has significantly impeded her work.
For most global mobile users, everyday activities like sharing life updates pose no risk. However, in Tibet, these seemingly innocuous actions can lead to imprisonment. Recent events, such as the three-year jail sentence handed to Tibetan singer Golok Palden for performing a patriotic song on a popular Chinese video app, highlight the grave consequences of such restrictions—incidents that have unfortunately occurred all too frequently over the past decades.
From the mid-2010s, mobile usage has become present across Tibet and Tibetans were actively sharing information through their devices. Android users rely on various Chinese app stores as Google Play Store is not accessible in China, while iOS users primarily access apps via Apple’s China App Store or locally developed third-party app stores. Regrettably, all these avenues fall under the stringent censorship of the Chinese regime, posing enduring challenges to secure and private communication.
Kyizom, who has covered Tibet from outside for over 15 years, witnessed a time when Tibetans had relatively more access to commonly used apps like Gmail and Skype, aiding her information gathering before 2010. However, even employing safety-conscious measures such as encrypted messaging apps led to the arrest of her sources, prompting Kyizom to revise her information request and retrieval methods.
Minimizing direct communication with individuals inside Tibet, Kyizom established a trust-based network of Tibetans-in-exile with connections within Tibet. Yet, she observed a distressing transnational repression against these intermediaries, leading to harassment or persecution of their relatives and friends within Tibet.
“The impact from transnational repression is huge; they [exiled Tibetans] are not communicating anymore, neither with their families nor with us. That’s a challenge,” she explained.
Censorship by political ambitions
Examining AppleCensorship’s findings on unavailable Tibetan apps, Kyizom attributes the censorship to the Chinese government’s sinicization campaign, aiming to erase Tibetan language and culture. Apps that bear the Tibetan spiritual leader’s name, such as “Dalai Lama” and “Dalai Lama Quotes” are available in all 174 Apps Stores around the world except for the China App Store. The same goes to a range of news apps, including “Tibet Times,” “Voice of Tibet,” as well as Radio Free Asia’s Tibetan service and Voice of America’s Mandarin service.
In an earlier interview with Director of Technology at Tibet Action Institute, Lobsang Sither, it was established that all Tibet-related apps allowed on the China App Store align with the government’s official stance on the region, and that stance evolves with current affairs.
On a social backdrop where a million Tibetan children are forced to go to boarding schools set up by the Chinese government in the pursuit of assimilation, political censorship on Tibet-related apps seems to only be the tip of the iceberg.
“These incidents mirror a broader political agenda outlined in the white paper published in November by the Chinese Communist Party on policies and governance in Tibet. It is not the first time such a white paper has been published, but this edition sets the precedent of replacing “Tibet” with its pinyin “Xizang” (Chinese romanization of the Mandarin script for “Tibet”) in the English translation. Since then, “Xizang” has appeared much more frequently than “Tibet” in official documents and in the state-controlled news agency Xinhua.”
This linguistic alteration reflects CCP’s control of media outlets like “Tibet Daily,” a daily newspaper published by the CCP Tibet Autonomous Regional Committee, whose app is available on the China App Store, uncoincidentally. According to CCP leader Xi Jinping’s directive, the media run by the party and the government are the propaganda fronts and must have the party as their family name. This is a guarantee that the newspaper would put the government before its readers. Independent news apps, particularly those covering Tibet, face insurmountable odds in surviving on Chinese app platforms.
If Kyizom could wish for an app accessible to Tibetans, she wants “one in the Tibetan language with a server located outside China” as it would facilitate safe communication, alleviating fears for personal safety. Yet, major tech companies have failed to provide such crucial tools in China.
And it appears that Kyizom’s ideal app will face an even harsher regulatory setback due to the new rules by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology: Starting in March 2024, all apps in China are required to “register” with mainland authorities—a requirement that Apple has started to enforce.
“They [big tech companies] compromise with the Chinese government. I don’t trust them to actually help humanitarians. At the end of day, they are commercial companies,” Kyizom asserted.
