The language advocate and former political prisoner Tashi Wangchuk was attacked on Saturday 19 August by a group of unidentified, masked men.

Tashi Wangchuk travelled to Darlak County in eastern Tibet on the evening of 19 August with the aim of raising awareness about the disappearance of the Tibetan language from schools in favour of Chinese. He filmed a video near to Darlak County Nationality Middle School, which he posted on the Chinese social media platform Douyin before travelling to a hotel where he was hoping to stay.

around 8pm, Tashi Wangchuk’s hotel room door was forced open and he was beaten and kicked by a group of men wearing masks

Tashi Wangchuk called to the hotel owner to contact the police. Police arrived at his hotel room at around 9pm and took him to the police station for questioning, where Tashi stayed until 11:30pm. During this meeting, police forced Tashi Wangchuk to erase photos and videos he had taken earlier that day from his phone.

After being rejected from the hotel he was staying  in other hotels, he instead went to Darlak County Hospital, where he asked the doctor to check his head. The doctor responded that the CT scanner was broken.

While Tashi Wangchuk carries out his peaceful language advocacy, authorities across occupied Tibet have imposed policies to marginalise or even eliminate the Tibetan language from the public sphere. This includes closing down Tibetan language schools and the Chinese government’s residential boarding schools policy, in which almost one million Tibetan children between the ages of four and 18 have been placed in boarding schools and pre-schools. In this environment, children have limited access to their families and are placed in a teaching environment that promotes the Chinese language and Chinese Communist Party-approved history over Tibetans’ own language and history. The policy has been criticised by the United Nations Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights, which in March 2023 urged China to abolish the residential school system.