Xi Jinping Arrives in U.S. as Tibet Remains Barred to Journalists
For Immediate Release
September 23, 2026
Xi Jinping Arrives in U.S. as Tibet Remains Barred to Journalists
Activists Call for End to Repression, Free and Unfettered Access
Boston – While Chinese President Xi Jinping makes a high-profile visit to Washington, D.C., Beijing continues to enforce a complete information blackout across Tibet following August’s catastrophic landslide and floods at the Nepal-Tibet border. The Chinese government has suppressed all information regarding the number of lives lost in this tragedy and voices on the ground have been silenced.
“Xi Jinping’s regime tried to make Tibet invisible after the devastating border floods—blocking journalists, silencing victims, and censoring the internet––all to mask the truth of its occupation and colonization of Tibet,” said Tenzin Dorjee, Research and Advocacy Director at Tibet Action Institute. “As Xi arrives in Washington, President Trump must demand that he allow immediate, unfettered access to Tibet and end the relentless repression that imprisons Tibetans in their own land––including forced child separation, severe restrictions on Tibetan language and religion, and dangerous new laws that criminalize Tibetan identity.”
Censorship and narrative control around the flood disaster is only one aspect of an intensive regime of control in Tibet that focuses heavily on reshaping Tibetans’ identity in order to manufacture loyalty to the Communist Party. The passage of China’s ethnic erasure law (formally the “Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress”) earlier this year has intensified efforts to forcibly sever Tibetans from their language, religion, belief systems, and cultural traditions and increased the already grave risks for those who do not comply.
Measures include heavy restrictions on Tibetan language, new limitations on children participating in religious practice such as entering monasteries, and intensified indoctrination in Chinese Communist Party narratives. Already, approximately one million Tibetan children, including preschoolers, have been coerced into state-run boarding schools that separate them from their parents to stem the intergenerational transmission of culture, religion, language, and beliefs that keep a civilization alive [1]. The U.N. Pre-Sessional Working Group on the Convention on the Rights of the Child meets in Geneva next week to scrutinize China’s record.
“Xi Jinping has personally driven policies that threaten the very survival of Tibetan culture, including forcing a million children into colonial boarding schools, but Tibetans will not give up,” said Lhadon Tethong, Director of the Tibet Action Institute. “As Xi tries to dictate the agenda in Washington, President Trump can demonstrate true American strength by putting human rights front and center: demanding an end to the eradication of Tibetan identity and calling for a lasting resolution that respects Tibetans’ fundamental rights to freedom and self-determination.”
Contact: Tenzin Dorjee (Tendor)
Email: [email protected]
Notes for Editors:
[1] See Tibet Action Institute, 2021, “Separated from their Families, Hidden from the World: China’s Vast Network of Colonial Boarding Schools in Tibet.” We estimate that 900,000 students aged six to 18 are in boarding schools, the higher end of the range documented in our 2021 report, due to continued expansion of preschool and grade school boarding since 2021 and forcible transfer of more monks and nuns under 18 to state boarding schools over the past three years. Fieldwork by Dr. Gyal Lo, a Tibetan educational sociologist who fled Tibet and China in 2020 — now employed by Tibet Action Institute — confirms the existence of a system of colonial boarding preschools for rural Tibetan children that he estimates houses 100,000 boarding preschoolers aged four to six. See https://tibetaction.net/
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