PARIS — Clandestine newsletters are being widely circulated and Internet cafes have sprouted in Tibet to counter severe repression of independent media by Chinese authorities, a Paris-based press watchdog said on Friday.
In a new report, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) called for support from the U.N. Human Rights Commission to make China lift curbs on free media in the Himalayan territory.
RSF said that while a study found that the only recognised media in Tibet were under official control, some 20 clandestine newsletters were being distributed via underground channels.
Consisting mostly of handwritten articles by exiled lamas or banned political writers rather than independent reporting, the newsletters were spread via monasteries and Buddhist schools, according to the RSF.
Many newsletters had originated as scripts pasted on walls or passed from person to person in secret, it said.
RSF said the growth of the Internet in Tibet, with a cluster of cybercafes now in place in Lhasa, offered potential for the spread of independent journalism by residents and exiles.
China's troops invaded Tibet in 1950 and the region's leader, the Dalai Lama, fled into exile in India nine years later after an abortive, bloody uprising against Chinese rule.
The 80-odd recognised newspapers and magazines in Tibet, as well as all television and radio, were under Communist Party control which RSF said was stifling both Tibetan culture and freedom of speech.
"In the heart of state media, Tibetan and Chinese journalists work under the permanent threat of censorship and sanctions," it said in the report, noting that foreign news agencies and journalists were rarely allowed into Tibet.
Most articles in Tibetan newspapers were direct translations from China's Xinhua state news agency, it said.
"We are all frightened. Anybody that breaches the censorship can expect the worst," RSF quoted Tsering Wangchuk, an exiled journalist who formerly worked for Radio Lhasa, as saying.
Yet the network of underground publications circulated in small bundles since the late 1980s was most at risk, RSF said.
"The coordinators of these newspapers are taking very big risks ... If the authors are identified, they incur heavy prison sentences," it said, noting the Chinese authorities have in the past handed out four-year jail terms for "Free Tibet" graffiti.
RSF also detected an underground press circulating among a community of an estimated 30,000 Tibetans exiled in India and Nepal which could only be smuggled in by sympathetic tourists.
While it was too risky for a Tibetan to carry copies of such publications into Tibet, some editors mailed copies to Tibetan universities in the hope some might get past postal controls.
RSF urged the European Union to present a resolution to the United Nations rights forum under way in Geneva condemning China for restricting press freedom in Tibet and said the 15-nation bloc should also actively support independent Tibetan media.
The 53-member state rights forum, midway through its annual six-week session, will vote in late April on a U.S. resolution rebuking China for an alleged crackdown on democracy activists and religious groups. The resolution also cites "restrictions on the exercise of cultural, religious and other freedoms."
Washington has moved a similar resolution at every meeting bar one of the U.N. body since the mass killing of protesters in Beijing in 1989. But China has escaped scrutiny each time.