Thank you.
The Chinese government has been very effective and rather successful at mobilizing big data totalitarianism and various transnational tools of tyranny to silence Tibetans abroad in the world and also to repress Tibetans inside Tibet. One key tool they use to achieve this is by linking Tibetans living in the diaspora to their family members in Tibet. By using that linkage and that relationship, they use families who are in Tibet as hostages. They are quite blatant about it.
I know a lot of Tibetans—Tibetan Americans or Tibetan Canadians—who have travelled to Tibet. They get told by these United Front minders explicitly and directly, “You guys live out there in freedom, in the free world, but if you say anything critical of the Chinese government, just remember that your family is right here under our thumb.” That's the specific kind of threat China is using as a strategy to silence the world.
Within Tibet, there have been cases where DNA collection without consent has taken place in schools and in various communities. There are still a lot of questions about exactly what the Chinese government is trying to do with this, but it is nothing benign. Nothing good is ever going to come out of this.
We do live in a very scary time, when the world could go to a very different place. China is at the cutting edge, is leading and is at the frontier of how technologies are being mobilized to increase tyranny. The dream we had 20 years ago was that the Internet would liberate humanity and bring democracy and that the technologies of liberation would help us. Instead, the Chinese government is playing a huge role in inverting this whole logic.
Right now, that is another reason why we have to be really careful and hold accountable the corporations, especially multinational corporations that are out here in the west, that are benefiting from our democracy and freedom but at the same time giving their software and aiding the Chinese government to impose its tyranny not only in China but also abroad. We have to hold these corporations accountable as well.