The hunt against the Tibetan people is escalating — and it involves American technology, Chinese colonialism, stolen intellectual property, and enormous sums of money.
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The Tibetan people regard themselves as a free nation with their own traditions and culture, but China's "Greater China" vision flatly rejects this. For China, Tibet is an inseparable part of its territory.
After the failure of the Tibetan uprising in the late 1950s, the Dalai Lama fled Tibet to India across the Himalayas, and since then tens of thousands of Tibetans have followed his path each year — through Nepal and onward to India.
Recently, that flow of Tibetan migrants has nearly stopped entirely, and the reason is technological.
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American company Motorola spent decades developing highly advanced two-way radio technology for U.S. emergency services.
Unlike analog radios, which can transmit only one type of information at any given moment — either voice or location — the new devices can transmit voice and location simultaneously, and can even split a single radio frequency into 2 parallel, concurrent calls.
The technological secret behind this is the division of communication time between radios into extraordinarily short time slots — approximately 30 milliseconds each.
Within each time slot, the device transmits either voice or location data, but the switching between the two is so rapid that to the user the call sounds continuous and clear.
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The source code for this technology — including the original bugs — was stolen by a Chinese company called Hytera and embedded into identical Chinese products.
The Chinese government supplies these radios, along with advanced security cameras and sophisticated "Safe City" systems, to countries such as Nepal — with the only payment required being cooperation with the Chinese authorities whenever Beijing sees fit.
Nepal is a poor country, and its ties with China matter greatly to it.
The ability to enjoy world-class technology for free, combined with total control over the movement of citizens, is a temptation that is hard to resist. As a result, the streets of Nepal have become home turf for the Chinese government, which uses them to easily locate and detain Tibetan exiles.
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The fact that these radios provide encrypted communications and broadcast their location in real time — combined with data from all the security cameras scattered across city streets — enables the automatic identification of Tibetans that Chinese authorities are searching for, and allows them to close in rapidly using the nearest Nepali police officer.
At the same time, Nepal's own law enforcement agencies are acquiring a taste for total control over the country's citizens, and there is a growing danger that the country could slide into a dictatorship from which there is no return.
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Pictured: The Himalayan mountain range of Tibet.