Tibetan Uprising Day

Tibetan Uprising Day, observed on March 10, commemorates the 1959 Tibetan uprising which began on March 10, 1959, and the Women's Uprising Day of March 12, 1959, involving thousands of women, against the presence of the People's Republic of China in Tibet.{{cite web

The armed rebellion was quashed by the Chinese army, resulting in a violent crackdown on Tibetan independence movements, tens of thousands of Tibetan deaths, and the escape from China of the temporal and spiritual leader of Tibet, the 14th Dalai Lama, disguised as a soldier, on March 19, 1959. It also put an end to the 1951 Seventeen Point Agreement, a Sino-Tibetan Agreement written by China which had promised to respect and protect “the religious beliefs, customs and habits of the Tibetan people," which was forced on Tibet to avert war. The Dalai Lama refuted the Sino-Tibetan Agreement after he went into exile in India, in April 1959, in Tezpur, by making an announcement in the presence of the international community.

In 2008, on Tibetan Uprising Day, a series of riots and violent clashes broke out in the Tibetan city of Lhasa when monks were arrested during peaceful demonstrations.{{cite web The events in Lhasa triggered a nationwide uprising in which protests occurred in every region of Tibet. The Central Tibetan Administration estimates that 336 protests occurred in Tibet in 2008.{{cite web

Beijing has regularly been accused of using spying, threats and blackmail against Tibetan exiles in other countries and ‘threatens relatives in Tibet’ to exert control over activists in exile, with greater transnational repression at Tibetan new year," Losar, which falls on or around the same date as Tibetan Uprising Day. China also pressures other countries to suppress Tibetan Uprising Day commemorations and protests. Freedom House, a global watchdog which monitors people's political rights and civil liberties in different geographic areas, regardless of the country they are in, has successively ranked Tibet as the World’s Least-Free Country for the three years the Freedom of the World report has been issued, in 2021, 2022, and 2023.