About Our Team
May the winds of freedom blow across the land of Tibet!
愿自由之风吹遍图博大地！
We are a group of Chinese-speaking youth activists deeply passionate about Tibetan culture and committed to uncovering and sharing Tibet's hidden history and truths. Through this platform, we provide insights into Tibet's rich humanities, unique ecology, complex history, political and economic dynamics, and human rights conditions.
Inside China, censorship has left an information vacuum on Tibet, filled only by propaganda and rumor. Most people there read neither English nor Tibetan, so to change minds, we have to speak the language they use every day.
By “Chinese,” we don’t mean an ethnicity. We mean Chinese-speaking. Our members include Tibetans, Han Chinese, and other ethnic groups.
Chinese is not our identity. It is our tool.
Our mission
To bridge the information gap between Chinese-speaking communities and Tibetans, both inside and outside Tibet. We publish reliable, Chinese-language reporting, fact-checks, and explainers that challenge state propaganda, and we help Tibetans who have lost their mother tongue reconnect with their history and identity. Our role is not to speak for Tibetans, but to make Tibetan voices understandable to audiences who have rarely had the chance to hear them.
Tara Zhang Yadi
张雅笛 Tara Zhang Yadi is our editor and a content contributor. She was arrested in the summer of 2025 after returning to China from her studies in France to visit family and celebrate her 22nd birthday. A devout Buddhist who never advocated Tibetan independence, she was nonetheless charged with “separatism.”
“CCP's action clearly exposes the true nature of Beijing’s Tibet policy: They neither want genuine mutual understanding between Han and Tibetan people, nor do they want a real resolution to the Tibetan issue”
Our Team
We are a global online editorial team, from Tibet to Dharamshala and from North America to Europe. From China to India, from the desert to the highland pasture!
Contributor/ Editor
Yuqiao Hu
Yuqiao Hu grew up in Huangshan, China, and now lives in the United States, where he works as an attorney.
He has never been to Tibet. His interest began when he encountered our posts about Li Jianglin and her book Tibet in Agony: Lhasa 1959. Those posts prompted him to explore Tibetan history beyond official Chinese narratives. As he learned more, he came to recognize how the Chinese government had distorted that history and obscured Tibetan experiences. That realization drew him into advocacy for Tibetan rights.
He now contributes Chinese-language writing to Chinese Youth Stand for Tibet, focusing on Tibetan history, human rights, language education, and cultural preservation. Through his work, he hopes to challenge misinformation and prejudice, encourage Chinese-speaking audiences to listen to Tibetan voices, and build solidarity with Tibetans.
Director / Chief Editor
Ginger Duan
Our founder, Ginger, grew up in Yunnan, western China, where the Tibetan and Han worlds meet, and worked with a local NGO using technology to empower farmers and herders. In 2018, she worked at Jigme Gyaltsen School in Golog, Amdo, as a technology specialist, living with daily checkpoints and harsh plateau weather. This Tibetan-run private school was forcibly closed in the summer of 2024 amid the Chinese government’s intensifying crackdown on Tibetan education.
After moving to the United States, she connected with exiled Tibetan communities and founded Chinese Youth Stand for Tibet to build understanding between Chinese speakers and Tibetans, while staying connected with people inside Tibet and closely following developments there. Through extensive writing and public speaking, she introduces Tibetan history and human rights to the Chinese-speaking world, hoping to ease ethnic hostility and help bring about a peaceful resolution to the Tibet issue.
Photojournalist / Culture consultant
Choegyal Dawa
Choegyal Dawa is from Drago in Tibet’s Kham region and studied Tibetan language and literature at Northwest Minzu University. In 2008, at just eight years old, he was caught trying to leave Tibet and imprisoned in Shigatse for six months. He later witnessed his primary school come under state control and his secondary school close, deepening his concern for the future of Tibetan-language education.
In 2026, he fled through Nepal to India. At the Tibetan reception center in Kathmandu, seeing a freely displayed portrait of the Dalai Lama moved him to tears—a moment of safety and freedom. He later shared his experiences with CNN under his real name.
As a member of the Chinese Youth Stand for Tibet, he draws on his experiences and studies to share Tibet’s history and present with Chinese-speaking audiences and bring Tibetan voices to a wider public.
He said, I have always remembered the Gendun Chopel's words:
རང་སྡེ་རིགས་ལ་ཞེན་པ་དཀར་པོའི་མདངས།།
རང་བྱུང་སྙིང་གི་དབུས་ན་གནས་པ་འདིས།།
རང་ཡུལ་ཁ་བ་ཅན་གྱི་རྗེ་འབུངས་ལ།།
རང་གི་ནུས་པས་སྲི་ཞུ་ཅུང་ཟད་སྒྲུབ། །
The white color of love for one's own race
This is the heart of nature.
The snow-capped king of his homeland
Do a little service in your own way....
Tech Lead / Editor
Yanwei Xu
Yanwei Xu was born in 1980 in Aba (Ngaba) Prefecture, a Tibetan region of Sichuan, China, where many of his friends and classmates were Tibetan. Years after leaving home, he noticed that many of their children could barely speak their own language, and he began working to preserve it.
Xu was detained for more than seven years on fraud charges, which he says were a pretext to punish his advocacy. In detention, fellow Tibetan detainees taught him the basics of Tibetan phonetics. Through them, he came to appreciate the language’s systematic structure and cultural richness, and his commitment only grew stronger.
Xu came to the United States in 2024 and now works as a substitute teacher in a high school district near Sacramento, California. The tightening control over Tibetan areas and the systematic erasure of Tibetan language and culture weigh heavily on him. He has joined Chinese Youth Stand for Tibet and continues working to ensure this heritage is passed on to future generations and continues to flourish.
Contributor
Nimatso
Nimatso is from Kham. She grew up watching her mother tongue fade, schooled in Chinese under a regime of corporal punishment. Now living in Europe, she is learning Tibetan and rebuilding her sense of identity, while continuing to care deeply about every corner of greater Tibet. By reading the writings of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, along with Tibetan history beyond the Chinese narrative, in foreign languages, she came to understand that the CCP rules through lies.
The anxiety and fracture of her own identity have also made her care deeply about the fate of the Tibetan-Chinese borderlands and about relations between Tibetans and Chinese, and she hopes to find a path toward reconciliation. She believes Chinese Youth Stand for Tibet is helping to open up this rare possibility, and she writes Chinese-language articles for the group as her contribution to that effort.
Hidden member
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There are a few more members whose names we could not put here for security reasons. But you can learn their work through our post!
About Starshiner
Lhasa Spring is part of Starshiner, a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit in California, US.
We grew out of the scattered community of the 2022 White Paper protests — activists who left China and found each other far from home.
In the dark, we polish the stars, so we can see one another.