Simon Denyer

TOKYO — Their story is a depressingly familiar one. An indigenous people live as hunter-gatherers practicing animist beliefs, before settlers sweep across their land, bringing disease and discrimination and almost wiping out their culture. On Friday,…

BEIJING — Kayrat Samarkand says his only “crime” was being a Muslim who had visited neighboring Kazakhstan. On that basis alone, he was detained by police, aggressively interrogated for three days, then dispatched in November to a “reeducation camp”…

U.S. clothing retailer Gap is the latest company to apologize to China for failing to reflect Beijing's territorial claims — on a map shown on a T-shirt for sale in North America. The offending T-shirt showed a map of China without including Taiwan,…

This video is currently not available Australian opposition lawmaker Sam Dastyari pledged to resign from Parliament Dec. 12 after allegations emerged that he had been acting in China’s interests. (Reuters) BEIJING — Australia's attempt to curb…

BEIJING — India and China have withdrawn troops from a disputed Himalayan region on their border, foreign ministries from the two countries announced Monday, defusing a tense standoff that had threatened to provoke armed conflict between the…

NEW DELHI — As nuclear posturing between North Korea and the United States rivets the world, a quieter conflict between India and China is playing out on a remote Himalayan ridge — with stakes just as high. For the past two months, Indian and Chinese…

BEIJING — While his boss was goading China over Twitter, new Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has been trying to build a constructive and “results-oriented” relationship with the leadership in Beijing. And though his warnings about the possibility of…

BEIJING — The United States needs to stop getting pushed around by China and work out a long-term strategy to deal with the country’s rise, former U.S. ambassador Max Baucus said last week. In an interview more than five weeks after leaving Beijing,…

JIAJIKA, CHINA — High in western China’s Sichuan province, in the shadow of holy mountains, the Liqi River flows through a lush, grassy valley dotted with grazing yaks, small Tibetan villages and a Buddhist temple. But there’s poison here. A large…

This week, the Chinese government’s lack of confidence was on display as reports emerged that a state-run bookstore in Shanghai had opened the plastic wrapping around a batch of Merriam-Webster's English dictionaries and had torn out the page…

It is an epic tale of love between a teenage princess and a noble emperor, of the first bonds of friendship between China and Tibet that sprung up more than 15 centuries ago. It is a tale of how China brought civilization to its barbarous west,…

Depending on your perspective, the official statistics for the number of tourists flooding into Tibet are either impressive, or downright scary. The Chinese government says 23 million visitors will enter the Tibetan Autonomous Region this year, an…

LHASA, China — In the contest for Tibetan hearts and minds, a 26-year-old Buddhist monk is emerging into the spotlight. He is the Chinese-appointed Panchen Lama, and he is being groomed by the Communist Party to fill an important political and…

A month ago, I never would have imagined I would be standing in front of the Potala Palace in Tibet, streaming a live video on Facebook and talking openly about economic and cultural discrimination and environmental pollution under Chinese rule. And…

Inside a metal shed in the Tibetan highlands of western China, thousands of microprocessors flank narrow corridors, generating a constant hum and stifling waves of heat. Outside, the sky is clear and blue, with a mountain peak looming at the top of a…

The man posed as 300-year-old Chinese emperor Qianlong, who was apparently still going strong thanks to drinking the “elixir of life,” and he told a woman in southern China that he could access his “imperial savings”; he just needed a down payment to…

JIQIE NO. 2 VILLAGE, China — She was 27, a kind, hard-working woman who supported her family by herding yaks and harvesting caterpillar fungus, a prized health cure, on the high grasslands of Tibet. Last October, Tsering Tso was found hanged from a…

BEIJING — China kicked off trials for a group of lawyers and human rights activists Tuesday, accusing them of being part of a broad Western campaign to overthrow the one-party state by fomenting a “color revolution.” Accusations of foreign-backed…

Skip to main content World Africa Americas Asia Europe Middle East Foreign Correspondents YUSHU COUNTY, CHINA — As he gazes out across the rolling grasslands of the Tibetan plateau, where hundreds of his yaks are grazing, 70-year-old Awang Chumpey is…