Barbara Demick Quotes

On Apple's special store for the Chinese market, apps related to the Dalai Lama are censored, as is one containing information about the exiled Uighur dissident leader Rebiya Kadeer. Apple similarly censors apps for iPads sold in China.

Those nations that say it's a crime to preach your religion are making a terrible mistake. All they're doing is driving underground other forms of spiritual intuitions and practices.

I know plenty of people in China who don't like what their government does to the Falun Gong, but they don't want to entrust their data to the Falun Gong, either.

The prisons were now everywhere filled with Friends and others, in the city and country, and the posts were so laid for the searching of letters that none could pass unsearched.

I don’t understand you. China is a large empire—the largest nation in the world—and Tibet is so small. Why should you care what is happening there? It’s irrational.

The attempt to suppress new religious, linguistic, cultural, intellectual and political developments during past centuries was the cause of all major wars.

Preach or proselytize for Christianity in much of the Islamic world, and you are a candidate for martyrdom. Practice freedom of speech in Xi Jinping's China, and you can wind up in a cell.

When China was only Communist, everyone received the Dalai Lama, but now that China is hyper-capitalist, he gets blacked out.

My friends and family in Turkey could be arrested just for talking to me.

China may brutalize Buddhists in Tibet and Muslims in Xinjiang while denying basic rights to the rest of its 1.3 billion citizens, but 'woke' activists pushing intersectionality keep mum on all that.

Even if they're functioning out of ignorance, they are still participating and must be suppressed. In China, even one million people can be considered a small sum.

Hundreds of political prisoners still suffer in Tibetan prisons. Freedom of speech is not allowed in any sense. It is illegal to possess a photo of the Dalai Lama.

Since 2009, 140 Tibetans have immolated themselves to protest Chinese policies that limit their freedom of movement, speech and religion, especially their right to venerate the Dalai Lama.

It is time for the government of China to stop holding innocent religious figures in captivity merely for peacefully protesting China's occupation of Tibet.

Ai Weiwei, who is both a widely admired conceptual artist and a fearless human-rights activist, has been on the bad side of the Chinese government for years.

I hope that I will be the last victim in China's long record of treating words as crimes.

Christ in this country would quite likely have been arrested under the Suppression of Communism Act.

My phone and email have been hacked, I've been arrested by the police and followed by the pro-China people or the photographers from the pro-China newspapers.

Hong Kong has always been a symbol of the vibrant and free exchange of cultures, commerce and ideas. This reputation is threatened, however, in the face of China's efforts to increase its authoritarian control within its sphere of influence.

Whenever there is injustice, there is tension. But in China it is very hard to release your anger unless you burn yourself or you jump from a bridge. In a society where there is no freedom of the press, it is difficult for victims to be noticed.

Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit

The one indisputable reality of dictatorship is that dissent, insult, and malevolent language do not go unpunished if it is allowed at all.

Bashar al-Assad's henchmen stomped on the hands of famed Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat. Our dictators tailor wounds to suit their victims' occupations.

Political leaders in Belarus are routinely repressed, and their voices are muffled: Tsikhanouskaya was running for president because her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, was arrested before he could start his own presidential campaign.

They think because they have put my husband on an island that he will be forgotten. They are wrong. The harder they try to silence him, the louder I will become.