In December 2021, Warner Music China published a graphic to its official social media accounts welcoming Tibetan singer Tsewang Norbu to its roster. Less than three months later, the promotional posts and graphics referencing him had been deleted. Norbu was dead.
The 25-year-old singer self-immolated near Lhasa’s Potala Palace on February 25, 2022, in protest of Chinese rule in Tibet. He was reported to have died from his injuries in early March. Sources told Radio Free Asia that he shouted slogans before collapsing, though authorities did not provide a public account of the incident.
The Chinese government had, for several years, been one of the primary beneficiaries of Norbu’s public profile. His rise through China’s national entertainment industry provided exactly the kind of imagery that state messaging around Tibet depends on: a young, talented Tibetan man succeeding within the People’s Republic of China on the country’s biggest platforms, in front of its largest audiences.
In 2017, Norbu reached the national finals of The Coming One, a Tencent Video talent show, where judge Hua Chenyu said of one performance that he was “completely infected by this song” and that “no fault can be found.” In 2021, Norbu appeared on CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala, one of China’s most-watched broadcasts. He competed on The Voice of China, reaching the top six in his team. He had close to 600,000 followers on Weibo. The signing to Warner Music China in late 2021 represented the peak of his commercial visibility.
Yet Norbu had been doing something throughout that career that the promotional machinery around him did not fully register. He encoded Tibetan political identity into his work in ways that were audible to Tibetan audiences even when they passed unnoticed by the broader Chinese entertainment landscape. During a live nationally televised performance of his song “Returning Home,” he replaced the name of his hometown with the phrase “homeland Tibet.” His 2018 single “Tsampa” used the roasted barley flour that is central to Tibetan cultural identity as the subject of a song that communicated attachment to a way of life that Beijing’s assimilation policies have spent decades trying to absorb.
These were not accidental choices. They were the work of an artist who had found the narrow space between the permissible and the meaningful, using it consistently across a career that he was building inside a system designed to produce compliant, apolitical performers.
His family history suggested that the political dimension of his identity had always been present. His uncle, Lodoe Gyatso, had served more than 21 years in Chinese prisons for political activities. In 2018, Lodoe Gyatso staged a protest at the same Potala Palace where Norbu would later act, and was sentenced to 18 more years. His wife Gakyi received two years for filming it. Norbu grew up with this history. He understood what making a public statement at that location meant.
After his death, the government’s response was immediate erasure. Warner Music China removed posts, graphics, and promotional materials referencing Norbu from its accounts. His music was reported removed from the label’s YouTube channel and from multiple Chinese streaming services. His Weibo account was frozen. A notice reading “banned for violating relevant laws and regulations” was added to his profile. His final post on Weibo, written on the day of his protest and thanking fans for their messages about his most recent song, remained visible on the frozen account while much of the surrounding content disappeared.
State media did not issue an official public report on his death, and authorities did not provide a public statement detailing the incident.
Tibetan poet Woeser archived the Warner Music China announcement materials before they were deleted and published them to Twitter, creating a documented record of the label’s association with Norbu and the timeline of his erasure. That record circulated internationally.
The attempt to erase Norbu produced the opposite of what Beijing needed. Among Tibetan communities inside Tibet and across the diaspora, his image and story circulated precisely because authorities moved to suppress them. Reports described intensified censorship and suppression surrounding discussion of his case, underscoring official sensitivity to the spread of the story.
