Simon Elegant has a more detailed piece on his recent travel to Tibet in Time. The piece begins with a testimony on Chinese surveillance and Tibetan defiance:

When asked how his New Year celebrations have been, the pilgrim — a middle-aged businessman wearing a heavy winter coat against the bitter winds that knife through the monastery’s narrow alleys — immediately glances up and then over his shoulder. It is the universal, instinctive reaction of Tibetans I talked to on a recent trip to China’s far western province of Qinghai, where ethnic Tibetans make up the majority of the population in the areas closest to the Qinghai-Tibet border. “Cameras,” he hisses, nodding upward. “The police have them everywhere.”

Pulling me into the shadow of one of the deep doorways cut into the monastery’s thick walls, he launches into a tirade that reflects the feelings of most of the Tibetans I spoke to in the region, a group ranging from nomadic herdsmen to shopkeepers to students to monks. “We didn’t celebrate anything this year, because we have nothing to celebrate,” he says grimly. “We want to respect and commemorate the people who were killed last year,” when demonstrations against Chinese rule in Lhasa, capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region, which neighbors Qinghai, turned violent. Beijing says 19 were killed, mostly innocent Chinese shopkeepers. Tibet’s government in exile, led by its spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, put the number at more than 200, mostly Tibetans. This businessman, like many of his compatriots, passionately insists that the real number is in the thousands. “We are a people living under the gun. They tried to make us celebrate the New Year, but we refused. They jail us if we display pictures of the Dalai Lama. They even force our children to study only in Chinese at school,” he tells me. “But we will never forget we are Tibetans and will always have the Dalai Lama in our hearts.”

Additionally Elegant interviews a Tibetan nomad who speaks to the extent that the Chinese government is cracking down on the boycott of Losar (Tibetan New Year) by Tibetans.

Not surprisingly, the boycott has apparently angered Chinese authorities, who sources in exile allege have been engaged in a security crackdown code named Strike Hard since Jan. 18 in an attempt to head off trouble. “They have conducted house-to-house searches. They have military in plain clothes everywhere and snipers on the roofs,” says Tsewang Rigzin, president of the Tibetan Youth Council based in Dharamsala, India. According to one nomadic herdsman I meet at the Longwu monastery in Tongren, one of the most important outside the Tibet Autonomous Region, the attempt by the authorities to force celebrations — and the Tibetan resistance that has followed — has extended even into some remote areas. The 53-year-old, dressed in a traditional fleece-lined long coat and fingering his prayer beads, recounts how security forces came in January to his village in neighboring Gansu province and tried to enforce celebrations through a system of collective responsibility. “Ten days before New Year, the police came and divided us into groups of 20 families and put one or two people in charge. They were given a few thousand yuan and told they were responsible, that they would be punished if there were no celebrations,” he explains. “Later they came and arrested nine people who they said were ringleaders in the refusal campaign, even though they had nothing to do with it.”

This testimony goes along the New York Times report of the Chinese government trying to pay Tibetans to celebrate Losar and cracking down on those who have refused.