There's something in this account of the Tibetan cultural revival movement that doesn't seem to quite fit:
That includes the lhakar movement, which emphasizes individual acts of protest through personal actions such as wearing traditional clothes, eating Tibetan food, listening to Tibetan music and teaching the native language to their children.
Tamding Tsetan, a well-known artist who writes and performs folk songs, is one of the leading exponents of Tibetan heavy metal.
Well, authenticity is in the eye of the beholder I suppose. Anyway: the lhakar, a kind of Tibetan Gaeltacht thing:
Developed inside Tibet after the uprising of 2008 and more recently exported to the Tibetan Diaspora, Tseten says it challenges Chinese rule while simultaneously allowing Tibetans to assert their culture and identity within the letter of Chinese law.
“So, Tibetans have started buying vegetables from Tibetan [grocers], going to Tibetan restaurants, not Chinese," Tseten says. "We are speaking as much Tibetan as possible, not Chinese. But Lakhar is not just about eating Tibetan food and wearing Tibetan dress, it is about getting back your identity.
Pressures towards Sinicization certainly exist, but I'm pretty sure the Politburo are quite cool with people buying stuff from Tibetan grocers: there's probably a quota for Tibetan grocer creation as part of Provincial economic development metrics. Overall, China's aim is more to co-opt 'Tibetanness' as an inferior part of a Greater Chinese identity than to supress it absolutely.
This actually reads more like a way of disengaging with direct confrontation than anything else: a retreat into culture. If the alternative is serial self-immolation maybe that's not too surprising.