The dramatic footage was virtually not possible to miss. A torrent of water tearing through Gyirong Port, one of the most important border crossings between Nepal and Tibet, sweeping away all in its path as a whole bunch of people fled for their lives.
The scenes, captured by CCTV cameras, rapidly unfold on social media and onto screens around the world.
Except here, in China.
Only a single still-frame shot has been broadcast so far by the nation’s state-run flagship information bulletin.
It has also been tough to discover the video on China’s closely censored web. It is just as exhausting to even discover posts describing the flash flooding that has claimed a whole bunch of lives, with just as many still unaccounted for since Wednesday.
Beijing has launched a huge rescue operation involving a whole bunch of emergency staff, which is persevering with, and President Xi Jinping chaired an emergency assembly with officers to co-ordinate efforts.
But when you examine the nation’s web content material to what much of the world has been seeing online these previous few days, China’s firewall becomes more seen than ever.
Tibet, which Beijing annexed in the Nineteen Fifties, had long resisted rule by the Chinese Communist Party.
China has quashed protests over the years, sometimes violently, and has been accused of grave rights violations in the Buddhist area. It has labelled the exiled religious chief, the Dalai Lama, a separatist.
That historical past means the very identify Tibet attracts China’s censors. Beijing’s sensitivities are particularly obvious at occasions likes this.
There have been day by day updates on the lacking and the useless, and Beijing has also been posting updates on the rescue operations, as effectively as the risks posed by a barrier lake that has been at risk of overflowing.
But there is little element beyond that. There are no accounts from survivors in Tibet, and virtually no user-generated footage displaying the lethal moments or their aftermath.
We are yet to hear from anxious households of those lacking. Trying to contact people there is near-impossible during common occasions.
As a journalist who has coated North Korea, it has typically been simpler for me to contact interviewees in Pyongyang than it is in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa.
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