Since 2008 at least 145 Tibetans have self-immolated as a tool of political protest. Attempts to label these acts as suicide—or even, curiously, as a forbidden act of “killing”—are either a complete misinterpretation of the phenomenon or, more likely, the type of deliberate misrepresentation that we see all too often in Chinese state propaganda.

Source: Why Are Tibetans Setting Themselves on Fire? by Tsering Woeser | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books