[campaign header="Music to Our Ears: Ngawang Choephel Released"]Freeing Ngawang Choephel was one of SFT’s first campaigns. For six years, students campaigned for a fellow student to be released from prison, and in January 2002, he finally was. Ngawang Choephel was studying ethnomusicology on a Fulbright scholarship at Middlebury College in Vermont when he decided to go to Tibet to document traditional Tibetan song and dance. He was arrested by the Chinese government in September 1995 and later charged with espionage and counter-revolutionary activities. In December 1996 Ngawang was sentenced to 18 years in prison. On January 20, 2002, Nwagang Choephel was released and flown to the United States, twelve years before the end of his sentence. [press release] [message from Ngawang][/campaign]

[campaign header="Under Pressure from SFT, PBR Pulls Down Billboard in Tibet"]October 2001 – After intense pressure from SFT members, Pabst Blue Ribbon, the fourth largest brewing company in the United States, pulled down a billboard in Lhasa, Tibet that celebrated the “50th Anniversary of the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet.” Pabst Brewing Company asked their Chinese licensee to remove the billboard after receiving over 1,500 faxes about the billboard over the course of less than a week. [more][/campaign]

[campaign header="Unprecedented: SFT & Tibet Movement Stop World Bank Project"]In July 2000, a proposed World Bank loan that would have funded the move of 58,000 Chinese settlers into Tibet’s Amdo Province collapsed, after fifteen months of intense campaigning by a broad international coalition of human rights organizations, Tibet support groups, environmental organizations and Bank-watching groups to stop the controversial project. The project would have facilitated China’s continuing population transfer efforts, which have already made Tibetans a minority in much of their own nation and facilitates erosion of Tibetan’s distinct culture and identity. [press release] [press release - 1999] [more about the World Bank][/campaign]

[campaign header="SFT & Rights Groups Sabotage State-owned PetroChina IPO"]In 2000, SFT worked with labor, human rights, and environmental groups to successfully persuade many of America’s largest investors to spurn the initial public offering (IPO) of PetroChina, one of the recently privatized subsidiaries of China’s state-owned oil industry, and the company responsible for building a gas pipeline through Tibet. Citing human rights and environmental concerns, the coalition forced PetroChina to reduce its IPO target from $10 billion dollars down to a final figure of $2.8 billion, effectively taking more than $7 billion out of the hands of the Chinese government. [press release] [news article][/campaign]