During the eight years I lived in China, people would often say they felt as if they had no voice under Communist Party rule. This was especially true for minorities.

So when Tashi Wangchuk, a Tibetan herder turned shopkeeper, showed up at my apartment in Beijing in the spring of 2015, I of course wanted to listen to his story.

He told me the Chinese authorities on the Tibetan Plateau had been slowly eradicating the Tibetan language from schools and the business world. Mr. Tashi believed prohibiting the study of the Tibetan language went against China’s constitution.

The New York Times was not Mr. Tashi’s first stop in his attempt to raise this issue, I learned. Chinese state-controlled media had refused to listen to him. And years earlier, the Chinese authorities had briefly jailed him for expressing his opinions on social media. Foreign media were his last resort to be heard.