Dharamsala, January 30 – A Chinese court in Sogpo Mongol Autonomous County, Malho Tibet Autonomous Prefecture, has sentenced a Tibetan singer to one year and seven months’ jail term for producing a music album with “subversive songs”.

Tashi Dondrup was arrested on Dec 3 last year from a restaurant in Xining, where he had been in hiding after authorities banned his album titled “Torture without Trace” in November last year. He had been held at a detention centre in Sog County.

Chinese authorities in central Henan province, where the singer is a member of the Henan Mongolian Autonomous Region Arts Troupe, had issued the warrant for his arrest.

The music album contained 13 songs expressing nostalgia for the exiled Tibetan leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama and remembering the Chinese government’s crackdown on Tibetans across Tibet in March 2008.

Tashi was previously detained in September 2008, according to sources of the International Campaign for Tibet, and accused by authorities of including 'counter-revolutionary content' in a song entitled 'The Year of 1959,' the year of the Lhasa Uprising and the Dalai Lama's flight into exile. He was detained and beaten for over seven days by police in Xining.

The 5,000 CDs sold out within a month of its October release in Amdo region of eastern Tibet, where Tashi is a popular local star.

The musician, the son of Tibetan farmers who was married two months ago, then fled into hiding before being arrested.

Artists and writers have been at increased risk in the ongoing crackdown that has followed the Tibetan protests that began on March 10, 2008 in Lhasa and spread across the Tibetan plateau, a report by ICT said in December last year.