Archive for the 'Tibet' Category

China intensifies tug of war with India on Nepal

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on February 18, 2010
in China, India, Nepal and Tibet
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Jim Yardley from Kathmandu in The New York Times:

For years, Nepal never bothered too much with policing its northern border with China. The Himalayas seemed a formidable-enough barrier, and Nepal’s political and economic attention was oriented south toward India. If Nepal was a mouse trapped between elephants, as the local saying went, the elephant that mattered most was India.

But last week a Nepalese government delegation visited Beijing on a trip that underscored, once again, how China’s newfound weight in the world is altering old geopolitical equations.

As Nepal’s home minister, Bhim Rawal, met with China’s top security officials, Chinese state media reported that the two countries had agreed to cooperate on border security, while Nepal restated its commitment to preventing any “anti-China” events on its side of the border. More:

Tibet is no Shangri-La

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on February 17, 2010
in Tibet
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Christina Larson in Foreign Policy:

That is to say, there was no real place named Shangri-la until recently, when the city of Zhongdian (Gyalthang in Tibetan) changed its name to recall Hilton’s paradise. In truth, the modern city is not quite a dreamscape. Situated on an alpine plateau, in a location resembling that of Lost Horizon, the modern city of 130,000 is divided into an “old” and “new” town. The new town came first. It resembles many midsize Chinese cities that have arisen in recent decades, with hastily erected concrete apartment blocks and glass storefronts. The old town, however, was built entirely in the last decade years; it has “quaint” cobbled streets and wooden storefronts, and when I visited last fall, I stayed in a rustic lodge, with a wood-burning stove and a sloppy dog who slept on the steps. All this is pleasant fabrication for visitors like myself, catering to what we expect to find.

Shangri-la isn’t even in Tibet proper; it’s situated in the far north of China’s Yunnan province. (The region where Tibetans live actually spans parts of five Chinese provinces, and is known as “greater Tibet .”) Han Chinese tourists from the country’s wealthy eastern cities, who now are becoming more curious about Tibetan lands and culture, also come here to take in the view. They roll in on large tour buses and stay in luxury hotels in the new town, with banquet halls and karaoke bars. Chinese tourists generally spend little time in Shangri-la and instead book guided day trips to take in the dramatic scenery. Western tourists stay in old-town lodges, and stock their backpacks and suitcases with hand-sewn Tibetan coats, jade jewelry, prayer wheels and other trinkets, and profess more interest in the Tibetan people. More:

Inside Tibet

Published
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on February 9, 2010
in Tibet and human rights
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The Economist correspondent travels to Tibet on a “rare authorised trip by a foreign journalist”:

Day four

On the plane out of Lhasa, I sit next to a Nepali businessman who frequently visits Lhasa to buy shoes. He puts them in containers to be taken by lorry to Nepal, where most of them are re-exported to India. He has his complaints: about the duties he has to pay at the border, and the snow that sometimes blocks traffic. But of the road from Lhasa to Nepal, he is full of praise. It once took three days by lorry, he says. Now it is a day and a half. “China is so developed,” he says wistfully, looking out of the window at the ribbons of light marking highways and city streets below. He has little positive to say about Nepal and its roads.

China has been pouring money into its infrastructure in the past few years, and—from a business perspective at any rate—Tibet has been a big beneficiary. On my last visit to Lhasa, in 2008, I went by train. The railway line, Tibet’s first such link with the Chinese interior, had been opened just two years earlier and is one of the country’s most spectacular engineering accomplishments. Critics of Chinese rule in Tibet condemn its impact on the environment and the encouragement it gives to a flood of immigrants from the rest of China. But as a feat, it amazes: the $4.2 billion line crosses higher terrain than any other in the world, including permafrost—which requires elaborate ground-cooling measures to protect the rails from changes in temperature. More:

On the trail of the first people in India

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on January 2, 2010
in Bhutan, Heritage, India and Tibet
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Akshai Jain in Mint:

The Brokpa villagers who live near Batalik in Ladakh are a colourful but confused lot. Their oral history and songs suggest that they migrated from Gilgit, now in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), a few hundred years ago. But over the last 50 years they’ve come to believe that they’re remnants of an ancient Aryan population that came to India with Alexander’s army.

The “Aryan” theory was floated by a few German Indologists in the 1960s; it caught everyone’s fancy, and the Brokpas turned it into a marketing tool. The problem, however, is that nobody takes it seriously any more and the small, isolated community which had almost convinced itself about the supposition, is now unsure of its roots.

So recently when a group of researchers landed up at their villages, promising to tell them about their genetic history, the Brokpas were excited. The Aryan Welfare Association in Dha village swung into action, organizing a camp at which men from different villages came together to take swills of distilled water and spit into vials. For the Brokpas, it was a solemn occasion. This, they were told, would hold the clue to their origin. More:

High tensions

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on December 8, 2009
in China, Conflict, India, Tibet and Travel
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Tawang Monastery. Photo: Arunachal Pradesh Tourism

Tawang Monastery. Photo: Arunachal Pradesh Tourism

Peter Savodnik travels to Arunachal Pradesh, India’s Himalayan state whose contested border marks the front lines of the increasingly combative rivalry between India and China. In the National:

Tawang sits about 3,000 metres above sea level and is enveloped by sharply etched mountains and crystalline skies. The centre of the village comprises a narrow artery riddled with two- and three-storey hotels offering “fooding and lodging”, souvenir stands, barber shops – the Fancy Hair Cut Salon, with room for just one stool, is a big draw – and 4×4s that ferry tourists from Tawang to Jang and Bomdilla, also in Arunachal Pradesh, and Tezpur and Guwahati, in Assam. The tourists who come to Tawang are mostly young, newly moneyed Indians, according to Bijoy Baruah, a tour guide from Guwahati-based Jungle Travels India, but they also include older people, many with backpacks and ponytails, from Scandinavia, Germany and the United States. Buddhist monks in red robes from the Tawang Monastery, the largest in India and the second-largest in Asia, are ubiquitous. Old men sit in front of rug shops and miniature cafes cupping honey-ginger tea. A eight-metre gate painted aqua blue, orange, green and yellow frames the frenetic, honking crush of cars and people.

Usually, Tawang hovers just above the cloud line, and the only thing that mars the horizon are Army helicopters shuttling troops and materiel to and from the bases that dot the mountains just south of the border with China. Since 1962, when China briefly invaded northern India, Delhi has maintained a sizeable military presence in these parts. The Indian Defence Ministry’s official history of the 1962 war, which was completed 30 years later, states that Indian forces suffered 2,616 casualties against some 700 on the Chinese side. (The exact numbers are difficult to tabulate because many soldiers went missing or died from the cold.) More importantly, the war revealed that India was helpless to defend itself, particularly in the mountains. Chinese troops had gained valuable, cold-weather experience fighting in Korea in the early 1950s and, more recently, in Tibet. (Tibetan guides, familiar with the intricate mountain passes, gave Chinese soldiers critical help during the 1962 conflict.) India, meanwhile, maintained a small and ineffective Army that, much like today, was focused on Pakistan at the expense of its border with China. More:


Top adventure destinations for 2010

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on December 1, 2009
in Bhutan, Nepal and Tibet
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Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan as a Himalayan group are among the top ten adventure destinations for 2010 picked Gadling.

Travelers to Nepal can choose a myriad of adventure options, including hiking the Annapurna Circuit, making a trek up to Everest Base Camp, located at 17,500 feet, or tackling a mountain such as Island Peak, which stands at 20,305 feet, but remains popular for non-technical mountaineers looking to add a Himalayan summit to their resume. As the birth place of adventure travel, Nepal knows how to cater to the backpackers, vagabonds, and modern day nomads, that pass through its borders.

[A section of the Puna Tsang Chhu river in Bhutan]

Kayakers looking for remote regions in Bhutan

From the New York Times:

Heflin was part of an expedition to the area several years ago — the subject of a 2007 documentary, “Adventure Bhutan” — that explored several remote sections of the Mangde Chhu. This year’s return expedition reunites Heflin with two others from that trip: the adventure photographer Jed Weingarten and Willie Kern, a kayaker who was part of an expedition that completed a first descent of the Yarlung Tsangpo river in Tibet.

The Mangde Chhu and Puna Tsang Chhu contain some of the most impressive terrain in the world. The rivers run at the bottom of lush green canyons, framed by massive vertical rock walls. There, the group would be difficult to reach should it run into trouble.

Portions of both rivers run as difficult as Class VI, the most hazardous classification of rapids. Some sections of the Puna Tsang Chhu, Heflin said, are “unrunnable.” More:


36 Hours in Rajasthan

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on November 20, 2009
in India and Tibet
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From the New York Times:

rajasthanFor sheer extravagance and luxury, few places in Rajasthan compare with the Umaid Bhawan Palace (Palace Road, Jodhpur; 91-291-251-0101; www.tajhotels.com), a golden sandstone complex finished in 1943 on 26 acres of lush gardens. The Art Deco-style masterpiece is now a 347-room hotel, with rates of as much as 500,000 rupees, or $10,740 at 47.5 rupees to the dollar, for a night in the Maharani Suite. It is the type of place where Elizabeth Hurley married Arun Nayar, an Indian textile tycoon, in one of two lavish ceremonies. For your own memorable evening, make your way through the delicately lighted corridors to the terrace restaurant Pillars. Skip the overpriced Indian dishes and order the shiitake mushroom cappuccino to start and the spaghetti pescatore. There’s also an excellent chenin blanc from Bangalore. Dinner for one, 3,000 rupees ($64). More:

Where’s the remotest place on Earth?

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on October 29, 2009
in Climate change and Tibet
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The world’s most remote place is on the Tibetan plateau (34.7°N, 85.7°E).

From here, it is a three-week trip to the cities of Lhasa or Korla – one day by car and the remaining 20 on foot.

Researchers at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, and the World Bank, have created a model – and a series of maps — to calculate how long it would take to travel from a given point, to the nearest city of 50,000 people or more by rail, road or river.

The brighter an area, the closer it is to a big city; the darker it is, the further out it is.

Check out the New Scientist’s gallery of 11 maps. [via Fast Company]

Monk in waiting

Published
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on June 7, 2009
in Faith, Religion and Tibet
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This year marks 50 years of Tibetans living in exile in India, a period in which the Dalai Lama has been the face of their struggle. The Sunday Express profiles Ogyen Drodul Trinley Dorje, the 24-year-old Karmapa who many say could be the new face of the Tibetan struggle. By Devyani Oniyal:

ogyentrinleyIn a spacious room on the fourth floor of the Gyuto monastery in Sidhbari, a farming village near Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh, Ogyen Drodul Trinley Dorje, the 17th Karmapa, stands with a grave expression. He is receiving a few people who have sought a private audience with him. Some have come merely to pay their respects and to receive his blessings, others in the hope that he can fix their problems. Two old gentlemen bend to touch his feet, three women have come all the way from Hong Kong-one of them with a “business problem”. There is a reverential hush in the room, broken suddenly by the cry of a little girl accompanying her mother. With an unfortunate sense of timing peculiar to children, she bawls incessantly and is taken out of the room by her crushed mother. The Karmapa finally allows himself a half-amused look before returning to his duties with practised ease.

It’s an ease that has grown in the nine years that he has been living in India and will come in handy if he were to eventually become, as many say he will, the new face of the old Tibetan struggle. In the Tibetan hierarchy, the Karmapa, who is the head of the Kagyu sect and whose role is purely spiritual, is the third most important leader after the Dalai Lama (who heads the Gelugpa sect, the biggest sect), and the Panchen Lama, who went missing in China in 1995, a few days after he was chosen by the Dalai Lama. More:

[Image: The Buddhist Channel]

China creates spectre of dueling Dalai Lamas

A battle is looming as the current Dalai Lama and his followers in exile compete with the Chinese government for control of how the 15th Dalai Lama will be chosen. Edward Wong from Dharamsala in the New York Times:

For centuries, the selection of the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama has been steeped in the mysticism of a bygone world.

On the windswept Tibetan plateau, his closest aides look for divinations in a sacred lake. A mountain god transmits oracular messages by possessing a high lama. Monks scour villages for boys precocious in their spiritual attunement.

All that is about to change, as the current Dalai Lama and his followers in exile here in India compete with the Chinese government for control of how the 15th Dalai Lama will be chosen. The issue is urgent for the Tibetans because the current Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of all Tibetans and the charismatic face of the exile movement, has had recent bouts of ill health. He turns 74 in July.

Both the Chinese and the Tibetan exiles are bracing for an almost inevitable outcome: the emergence into the world of dueling Dalai Lamas – one chosen by the exiles, perhaps by the 14th Dalai Lama himself, and the other by Chinese officials. More:

The hip-hop lama

Published
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on March 13, 2009
in Politics, Religion and Tibet
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karmapa

Jeremy Page from Dharamsala on Karmapa Ugyen Trinley Dorje, the hip-hop lama who is ready to lead the Tibetan struggle. In The Times:

When I first met Ugyen Trinley Dorje, it was hard to imagine that he would one day be hailed as a future leader of the Tibetan freedom movement.

He was 7 years old, sitting on a throne at his monastery in Tibet, surrounded by devotees and incense, and looking a little bemused.

It was 1992 and, while travelling in Tibet, I attended his enthronement as the Karmapa, the third-highest-ranking lama in Tibetan Buddhism, at Tsurphu monastery near Lhasa.

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Dalai Lama: China Has Turned Tibet Into a ‘Hell on Earth’

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on March 11, 2009
in Politics, Religion and Tibet
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The Dalai Lama has accused China of having brought “hell on earth” to his homeland Tibet. On the 50th anniversary of a failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule, the exiled spiritual leader delivered a speech in Dharamsala. He said said China’s rule “thrust Tibetans into such depths of suffering and hardship that they literally experienced hell on earth.” Full story and China’s reaction here and here.

The full text of the Dalai Lama’s speech is posted on the official Web site DalaiLama.com:

We Tibetans are looking for a legitimate and meaningful autonomy, an arrangement that would enable Tibetans to live within the framework of the People’s Republic of China. Fulfilling the aspirations of the Tibetan people will enable China to achieve stability and unity. From our side, we are not making any demands based on history. Looking back at history, there is no country in the world today, including China, whose territorial status has remained forever unchanged, nor can it remain unchanged.

China’s official news agency Xinhua called the speech utter distortion of Tibet history. In a report from Beijing, it said:

Unfortunately, the Dalai Lama has not only been on the wrong side of history, but also has got the history upside down. Miseries of “hell on earth” and “untold suffering” occurred nowhere but in the slavery Tibet symbolized by the Dalai Lama.

Peter Jackson: The day I saw the Dalai Lama flee into exile

From The Independent:

On 18 March, an Indian journalist, Shri Krishna, who had contacts with senior members of the Indian government, called us urgently to his house. He told us there had been riots in Lhasa and the Dalai Lama was heading for the Indian frontier. We broke the news in a Reuters report. The Dalai Lama and his party reached the frontier after nearly two weeks of trekking.

As it happened, my wife Adrienne and I had been to Gangtok, capital of Sikkim, on the border with Tibet, the previous year. We had lunch with the Chogyal [king] and his sister, Princess Kukula, who was married to the high-level Phuenkhang family of Tibet. We knew the princess was in Delhi. More:

The house where the 14th Dalai Lama was born

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on March 4, 2009
in Tibet and Travel
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From The Economist:

It is tucked away in Hong Ya, a mountain hamlet of 200 people, which merges with the dusty crags to which it clings. Worshippers and tourists are not deterred. They seek out a pair of wooden doors with white prayer scarves draped through iron knockers. Inside, they pay their respects to a man China reviles.

The residence, with its throne room and prayer wheel spinning next to a portrait of the exiled leader, is a curious anomaly. It is there by Chinese government design. A casualty of the Cultural Revolution, it was rebuilt in 1986 when China was negotiating with the Tibetan government-in-exile. Xinhua, the official news agency, reported that it cost 350,000 yuan ($51,000) to resurrect, and boasts 61 rooms. In fact, there are six at a push. One stores a motorcycle.

More:

After the Dalai Lama

Published
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on February 5, 2009
in Faith, India, Religion and Tibet
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Saransh Sehgal in Asia Sentinel. Sehgal is based in Dharamsala, India:

dalai_lamaBut what happens after the Tibetan Diaspora’s most iconic figure departs the scene? In Tibetan Buddhism, reincarnation is not a life force that passes from body to body. It may lie dormant for an indeterminate period – perhaps years – before a complicated series of omens points to a reborn Dalai Lama. In the meantime, a remay reign. According to the faith, Tibetan religious leaders have been reborn again and again, for at least 750 years, when Kublai Khan, the Mongol warrior, recorded a visit to the isolated Buddhist kingdom. Certainly none of them has been a woman.

The Dalai Lama leads one of several sects, each considered to be a living Buddha, reincarnated in an endless series of new religious leaders. The Chinese have sought to end the practice, somewhat incongruously believing they can select their own reincarnated figures, an interesting belief for a nation that is officially atheist. In 1995, for example, after Tibetan leaders announced that the then-six year old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima had been named the 11th reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, Tibet’s second-highest ranking religious figure, Chinese authorities spirited him out of Tibet and named their own, Gyancain Norbu, in his place.

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The other Lhasa

Published
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on January 25, 2009
in Society, Tibet and Travel
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The old Lhasa is gone. In its place is rapid development, new pubs and the latest mobile technology. Yet, Tibetans see themselves distinctly as Tibetans, not a part of a larger Chinese culture. Vijay Jung Thapa takes a trip [in the Hindustan Times].

In 1976 the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, tripping on a strong dose of yajé, wrote about the ‘Tibet of his imagination’ — a psychedelic account of a secret, shadowy, white paradise up in the Himalayas. Like Ginsberg, the Tibet of my own imagination, spurred by writers from Hedin to Harrer to Hopkirk, had always conjured up a powerful image of Eastern mysticism set against the great brooding mass of the Potala — a place of pure spirit, unsullied by greed or personal ambition.

Five minutes into Lhasa, that illusion lay shattered.

As our van rolled onto a smooth-as-silk eight-lane-wide boulevard, my Chinese interpreter excitedly gushed: “This is our Lhasa.” Outside, glistening glass-and-chrome buildings, plush hotels and supermarkets with bright neon signage floated by. Bulky Prados purred down the uniform grid of roads that go off in all directions and chic women and strutting businessmen dotted the sidewalks and street corners. It was a new landscape where Lhasa meets Las Vegas — minus the buzz and with an unmistakable touch of Chinese kitsch.

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The drama of Miss Tibet

Published
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on November 26, 2008
in Tibet
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In the long-standing conflict between China and Buddhists seeking a return to their homeland, the Miss Tibet pageant is a symbol of defiance. Emily Wax from Dharamsala, India, in the Washington Post:

Choekyapy, a monk, teaches English and Web-surfing skills to Sonam Choedon, 18, who won the crown this year.

Choekyapy, a monk, teaches English and Web-surfing skills to Sonam Choedon, 18, who won the crown this year.

The Miss Tibet pageants, seen by many as a showcase of feminine beauty, have been fraught with controversy and drama. Even though the contests take place in a drowsy Himalayan town in India — home to the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan exiles — the Chinese government and some Tibetan elders have pressured contestants to withdraw. It is probably one of the few things that the political rivals can agree on. “Heavy is the head that wears the tiara,” one Tibetan TV station reported.

Unsurprisingly, there are few runners-up in the Miss Tibet pageants. This year, only two entered the contest, which is in its seventh edition.

And the winner was Sonam Choedon, a shy 18-year-old with shiny waist-length black hair and high cheekbones. At 16, she fled her homeland on the Tibetan plateau to Dharmsala, headquarters of the Tibetan Government in Exile.

More:

Tibetan exiles back Dalai Lama

Published
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on November 23, 2008
in Tibet
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From BBC:

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Tibetan exiles meeting in India have agreed to back the Dalai Lama’s policy of seeking autonomy, rather than full independence from China.The Tibetan spiritual leader’s approach to continue talks with Beijing received the majority vote at the meeting in Dharamsala, but delegates concluded that if China makes no effort to meet the demands, other options would be put forward.

Click here for another report.

A generation gap in Tibet’s royal family

Jyoti Thottam in TIME:

Khedroob Thondup nephew of the Dalai Lama. AP

Khedroob Thondup nephew of the Dalai Lama. AP

“I was seven years old in 1959, and I was studying in Darjeeling,” recalls Khedroop Thondop. “One day my teachers told me that I was to go and receive someone at the train station. That’s when I realized that I was related to His Holiness and that I was Tibetan.”

As the Dalai Lama’s nephew, the eldest son of the Tibetan spiritual leader’s eldest brother, Thondop, now 56, has already led an extraordinary life. He was born in Calcutta, where his father, a political leader in the Tibetan government, had been posted. He went to the elite St. Stephen’s College in New Delhi, got an MBA in the United States, ran a family business for several years in New York City, and then returned to India in 1977 to serve as his uncle’s special assistant. Two years later, he went to Beijing for Tibet’s first negotiations with China, taking notes on the meetings between his father and Chinese supreme authority at the time, Deng Xiaoping. For the last 21 years, he has run a center for Tibetan refugees in Darjeeling and has served three terms in the Tibetan parliament-in-exile.

More:

Born in exile: the young Tibetans of Dharamsala

In the streets of Dharamsala, Sébastien Daguerressar, special correspondent of France 24 channel, got firsthand testimonies from these young Indian-born Tibetans, who dream of winning back a country they have never seen.

Khendrab Palden

Khendrab Palden

He sits on the pavement, facing the temple on Dharamsala’s main road. Teacup in hand and MP3 player in his ears, he takes in the sun. “I’m considering exile,’ he says, anticipating my question. His name is Khenrab Palden, 26, and exile for him is not just a personal goal – it’s a professional one. He is a filmmaker. His parents left Tibet before he was born, he explains. But thanks to the Tibetan community, his parents set up a business and managed to send their son to study in the US.

In Massachusetts, Khernrab studies anthropology, the history of religion, and film. “I feel 60% Tibetan, 20% Indian, and 20% American. My country will be where I make my living. Tibetans are like the Jews chased out of their countries by Hitler.”

More:

Previously in AW: At exile meeting, Tibetans debate independence

At exile meeting, Tibetans debate independence

Published
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on November 22, 2008
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Long associated with the Dalai Lama and his “middle way,” the exile movement has reached a crossroads. Edward Wong from Dharamsala, India, in the New York Times:

In Dharamsala, India, Tibetans in exile waited last Saturday to welcome the Dalai Lama. Tibetans are discussing whether to advocate separatism from China. AP/NYT

In Dharamsala, India, Tibetans in exile waited last Saturday to welcome the Dalai Lama. AP/NYT

In this Himalayan hill town, where Tibetan prayer flags flutter and red-robed monks study Buddha’s call for forbearance, talk is brewing of kicking off the world’s next separatist movement.

Posters around town advertise the word “rangzen” – Tibetan for “independence.” Not in years has it been heard so much in the streets here, falling from the lips of members of the Tibetan diaspora whose frustration runs as deep as the mountain ravines of their homeland. Decades of dialogue with the Chinese government, they say, have failed.

“Support for independence will definitely increase,” Dhondup Dorjee, 30, said, as he took a break from a heated discussion with fellow exiles to grab lunch in the cafeteria of the Tibetan hospital. “What are the pressures we can put on the Chinese? The pressures will come in any form.”

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Is the dream of independence for Tibet now a lost cause?

Published
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on October 27, 2008
in Faith and Tibet
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[Updated with the Dalai Lama's response: see link below]

Andrew Buncombe in The Independent:

Why are we asking this now?

Over the weekend, his Holiness the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet’s Buddhists and the man who has been at the centre of efforts to highlight the Tibetan cause for decades, explained that he “had given up” his struggle. “I have been sincerely pursuing the middle-way approach in dealing with China for a long time now, but there hasn’t been any positive response from the Chinese side,” the 73-year-old told an audience at Dharamsala, the Indian Himalayan town that is the headquarters of the so-called Tibetan government-in-exile. “As far as I’m concerned, I have given up.”

Does that mean the Dalai Lama is retiring?

Karma Choephel, the speaker of the parliament in-exile, told reporters that the Dalai Lama used to say that he was semi-retired and that now he believed he was was almost completely retired. However, a senior aide to the Nobel laureate last night dismissed speculation that he would start taking a back seat in Tibet’s affairs. “Because of the lack of response from the Chinese we have to be realistic. There is no hope,” said Tenzin Taklha. “His holiness does not want to become a hindrance to the Tibetan issue, and therefore has sent a letter to the parliament regarding what options he has.”

More:

An update from His Holiness on Andrew Buncombe’s blog Asian (con)Fusion:

“His Holiness the Dalai Lama said that Tibetans have long been pursuing a path to find a solution to the issue of Tibet that would be mutually acceptable to Tibetans and Chinese. This has received widespread appreciation from the international community, several governments included. More importantly, it has gained the support of many Chinese intellectuals. More:

It’s bad karma: Sharon Stone links quake to China’s treatment of Tibet

Published
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on May 28, 2008
in Tibet
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“I am not happy about the way the Chinese were treating the Tibetans,” says Sharon Stone on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival. Watch the video on YouTube.

A new torch controversy: the battle for Everest

Published
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on May 2, 2008
in Tibet
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As the Olympic flame makes its way to the top of the world’s highest mountain, China’s repressive tactics have sparked fresh criticism. Andrew Buncombe in The Independent, UK:

William Holland was only thinking of the photograph. When he got to the top of Everest he planned to take the rolled-up flag saying “Free Tibet” from his rucksack, pose for posterity with the banner as a backdrop and then roll it away again before starting back down. He was not looking to make a scene.

But that is exactly what transpired. Someone in the group he was climbing with informed the Nepalese authorities of Mr Holland’s flag. When he reached Everest Base Camp he was ordered from the mountain and told to go straight to Kathmandu. From there he was deported from Nepal with an order not to return for two years.

The 26-year-old US climber’s treatment at the hands of the Nepalese authorities is just one indication of how the world’s highest mountain has in recent days become engulfed by the politics and controversy surrounding China and its relationship with Tibet.

More:

Everest Olympic torch diary – 5

BBC’s Jonah Fisher joins the Olympic torch for the high point of its trip – on Mount Everest. In the fifth of his diary instalments, he takes a tour of Everest base camp.

On Wednesday we had a treat. After lengthy negotiations with the border police our minders secured us permission to visit Everest base camp 5km from our media village.

With strict instructions not to film the numerous military trucks on the way, we were driven to the tented camp that forms the command centre for both the climbing team as well as the official Chinese media.

Click here for more and for his previous instalments:

Everest Olympic torch diary

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As the Olympic torch makes its way around the world before arriving in Beijing for the games in August, the BBC’s Jonah Fisher joins it for the high point of its trip – on Mount Everest. In the third of his diary instalments, he arrives at Mount Everest national park.

The first part of our high speed – even more highly managed – tour of Tibet is nearing its end. Everest is at last in sight, and we should reach it sometime on Monday.

The smiles on the faces of the Beijing Olympic Committee representatives say it all.

Despite the best efforts of us international journalists to find someone to express a slightly pro-Tibetan thought, we have not found anybody.

Having been blocked from going to the capital Lhasa, we have been forced into a strict routine of brisk starts in the morning followed by a long day of driving, with pauses for “attractions” en route.

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Click here for the second instalment of the diary:

A flashpoint called Tibet

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What India is passing off as a moderate China policy is actually aberrant behaviour, writes Bharat Karnad, professor at the Centre for Policy Research, in Mint.

The barbed wire barricade outside the Chinese embassy ought to become a permanent fixture of New Delhi’s landscape. It will remind the Indian people and their government about what it is that, at the core, separates India from China: freedom.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, however, has prostrated himself in a kow-tow to the zhung guo (“the central kingdom”) – calling China India’s “greatest neighbour”, deliberately leaving Tawang out of his official visit to Arunachal Pradesh and, as if to confirm this country’s tributary status, preventing anti-China protests in Arunachal Pradesh, hounding and gagging the poor Tibetan community in exile and, after declaring India would not tolerate Chinese minders, allowing Chinese cops to trot alongside the Olympics torch carriers and the contingent of army commandos for the short stretch the “flame” of fair play was exposed to the Indian “public”.

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My life in forbidden Lhasa

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Austrian soldier Heinrich Harrer escaped from a British POW camp in India in World War II and ended up as the young Dalai Lama’s tutor in Tibet. His story was published in the July 1955 edition of National Geographic. The magazine has republished the story in its May special issue on China.

The rocky trail led into the broad valley of the Kyi River. Exhausted, our shoes in tatters and our feet bleeding and blistered, we rounded a little hill. Before us lay the Potala, winter palace of Tibet’s Dalai Lama, its golden roofs ablaze in the January sun.

Lhasa was only eight miles away!

I felt a sudden compulsion to sink to my knees and offer a prayer of thanksgiving, even as did the Buddhist pilgrims who were our companions. It seemed impossible that we had reached safety, that our agony of cold and hunger and danger lay behind us. We had walked more than 1,500 miles across the most forbidding terrain in the world and had climbed 62 mountain passes, some as high as 20,000 feet.

It is just as well, I have since felt, that no man can foretell the future. What would Peter Aufschnaiter and I have thought, when we left our native Austria in 1939 as members of the German Nanga Parbat Expedition, had we known we faced long imprisonment and a desperate escape into Tibet, where we were to roam fabled Lhasa with a color camera?

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China launches ‘education drive’ in Lhasa

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In a bid to reinforce control in Lhasa, Chinese officials have launched an education drive, reports Chris Buckley for Reuters

China’s Communist Party has launched a political education drive in Tibet’s restive capital, Lhasa, vowing a long campaign to attack pro-independence sentiment and support for the Dalai Lama.

China has blamed recent unrest in Tibetan areas on a “clique” of the Dalai’s followers pressing for independence and seeking to upset Beijing’s preparations for the August Olympics. Over a month has passed since monk-led protests against government control gave way to deadly anti-Chinese rioting in Lhasa on March 14, but security forces have wrestled with continued unrest there and across other Tibetan areas. 

In a bid to reinforce control in Lhasa, Party authorities have launched an education drive focused on officials and Party members, the official Tibet Daily reported on Monday.

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Tibet’s new warriors

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A new generation of Tibetan leaders is overturning every stereotpye, writes Shoma Chaudhury in Tehelka:

Jantar Mantar in Delhi – unique site of struggle, open air podium for the distressed, a kind of safety valve for India’s myriad pressure cookers – is awash with colour. Five thousand Tibetans from across the country are camping on the street. Every few minutes, a new procession is launched, renting the air with slogans in Hindi and English and Tibetan. Occasionally, the mood is deepened by sonorous chants. The fervour is unmistakable; it seeks release. Beneath the surface, deeper currents are gathering.

For five decades — ever since his historic flight from his homeland in 1959 — only one face has symbolised the Tibetan community for the world: the kindly, almost childlike face of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, resolutely speaking of non-violence and absolute compassion. It is a face that has evoked global warmth and admiration, a face that has kept the Tibetan issue kindling on the international stage, a face that has commanded absolute reverence from its own people. For five decades, His Holiness has been the unchallenged star of his people: he has won the Nobel Prize for Peace, he has enlisted glamorous ambassadors, he has kept his scattered tribe together with a wise sense of tradition. But curiously, at the same time, he has leached the Tibetan predicament from hope of any resolution. Unlike the canny apostle of non-violence he is commonly compared to, he has failed to convert his ideal of nonviolence into effective political action.

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For an interview with Tenzin Tsundue click here

A city under siege

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AW has the news from New Delhi:

Nobody knew what time the event would begin, or even how many would be taking part in it. Barring some 500 ‘dignatories’ invited for the event and hordes of schoolchildren pressganged into service, nobody seemed to know what the hell was going on as the Capital of India turned into a virtual fortress in order to protect the Olympic Torch here on its latest leg of its troubled world tour.

Some 15,000 policemen and commandoes have been pressed into service to protect the flame on its brief 2.3 km route from Rajpath to Rashtrapati Bhavan. Meanwhile, Tibetan protestors held an alternative torch run that started from Raj Ghat, the memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, dubbing their torch the ‘people’s torch’. Those who participated and spoke included novelist and thinker Arundhati Roy and senior politician George Fernandes. At least 50 protestors were detained.

The official torch reportedly resulted in a spate of traffic jams as the entire route was sealed off and all roads and Metro stations in the area were shut down. The relay finally started shortly after 4 pm, and was shown live on television as startled viewers saw runners — many of them clearly out of shape, some waving feebly – jog along for some 10-12 steps (given the shortness of the route), surrounded by officials and a ring of securitymen.

Earlier in the day, Hindustan Times had a report that claimed that the reason why actors Aamir Khan and Saif Ali Khan had agreed to participate in the run was because of commercial consideration to the brands, Coca-Cola and Lenovo, that they respectively endorse.

[Pic: BBC News]

Undercover in Tibet

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In the news for his biography of V.S. Naipaul, Patrick French, who is also the author of Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land, writes for The Daily Mail on his personal experience of travelling through Tibet to research his book

The Chinese men in blue tracksuits were horribly familiar. Although they were dressed like athletes, their robotic movements, blank faces, swivel eyes and rough, menacing style reminded me of the secret policemen I had to avoid when I was in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, some years ago.

Last Sunday, they surrounded Konnie Huq as she ran with the Olympic flame through the streets of London, ordering her to hold the torch higher and shoving protesters and British policemen out of the way.

Lord Coe, the London Olympics chief, was overheard describing the so-called “torch attendants” as “thugs”.

He said: “They tried to push me out of the way three times. They are horrible.”

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[Pic: Konnie Huq is surrounded by 'thugs' as she carries the Olympic Torch in London last week]

Tibetan Buddhism’s next leader?

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In the IHT, former New York Times Asia correspondent and author of So Close to Heaven, Barbara Crossette profiles the Karmapa, the man who could succeed the Dalai Lama, on the eve of his first trip to the United States

The recent outburst of Tibetan rage against the Chinese government not only demonstrated once again the fear and anger among Himalayan Buddhists living under the cultural insensitivity of Beijing, it also illuminated the crucial role of the Dalai Lama, navigating skillfully between restive Tibetan exiles and an Indian government under Chinese pressures to stifle their protests. What will happen when he is gone?

The West is about to get its first glimpse of that possible future.

In mid-May, a serious young man of 22 who is revered as the 17th Karmapa – now the second-most-important figure in Tibetan Buddhism – will make his first visit to the United States. The trip comes eight years after his dramatic flight to India from a monastery near Lhasa at the end of 1999, when he was just 14 years old. This is the first time that a skittish India has allowed him permission to travel abroad. His flight from Tibet was a considerable embarrassment to China.

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Searching for the Dalai Lama

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In The New York Times, Holly Morris, the author of “Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine,” reviews “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,” by Pico Iyer.

Do you get the impression that the Dalai Lama is not exactly the brightest bulb in the room?” a journalist asked Pico Iyer after both men left a speaking event by His Holiness. We know what he’s getting at. At a certain angle, the chirpy aphorisms, the generous stream of book forewords, the Hollywood entourage, all conspire to cast a hue of superficiality that few global pop icons escape.

In that light, it is possible to forget that the Dalai Lama is, in fact, a titan: a head of state, a doctor of metaphysics, a prolific author, a hyperrealist, a newshound, a godhead to the Tibetan people and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize – a man who embodies a “simplicity that lies not before complexity but on the far side of it.”

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Turning point for Tibet

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President Hu Jintao has an opportunity to transform China’s policy on Tibet, says Lodi Gyaltsen Gyari, the Dalai Lama’s chief representative in talks with Beijing, in International Herald Tribune:

In the last few weeks, we have witnessed an uprising against the Chinese authorities’ repressive policies on the Tibetan plateau the likes of which we have not seen in a generation. Beijing has responded with a crackdown on a scale never seen before in Tibet, all just months before the Olympics are to open in Beijing.

As the representative of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in talks with the Chinese leadership since 2002, I have been deeply fearful that such events would come to pass. But none of us imagined the scale of the protests, given China’s tight control in Tibet.

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Personal journey: Caught between a crackdown and a Tibetan welcome

One writer’s peaceful experience in Western Sichuan during the riots left him yearning to return. Michael Benanav in The New York Times:

The ride in the Chinese minivan had taken 11 hours. After enduring multiple delays, the crossing of a treacherous 16,000-foot mountain pass and a seatmate who chain-smoked the entire way, casually flicking the ashes into his lap, I had arrived in Dege. I was in the culturally Tibetan area of western Sichuan Province, practically on the border of the Tibetan Autonomous Region. I had come to Dege to visit the sacred Bakong monastery, which is both the world’s largest library of ancient Tibetan Buddhist texts and a printing house where monks hand-ink thousands of pieces of religious paraphernalia every day.

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