CHINA’S HOME ON THE RANGE 40 enchanting, addictive, dramatic episodes set in remote Tibetan lands have been a 2026 big hit on TV in China. Tree of Life/Born to be Alive -both titles are used in English- has it all -a feisty heroine, violence, justice, adorable wildlife, stoic Tibetans, a big Han Chinese cast including […]
TIBETAN CHIMERA China chose Shenzhen as the location for hosting the 17 and 18 November APEC 2026 meeting, to showcase Shenzhen as the leading edge of entrepreneurial can-do, with statist Chinese characteristics. At APEC 2026 in Shenzhen brings Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and many other leaders in China’s sphere together. The […]
IATS 17th Seminar 2026 presentation delivered 25 August 2026 Gabriel Lafitte, https://www.rukor.org , with research documentation by Shede Dawa, Tibet Watch [Personal note: This presentation was proposed and accepted into IATS, but I did not proceed with registration, out of concern that the host nation might construe the topic as political, to IATS’ detriment. IATS […]
REALITY: TIBETAN TAKES This essay is about three civilisations: China, USA and Tibet. In these degenerate times Chinese and American leaders loudly proclaim their civilisational superiority, both racing to dominate the future, with rapidly evolving artificial intelligence at the forefront of their accelerationist campaigns. Tibet seldom calls itself a civilisation, even though it is deeply […]
Women are few in the narratives of the heroic men of no-man’s land. Yet the main narrators, over several decades, are women, who deeply identify with the pregnant chiru dashing to their birthing grounds, to protect weak and wobbly newborns from prowling wolves. That is the heart of what made an obscure animal, not seen […]
ENTREPRENEURIAL TIBETANS NEGOTIATING MODERNITY The elevation of Sonam Dargye as a saintly hero of red gene ecological civilisation construction has largely scrubbed his backstory, opting instead for a memorial statue predestining him for greatness, in Heroes Culture Square 英雄文化广场 in remote Drito. Despite this oversimplification, we fortunately have storyteller Liu Jianqiang on Sonam […]
THE NINETIES IN CHINA, SO DIFFERENT TO TODAY The decade of the 1990s, immediately after the Tiananmen massacre, seemed to be a decade of imposed conformity once the party-state, June 4 1989, brutally reminded everyone that power still comes from the barrel of a gun. The “culture fever” decade of the 1980s, with its intense […]
I got it wrong. I saw no sign China was going ahead with its Yarlung Tsangpo mega hydro build until too late. Turns out I was looking in all the wrong places for signs: China’s many hydropower research journals, official decrees, scientific expedition reports, engineering journals on ingenious ways of mitigating the innumerable hazards of […]
SPEEDING SINICIZATION OF CENTRAL TIBET: PART ONE Lhasa has launched a construction blitz, a classic campaign-style mobilization 运动式治理 all hands on deck to accelerate Tibet’s trajectory into modernity with Chinese characteristics. At Lhasa’s new giant data crunching centre, Lhasa’s Chinese mayor Wang Qiang told lined up cadres, March 2026, their campaign is “treating […]
RECTIFY CRUMBLING RED TOURISM & INERT CADRE FORMALISM PART 2 OF SPEEDING SINICIZATION OF CENTRAL TIBET Nostalgic revival of the enthusiasms of the revolutionary years today sweeps across China. That includes Tibet, despite its paucity of sites signifying enthusiasm for revolution, communisation, famine and urgent campaigns to smash everything old. Although reviving red tourism […]