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 […]
CHINA’S FIVE-YEAR MASTER PLAN TO TRANSFORM TIBET 2026-2030 1: DATA POINT LHASA China’s ambitious plans for a makeover of Tibet with Chinese characteristics are stunning in their comprehensiveness. In February 2026 China released its 15th Five Year Plan (FYP) for central Tibet, 45 pages long i n the original Chinese, by far the most detailed […]
CHINA’S FIVE-YEAR MASTER PLAN TO TRANSFORM TIBET 2026-2030 part 2: ACCELERATING TIBET MEAT MACHINE Efficiency and productivity are at the heart of China’s Five Year Plan to accelerate the depopulation of rural Tibet, partly to make way for the solar arrays, hilltop wind turbines, hydro dams and pumped hydro in the valleys, on a scale […]
Inventing a low-altitude economy in high-altitude Tibet The genius of capitalism goes beyond endless invention of new products and new markets. China’s state capitalism, especially its civil-military fusion campaign 军工协会 , is capable of inventing entirely new asset classes, based on inventing new human needs. Who knew that China is in need of military drones designed […]
Tibetans need more friends, new friends. Environmentalists might seem unlikely right now as friends of Tibet. Isn’t China making the most of its dominance of the tech of green energy, including solar, wind turbines, hydro dams and power grids? Isn’t Tibet China’s showroom for how fast and completely it can transition out of old […]
CAMPAIGNING TO OVERWHELM TIBET AND BEDAZZLE THE WORLD China’s plan to capture the greatest rivers of Tibet is the direct outcome of the US/China breakup. The Yarlung Tsangpo is being turned into an extraction enclave because China plans to use far more electricity, in order to outpace the US. A megaproject that for decades languished, […]
LOCKED China’s Five-Year Plan that runs from 2026 to 2030 locks Tibet into China as never before. In Lhasa, in August 2025, Xi Jinping named the two biggest infrastructure projects of the coming Five-Year Plan that arterially bind Tibet to China: “We must advance the construction of major projects such as the Yarlung Tsangpo hydropower […]
INSPECTING, CORRECTING, DISCIPLINING, ERASING Core leader Xi Jinping was in Lhasa for just one August day, but he brought with him a top-level delegation, who then fanned out to each part of central Tibet, issuing clear instructions as to what must be followed. So we follow their progress through Shigatse, Lhoka, Nyingtri, Chamdo, Nagchu and […]