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 […]
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 […]
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 […]