CHINA’S “LORD OF THE RINGS”, FILMED IN TIBET, FLOPS Alibaba, itself a corporation named after a fabled faraway, sank $100 million in the making of Asura, which has just crashed at the China box office. Billed as China’s Lord of the Rings, this fantasy epic, filmed partly in Amdo but mostly on computer, was meant […]
SHOWDOWN AT THE TARIFF CORRAL This should be set to music, a dirge for all the stuff the modern world was made of, that all went over to the world’s factory in China, and out of view, coming back to our shores in aisle 12 of the superstore, more and more stuff, cheap Chinese stuff […]
BLOG 1 OF 3 ON CHINA’S RENEWED PLANS FOR HYDRODAMS AND POWER GRIDS SPANNING TIBET AUTONOMOUS REGION As Tibet urbanises, electricity demand now greatly outstrips supply, especially in the winter and spring seasons of low water flow and little hydropower generation, when electricity is most needed. In rural Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) there are still […]
BLOG 2 OF 3 ON CHINA’S RENEWED PLANS FOR HYDRODAMS AND POWER GRIDS SPANNING TIBET AUTONOMOUS REGION China pioneered technologies for transmitting electricity at ultra-high voltages vast distances, using direct current, making it possible to dream big and plan big, to envisage criss-crossing the whole of China, connecting the remote Tibetan highlands, rich in hydropower […]
BLOG 3 OF 3 ON CHINA’S RENEWED PLANS FOR HYDRODAMS AND POWER GRIDS SPANNING TIBET AUTONOMOUS REGION In the first years of this century electricity demand in China grew annually by as much as 15 per cent. A world record. No matter how many coal-fired, nuclear and later, gas-fired power stations were built, it was […]
I owe you an explanation. A year ago, I posted a blog announcing I was going to die soon. A year later the blogs still roll out, and so do I. The tumours are still there, though shrunk, in the lungs and elsewhere, and they will probably consume me. But no-one knows when. A year […]
Blog two of four on splitting the land of Tibet from the Tibetans as a people If all human activity in Tibet is harmful to biodiversity and water supply, nature and culture have been fully divorced, and exist only as antagonists. The possibility of humans living in nature, with nature, in sustainability, is swept […]
Blog three of four on splitting the land of Tibet from the Tibetans as a people. Tibet has become human, all too human, and that is a problem. The Human Footprint Score or Human Influence Intensity (HFS or HII) has increased considerably in Tibet in recent decades, which, China’s scientists tell us, is deeply problematic. […]
Blog four of four on splitting the land of Tibet from the Tibetans as a people In several Rukor blogs, we have explored the nationalisation of the Tibetan Plateau by a party-state keen to inscribe its ownership, active management and its sovereignty over vast lands it has never had much use for, or understanding […]
Blog one of four on splitting the land of Tibet from the Tibetans as a people China’s frequently repeated Marxist dialectic proposition, that there is a contradiction between grass and animals simply means what is obvious: the more grass the animals graze, the less grass is left, until the next growing season; conversely, the fewer […]