Blog two of three on realities of China’s labour market for displaced Tibetans China is urbanising fast, including in Tibet. From a distance, out on the open range, urban life can look tempting. Up close it’s a relentless hyper-competitive race. China’s big consumer brands are in constant need of heroes, nudgers, validators, influencers or, as […]
Blog threer of four on China’s labour market for displaced Tibetans Lying flat is one of several metaphors used by the disillusioned young Han. Inside rolling and going Buddhist are equally popular. If only more young Chinese, disillusioned by the dead-end bullshit jobs, could discover what most Tibetans grow up with, that practicing Buddhism does […]
Blog four of four on China’s labour market for displaced Tibetans TRAINING TIBETANS FOR BULLSHIT JOBS This is the labour market Tibetans are now expected, sometimes compelled, to enter. All aspects of this vast, highly competitive urban labour market marks Tibetans generically as uncompetitive, backward, lacking in entrepreneurialism, untrustworthy and not even fluent in the […]
Blog one of two on China’s latest plans for upscaling poverty alleviation in rural Tibet towards urbanisation, industrial agribusiness, commercialisation and accelerating the speed of life. Apparently, China is shunting Tibetans out of their pastures and into the global economy of factory workers, a planetary underclass of underpaid, insecure assembly line workers; so China tells […]
Development with Chinese characteristics Blog two of two on China’s latest plans for upscaling poverty alleviation in rural Tibet into urbanisation, industrial agribusiness, commercialisation and accelerated lives There are plenty of Tibetans who do embrace development and modernity with Chinese characteristics as not only inevitable but necessary. There seems to be no alternative, especially now, […]
Scary Thanks to Adrian Zenz diligently digging into Chinese websites, we discovered in September 2020, a massive Chinese program to retrain and reform Tibetans en masse to propel them into the urban factory workforce. Of all the sources Zenz delved into, the scariest was a story, with precise numbers, of the number of Tibetans in […]
RECUPERATING TIBET China alone classifies ecology as a heroic human struggle. Does any other nation see the messy, contradictory, complex and unpredictable processes of ecological recovery as “construction of ecological civilisation”? The magnificent mission the CCP has set itself, of arduously constructing the highland ecological civilisation in Tibet, to use its official terminology, is laughable. […]
British Raj imperial follies of a century ago, justified as empirical science, still haunt the Himalayas and divide Tibetans from each other.. The conceit of Henry McMahon was that he could draw a line right along the Himalayan glacial peaks that would demarcate British India from Tibet, which was further labelled as suzerain to China. […]
TIBET 2021: WHAT CAN WE EXPECT? Blog one in a series on Tibet in 2021 1/7 Fifteen years ago one of the favourite slogans of central planners was to declare Tibet would under go “leap-style development.”[1] At the time, it wasn’t clear what this meant. The phrase had disturbing echoes of the Great Leap Forward […]
Blog two in a series on Tibet in 2021 2/8 DARKNESS TO LIGHT In official thinking, civilisation, development and modernity all go in a straight line that travels from rural to urban, from darkness to light, from poverty to wealth, from illiteracy to reading Chinese, from proletarian precarity to factory work in the rapidly industrialising […]