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 […]
Blog three in a series on Tibet in 2021 3/8 PROTECTING THE DRI CHU/YANGTZE Legislation to protect the biggest river in Tibet was passed into law by a session of the National People’s Congress in the last days of 2020 and takes effect March 1, 2021. The big question is whether it will protect the […]
Blog four in a series on Tibet in 2021 4/8 HYDROPOWER INDUSTRY REGAINS ITS MOJO China is far from done with dam building, on all the major rivers of Asia that rise in Tibet. This is more than a balancing of supply and demand; the dam plans were meant to knit Tibet into the fabric […]
Blog five in a series on Tibet in 2021 5/8 CLIMATE CHANGE & BIODIVERSITY 2021 is set to be a big year for climate and environment, with key global conferences held over from 2020. One such conference is to be held in China 17 to 30 May 2021 in Kunming, with side trips for delegates […]
Blog six in a series on Tibet in 2021 6/8 14TH FIVE YEAR PLAN plus GOALS FOR 2035 Seeing five years ahead, immediately after a global pandemic, might seem ambitious, but China’s leaders are more ambitious than that, announcing (at the CCP Fifth Plenum in October 2020) goals for 2035. Of necessity these goals are […]
Blog seven in a series on Tibet in 2021 7/8 CENSUS How many Tibetans are there? Tibetans in exile around the world number at most 150,000, perhaps less if we base it on the enrolment of at most 80,000 exiles registered to vote in recent exile parliamentary elections. But in Tibet, how many? For decades […]
Blog eight in a series on Tibet in 2021 8/8 PUTTING THESE TRENDS TOGETHER: Two divergent trends for 2021 are evident, if one looks at Tibet from Beijing, not only through the eyes of the CCP but of the established elite more broadly, including the security state, and liberal academics who are increasingly discovering much […]
MISINFORMATION OR DISINFORMATION? Within hours of a Global Times report that China is now committed to a massive hydro dam building project on the Yarlung Tsangpo/Brahmaputra, the story was picked up and amplified by media across Asia, from India to Hong Kong, The Hindu to South China Morning Post. Yet the Global Times 29 November […]