CONFLICT MINERALS OF TIBET: #2 IN A SERIES: LITHIUM This series of blogs highlights the specific minerals extracted from the Tibetan Plateau, despite the protests of Tibetan communities determined to protect their livelihoods, sacred mountains and pilgrimage routes. This series also introduces, to Tibetan readers, the new conflict minerals regulatory regime which effectively bans […]
Category: Tibet
All things tibet
CONFLICT MINERALS OF TIBET: #1 IN A SERIES: GOLD This series of blogs highlights the specific minerals extracted from the Tibetan Plateau, despite the protests of Tibetan communities determined to protect their livelihoods, sacred mountains and pilgrimage routes. This series also introduces to Tibetan readers, the new conflict minerals regulatory regime which effectively bans the […]
CCP’s SIXTH WORK FORUM ON ALL TIBETAN AREAS The Chinese Communist Party’s Sixth Work Forum on Tibet has just wrapped. Like the previous high-level conclaves, it will take time to find out what its real significance is, such as new policies or strategies. These filter out slowly, often as neibu (insider-only) documents strictly for senior […]
THE TIBET CONNECTIONS Why were 700 tons of sodium cyanide sitting in a Tianjin warehouse waiting to explode? What was all that cyanide for? Tianjin is a very long way from Tibet, yet they are historically connected, and the cyanide, primarily used in gold extraction, adds another link. Tianjin is China’s entry point for imported […]
Categories
GEARING UP FOR PARIS
CHINA, GLOBAL WARMING, AND TIBET Climate change campaigners understandably yearn for good news, for signs that governments worldwide will get real, in Paris in December, about real action to stop baking the planet. After the utter failure of the last round, in Copenhagen in 2009, to produce substantial commitment to effective earth negotiations, there have […]
Categories
GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE IN TIBET
THE GREAT WATER MEADOW OF DZOGE Great rivers have their own logic, seldom suited to the categories and economies of the modern world. China’s great rivers, the Yellow and Yangtze, rise close to each other, in glaciers on the slopes of Tibetan mountain ranges, before making their way across the vast grasslands of the Tibetan […]
Categories
FESSING UP TO FAILURE
RESTARTING TIBETAN-CHINESE RELATIONS BY FACING REALITY Elite Han Chinese who open their eyes and minds to the realities of Tibet are few, as of yet. Their number is growing, partly because of those pioneers who not only see afresh but also write about it, alerting others to new ways of seeing. One such is […]
Categories
UBER COOL TIBETANS
A-LIST TIBETANS OF BEIJING China, at official level, lacks confidence, sees dangers and conspiracies everywhere, feels compelled to control who can say what. But now a new generation, who are confident and relaxed, are reaching out for new experiences, transcending the narrow fixations of the modern consuming self. They need to experience directly. They go […]
Categories
GRASSLAND CATHEDRALS OF TIBET
At the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in New Delhi, launching the new report on Tibetan nomads, http://www.tchrd.org/2015/05/wasted-lives-new-report-offer-fresh-insights-on-travails-of-tibetan-nomads/ Tibetan Centre for Human Rights & Democracy Director Tsering Tsomo said: “You cannot step onto the same pasture twice, as Heraclitus might have said if he’d been a nomad. I come from a nomad family in Tibet. My European […]
Categories
MELAMINE, MILK AND ASHES
NORTSE: Tibetan art amid creative destruction Wherever you go on the streets of Hong Kong, one product is thrust under your gaze everywhere, from almost every shopfront, whatever its main line of business: tins of powdered milk. China has discovered milk, and with it, acute anxiety as to its safety, especially infant formula. The combination […]