Blog one of three updating Achen Gangyab/Hoh Xil: problematic UNESCO World Heritage IN LOVE WITH ICONIC TIBETAN SPECIES Now that UNESCO has bestowed its prestigious World Heritage badging to a remote portion of the Tibetan Plateau, China is figuring out what to do with this jewel of alpine desert, even though very few lowland Han […]
TIBET’S UNIQUE WILDLIFE ENRICHES CHINA’S UNIQUENESS Blog two of three updating Achen Gangyab/Hoh Xil: problematic UNESCO World Heritage China embraced science a century ago, as the way out of China’s weakness and vulnerability. Now China is strong, and more convinced than ever that science is the key. All aspects of life must have “Chinese characteristics”, […]
ENTER HOX IL THROUGH THE EXPRESSWAY, EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP Blog three of three updating Achen Gangyab/Hoh Xil: problematic UNESCO World Heritage As the conservation biologists on the ground in Hoh Xil well know, the most pressing managerial decisions are to do with the new human presence, the Han presence, in the form of […]
PROTECTING THE YANGTZE, FROM TIBET TO SHANGHAI What connects Tibet and China most immediately, most physically, is water, the flow of water from the glaciers and great meandering pastoral rivers of Tibet, which eventually reach lowland China, specifically the Ma Chu or Yellow River and the Dri Chu or Yangtze. Tibetans, proud to be the […]
In today’s new era China, every advance has to be called a system, ideally a system born of “top-level design.” Depopulating rural Tibet, to make way for virgin grassland wilderness attractive to Han tourism, is now on such a scale that a new system for mass manufacturing housing for ex-nomads is needed. Officially, this is […]
A spectre is haunting Tibet (as Marx used to say), a spectre of itself. A Tibet double, invented by clever Chinese agricultural economists, now walks alongside actual Tibet, every step of the way. It is officially known as Synthetic Control Tibet. This ghost, if you look closely, is actually made up of Xinjiang, Shaanxi and […]
Whatever becomes a scientific object becomes a problem, which in turn requires management, human intervention. No thing can be left as is, because that is risky. If it can be measured, it can be managed, as they say in business schools worldwide. China, or rather the Chinese Communist Party, is obsessed with risk, in fact […]
SUSTAINABLE WILDLIFE, SUSTAINABLE TIBETAN LIVELIHOODS “The industrial powerhouse China and major energy exporters are doing almost nothing to limit carbon dioxide emissions.” That is how The Guardian sums up China’s inaction on climate change, summarising a 2018 report in a leading scientific journal warning against the likelihood of global warming spiralling out of control. The […]
As the Americans say, you can put lipstick on a pig, but ….. it’s still a pig. You can dress up a beguilingly humanoid robot in Tibetan gear, in a pink and yellow outfit, top her whirring machinery brain with a Tibetan braided hair wig, but she’s still, she tells us, the solution to human […]
Probably the best thing I did in my life was a simple idea, implemented with a typewriter and airmail envelope: to arrange for Gyalwa Rinpoche and Panchen Rinpoche to have in indepth, free, unmonitored conversation without other parties listening in. Since January 28, 2019 is the 30th anniversary of the passing of the tenth Panchen […]