NATIONAL PARKS & SKIING THE EMPEROR’S HUNTING GROUND When China was conquered by the Mongols, areas north of the Great Wall, close to Mongolia, were declared imperial hunting grounds, where the new emperors of China could exercise their Mongolian passions for open space, especially hunting. While, in order to rule, the ruling Mongols adopted many […]
ETHNIC MINORITY IDENTITY IN NEW ERA CHINA Blog one of two on China’s new ideology The 19th Chinese Communist Party Congress, in October 2017, not only anointed Xi Jinping as dear supreme leader, his Thought is now enshrined as the ideology governing China for the foreseeable future, and well beyond. What did this decisive […]
CHINA’S NEW GRAND NARRATIVE Blog #2 of 2 on China’s new ideology for a new era Unfashionably, we need to take ideology seriously. These days, we seldom consider ideology, beyond sketching a thumbnail of the belief system of the enemy, only to prove how crazy bad Trumpism, or Islamic fundamentalism are, so we […]
River diversion, on a grander scale than ever The possibility of extracting water from Tibet on a truly staggering scale, to make China’s deserts bloom, is a daft fantasy that never goes away. Like a rolang (Tibetan for zombie) it comes back from the dead, no matter how often it is dismissed, for its impracticality, […]
THE CHINA DREAM OF PERFECT SURVEILLANCE AND CORRECTION OF ALL CITIZEN BEHAVIOUR BLOG 1 OF 4 ON CHINA’S NEW REGIME OF REWARD AND PUNISHMENT As a rapidly rich China seeks perfection, old Confucian norms slide quietly into Communist Party goals and programs of mass behavioural compliance. What could be more Confucian than the massive effort […]
ALIBABA & CRONY CAPITALISM: CONFLATING STATE AND CORPORATE POWER BLOG 2 OF 4 ON CHINA’S NEW REGIME OF REWARD AND PUNISHMENT In China, big data already looms large. Jack Ma’s Alibaba does not face foreign competition, but he is not alone in the Chinese market. He knows, like all […]
LEARN FROM TIBET BLOG 3 OF 4 ON CHINA’S NEW REGIME OF REWARD AND PUNISHMENT IN TIBET As China has become richer, punishment and repression are no longer the only options for taming Tibet. The other end of the scale –rewards- are now within the budgetary capacity of local governments in Tibetan areas, long subsidised […]
BLOG 4 OF 4 ON CHINA’S NEW SURVEILLANCE STATE CLASSIFYING TIBETANS AS CRIMINAL TRIBES GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT China is far from being a country of laws, a rules-based order, despite the insistent propaganda issued by China’s tutelary state. Many analysts argue that in reality China remains quite anarchic, a chaotic jumble of conflicting loyalties […]
UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee has dutifully rubber-stamped China’s application to declare a further 60,000 sq. kms of the Tibetan Plateau to be branded with World Heritage status. Politics has trumped facts on the ground, inconvenient facts such as China’s removal of most of the Tibetan nomad guardians of the Koko Shili landscape to remote concrete […]
Well, maybe not. But I do want to introduce myself, the author of all the www.rukor.org blogs, if only to say hello and goodbye. When I started this blog a few years ago, it seemed to me that debate on Tibet was restricted to a narrow range of essential issues: civil and political rights, religious […]