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 […]
EXCLUSIONS, EXEMPTIONS, SCIENTIFIC NARROWNESS, NATURE versus NOMADIC CULTURE Blog one of two on UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE IN TIBET: June 2017: One month before the UNESCO World Heritage Committee is due to decide the fate of a large portion of the Tibetan Plateau, documentation has been released giving us a detailed picture of what China […]
EXCLUSIONS, EXEMPTIONS, SCIENTIFIC NARROWNESS, NATURE versus NOMADIC CULTURE Blog two of two on UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE IN TIBET: What the World Heritage experts have failed to notice is that most of the Tibetans were removed well before the World Heritage nomination process began, specifically to the Chinese petrochemical industrial city of Gormo, hundreds of […]
NATURAL AND CULTURAL WORLD HERITAGE in KOKOSHILI/HOH XIL: TIBET’S EMPTY QUARTER OR HUMAN LANDSCAPE? Blog 1 of 2 on the decision facing UNESCO World Heritage Committee in the first week of July 2017 A remote, high, frigid land of lakes on the Tibetan Plateau is about to become news, thrust forward by China’s nomination of […]