RIVER ROAD Two brothers set off on the road, the road home, leaving behind the school and its insistent rote learning of modernity. The road is the river bed, bereft of water and vegetation, a flat sandy bed along which these young boys, neither older than 12, wander with their camels. They are born cameleers, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
LAUNCH OF Wasted Lives: China’s campaign to end Tibetan nomadic PRO-PASTORALIST REPORT ON TIBETAN NOMADS UNDER CHINA’S POLICY OF CLOSING PASTURELANDS UPRIVER FROM INDIA http://youtu.be/mBOsT6ss1pU New voices out of Tibet and China, converging on a new understanding of why nomadic pastoralism is what suits the Tibetan Plateau best, feature in a new report, launched globally […]
Tibet, Congo or Papua New Guinea When, in 2012, I wrote a book about mining in Tibet, it seemed China’s appetite for minerals was insatiable, having survived the great global recession of 2009 onwards with hardly a blip in demand. By then the global commodity boom had been rolling on nonstop for a decade and […]
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE TIBETAN MASTIFF; THE FALL AND RISE OF THE WOLF AS TOTEM OF THE CHINA DREAM The mastiff guard dogs of the Tibetan pastoralists preceded their owners into modernity. Early this century China discovered an utterly modern fashion for Tibetan mastiffs, traditionally used to guard the black yak hair tents, […]
XI JINPING AND THE ECONOMY OF TIBET It is 18 months since my book on mining in Tibet came out, over two years since I finished writing. What a lot has changed, in directions I did not foresee. Those changes mean a lot for the future of Tibet. While writing Spoiling Tibet: China and […]
A CHARMING NEW DOCO Tibetans in exile, and their supporters, chronically politicise everything they learn about what is happening inside Tibet; maybe they forget there are other lenses. However, there are other ways of approaching reality, and in today’s China those approaches can occasionally come from Chinese film-makers taking a fresh look at situations that […]
from a small book of essays, poetry and art on the Soil and the Earth, edited by Vandana Shiva, celebrating the International Year of Soils, 2015 ********************** That the soils of the Tibetan Plateau exist at all is remarkable. This vast island in the sky is, in planetary history, so new, so high and still […]