Lhasa
Lhasa used to be "the forbidden city" but now it's swamped by Chinese architecture (almost as bad as our own-- huge bland dull and sometimes tacky). The old Tibetan section, the Bharkot, is filled in the morning by pilgrims doing koras (circumambulations) and praying. A little girl walks up to me and says "Hi! Fuck you! Money!" Somebody's obviously had some fun at her expense. Steamed pork dumplings in sweet and sour sauce cost 5 cents and I pig out. Inside the Jhokang (the spiritual center of Tibetan Buddhism) are a few hundred Chinese tourists, out to enjoy what their government forgot to destroy, and even a few monks.
You have to give the CHinese some credit. They have wide clean roads, drivers who follow traffic laws, excellent cheap Chinese food, little obvious poverty and a sense of social propriety totally missing from Nepal or (way worse) India. People do not come up to you here, yelling, or making obscene gestures, or dragging you into their shop, or asking bizarre questions about God, aliens or your salary.
There are beggars here, and they are Tibetan, not Chinese. A road sign points to a new 'burb-- "Upper Class Residences This Way." Tibetans are the Blacks of China. Their language is not taught in school or used by the government; cultural activities are severely restricted (e.g. monasteries with room for 3000 monks are allowed 700), and they are the bottom fo the social ladder in their own country. Whatever happened to the People's Republic of Equality?
Macke and I have talked about this and I've decided that-- as awful as the Chinese are with regards to h*man r*ights, the environment, etc, in the long run, the Tibetans will survive. The Chinese are building a society that as of the worst aspects of Western societies: massive reliance on fossil fuels, total devaluation of the environment, materialism, everything resting on technology. The Tibetans, meanwhile, are built for surviving at high altitude. They eat locally available foods (potatos, yak products, greens), use locally sustainable "power" (water, yak, goat etc) and their religion as deeply anti-materialistic.
When push comes to shove-- as it is starting to in the world of energy-- Tibet will be low priority for the Chinese. It is thousands of kilometers form the edge of Chinese civilisation (Chengdu is 2200 km away!) and Tibet's main contribution has been forests, which the CHinese have basically destroyed, and now mining. Mining is energy intensive and therefore more and more expensive. In the long run, the CHinese in Tibet will have problems dealing with higher living costs and lower government subsidies, whiel the Tibetans with their yaks and simple plots of land will be OK. Until then, though, life is rough for the Tibetans.
You have to give the CHinese some credit. They have wide clean roads, drivers who follow traffic laws, excellent cheap Chinese food, little obvious poverty and a sense of social propriety totally missing from Nepal or (way worse) India. People do not come up to you here, yelling, or making obscene gestures, or dragging you into their shop, or asking bizarre questions about God, aliens or your salary.
There are beggars here, and they are Tibetan, not Chinese. A road sign points to a new 'burb-- "Upper Class Residences This Way." Tibetans are the Blacks of China. Their language is not taught in school or used by the government; cultural activities are severely restricted (e.g. monasteries with room for 3000 monks are allowed 700), and they are the bottom fo the social ladder in their own country. Whatever happened to the People's Republic of Equality?
Macke and I have talked about this and I've decided that-- as awful as the Chinese are with regards to h*man r*ights, the environment, etc, in the long run, the Tibetans will survive. The Chinese are building a society that as of the worst aspects of Western societies: massive reliance on fossil fuels, total devaluation of the environment, materialism, everything resting on technology. The Tibetans, meanwhile, are built for surviving at high altitude. They eat locally available foods (potatos, yak products, greens), use locally sustainable "power" (water, yak, goat etc) and their religion as deeply anti-materialistic.
When push comes to shove-- as it is starting to in the world of energy-- Tibet will be low priority for the Chinese. It is thousands of kilometers form the edge of Chinese civilisation (Chengdu is 2200 km away!) and Tibet's main contribution has been forests, which the CHinese have basically destroyed, and now mining. Mining is energy intensive and therefore more and more expensive. In the long run, the CHinese in Tibet will have problems dealing with higher living costs and lower government subsidies, whiel the Tibetans with their yaks and simple plots of land will be OK. Until then, though, life is rough for the Tibetans.
posted by Butch at 9:36 AM
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