Reports

06.01.08

Tibet Autonomous Region: Access Denied

Amnesty International
This report, written in the aftermath of the widespread Tibetan unrest in Tibet and Tibetan regions of China in the spring of 2008, addresses the Chinese government with immediate demands. In cracking down on unrest, the Chinese government sealed...

Thunder from Tibet

Robert Barnett from New York Review of Books
1.Every so often, between the time a book leaves its publisher and the time it reaches its readers, events occur that change the ways it can be read. Such is the case with Pico Iyer’s account of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibet...

Twelve Suggestions for Dealing with the Tibetan Situation, by Some Chinese Intellectuals

Wang Lixiong from New York Review of Books
At present the one-sided propaganda of the official Chinese media is having the effect of stirring up inter-ethnic animosity and aggravating an already tense situation. This is extremely detrimental to the long-term goal of safeguarding national...

The Quiet Heroes of Tibet

Pankaj Mishra from New York Review of Books
Earlier this year, shortly before boarding the new Chinese train from Beijing to Lhasa, I met Woeser, a Tibetan poet and essayist (she uses only one name). Unusual among Tibetans in China, who tend to avoid talking to foreigners, she spoke frankly...

Reports

06.01.07

No One Has the Liberty to Refuse: Tibetan Herders Forcibly Relocated in Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan, and the TAR

Sophie Richardson
Human Rights Watch
This report describes the effects on Tibetan herders of Chinese government policies of resettlement, land confiscation, and fencing. The author draws on interviews with about 150 Tibetans from the areas directly affected, including Gansu, Qinghai,...

Reports

02.01.07

China: Minority Exclusion, Marginalization and Rising Tensions

Human Rights in China
This report documents the serious impediments to the fulfillment of China's human rights obligations, in the areas of ethnic minority political participation, development, and preservation of cultural identity. Given the destabilizing levels of...

The Muslims of Tibet

Ian Buruma from New York Review of Books
Jamyang Norbu, writes in response to Ian Buruma’s article “Tibet Disenchanted” and Buruma replies.

Tibet Disenchanted

Ian Buruma from New York Review of Books
The first time I visited Tibet, in the fall of 1982, scars of the Maoist years were still plain to see: Buddhist wall paintings in temples and monasteries were scratched out or daubed with revolutionary slogans. Now that new winds are blowing, these...

Found Horizon

Ian Buruma from New York Review of Books
Traveling recently by bus from Shigatse to Lhasa, squeezed in between a heavily made-up bar hostess from Sichuan who was vomiting her breakfast out the window and a minor Tibetan official in a shiny brown suit who asked me about Manchester United...

A Lamas’ Who’s Who

Jonathan Mirsky from New York Review of Books
A one-l lama, he’s a priest. A two-l llama, he’s a beast. And I will bet a silk pajama, There isn’t any three-l lllama. —Ogden NashThe only Tibetan lama most Westerners knew of until recently was the fourteenth Dalai Lama, the genial Nobel Prize...

Room at the Top

Pico Iyer from New York Review of Books
The last time I was in the Himalayas, I met a young, highly Westernized Tibetan who, misled perhaps by my Indian features (born in England, I’ve never lived in the subcontinent), started talking to me about the strange ways of the exotic foreigners...

The Dalai Lama on Succession and on the CIA

Jonathan Mirsky from New York Review of Books
This year is the fortieth anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s flight from Tibet into Indian exile. He is sixty-five and some day even god-kings must die. But in the eyes of Tibetans he is also the fourteenth incarnation of the first Dalai Lama, who died...

Message from Shangri-La

Jonathan Mirsky from New York Review of Books
On October 6, 1939, on the outskirts of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, Hugh Richardson, who is now ninety-three and the West’s foremost living Tibetanist, saw the arrival in the city of the five-year-old boy who in early 1940 would be installed as the...

Lost Horizons

Pico Iyer from New York Review of Books
Tibet has always cast a dangerously strong spell upon visitors from abroad. When the first major European expedition marched on Lhasa in 1904, led by Colonel Younghusband at the behest of his old friend Lord Curzon, it ended up slaughtering in just...

Peking’s Choice

Jonathan Mirsky from New York Review of Books
The recent sentence to six years in prison of one of Tibet’s supreme monks shows Peking’s determination to dominate all events in the region and bring to an end a period of intense confusion within the Chinese Communist Party. For a brief time the...

Lost Horizons

Jonathan Mirsky from New York Review of Books
Except for the Chinese Communists, who call him names like “the wolf in monk’s robes,” or “the criminal Dalai,” virtually everyone speaks well of the Dalai Lama. The latest incarnation is the Fourteenth in a line that began in 1351 and exists...

How Aggressive is China?

John K. Fairbank from New York Review of Books
Peking’s “expansionism” has been the major justification for the United States’s containment policy. The sudden Chinese attack on Indian border forces in October, 1962, was denounced by India as unprovoked aggression, and it still contributes to the...