Tibet
Tibet is a very odd place. On the one hand it doesn't feel "repressed" as such, wandering around it. At the temples and things there are plenty of Tibetan pilgrims with their prayer wheels and yak butter and so on, practising a freedom of religion they didn't have 20 years ago. But then, there are things like Nike shops in Lhasa, all these restaurants serving Chinese food - at best alongside Tibetan food, sometimes exclusively. In the Potala Palace Chinese guards or policemen or whoever they are stop you from stopping for too long at any one shrine, and one is forced to look round the palace in an anticlockwise direction, just because the Chinese know it upsets the Tibetans. There are still shell holes in the grounds of the Norbulingka (the Dalai Lama's summer palace). The Sera monastery (which is mentioned in that article) felt like Disneyland (no offence, Soli, I hope you realise how I'm using it) - you could look round certain bits of it and there was a courtyard full of debating monks which was on the one hand really interesting - until you relise that they're only letting you look around the bits that have been rebuilt after the Cultural Revolution, that everything has been built to look old but it's only really post-1989 or so that they've rebuilt things at all, and that the debating monks are there just for the tourists. It's really weird; maybe a hundred monks in quite a small courtyard debating (in Tibetan) and about the same number of Western tourists round the edges taking photos, not understanding a word of it.
Lots and lots of Chinese tourists come to Tibet - it seemed like we were the only Westerners on the train - and there are huge new breezeblock suburbs being built in Lhasa. Now I have no idea how many of you have seen Seven Years in Tibet or know anything about the place, but breezeblock suburbs are NOT Lhasa. Before the Chinese came along in the 50s, there were exactly three cars in Tibet (all belonging to the Dalai Lama) and no metalled roads at all. Now there's a weird dichotomy between the Chinese part of the city - all broad boulevards, spacious shiny houses, new cars, street lights etc - and the old Tibetan city, with tumbledown buildings but with beautifully painted eaves, smelling of the smoking herbs they use as offerings and of burning yak butter, cycle rickshaws and impossibly wizened-looking old ladies with prayer wheels who have made pilgrimages from all over Tibet and clearly are carrying all their belongings on their backs. But the Chinese are making sure the Tibetan part isn't free of their influence - across the road from the Potala Palace, which is huge and completely undwarfable, is a big plaza with statues and Chinese flags and you-name-it ickiness, supposedly to symbolise the Chinese-Tibetan partnership or whatever they think is going on there... Thankfully the Potala is so bloody HUGE (and you really have no conception of it from photos, you have to see it as we first did, rising up on a vast rocky outcrop over the city at night, floodlit and amazing) that they're not getting anywhere there. They probably just love that when people look out the windows of the Potala they're reminded of Chinese occupation. And the Palace itself is empty anyway - no monks live there any more, it's just full of Chinese tour groups. I don't know where else the Chinese go and see, actually - the Jokhang Temple and the Potala Palace, and the closest monastery (Drepung) to central Lhasa, and that's it.
The rest of Tibet is vast and empty. I have no idea why, or how, the Chinese are living there. I mean, they're mostly in Lhasa, but why would you want to live 14 hours of train journey or 24 hours of dangerous, often cut-off road, away from the nearest other Chinese-populated town - which anyway is Golmud, a horrible, polluted mining town still at nearly 3000 metres above sea level and also in the middle of nowhere. Why do they want to own Tibet? It has very few natural resources (I think some oil or natural gas or something which is their excuse) - I mean, Tibetan food is basically wheatflour and yak products and that's it. You need to read Freedom In Exile (Dalai Lama's autobiography) or see/read Seven Years in Tibet (it has Brad Pitt and David Thewlis, you know you want to) to get even a vague idea of Tibet before the Chinese. It's HUGE and mostly frozen and empty and doesn't even have any air - I felt shitty for the first 2 days and we only stayed for 3. The train we came in on had oxygen piped in. It stopped at places with literally 4 houses and they were the only stops for 4 hours - there's nothing to run a train line to except Lhasa. But the Chinese have built big flashy train stations in all these towns (population 4 except during the yak fairs twice a year, or something like that to give them even a vague purpose for their existence), with proud red-background slogans on banners probably telling all 4 of those Tibetans how lucky they are that the Chinese came through. The Lhasa valley (at the relatively low-for-Tibet altitude of 2700m (um, 9000 feet? Very approximate conversion) above sea level) is the only place I ever saw crops.
I'm not sure if I'm making much point, except that I'm amazed these monks are prepared to put their necks on the line by protesting. It's not like Burma where they're seeking regime change in their own country - they're trying to rid themselves of an occupation; an occupation that has wasted no time in consolidating its position. Han Chinese are being encouraged left, right and centre to move to Tibet and from the people we saw and the rate of building works, they're jumping at the chance (God knows why, but anyway). The whole thing made my brother incredibly angry... and the longer it's left, the harder it'll be to get rid of the Chinese. A lot of people believe in a free Tibet, me included, but most (me included again) don't do more than that. I hope this latest monks' protest gets a LOT of airtime, and that as many people as possible link the cause of Free Tibet to the Beijing Olympics - because China is so so obsessed with those as their entry onto the world stage and their acceptance by the international community etc. They seriously can't stand people implying a connection - right before we arrived they tightened the regulations for tourists because a group of American students unfurled a banner at the Tibetan Everest Basecamp basically doing just that.
So people, if you care, let's do it. Talk about the monks' protest, write to newspapers about it, and keep mentioning it whenever the Olympics come up. This is an information age, the internet is very powerful, and the Chinese sure as hell know it (can't get on any website worth reading from a normal internet-cafe computer in China). And just because I'm wondering - how many of you would say you know or care anything about Tibet? I don't think I was more than vaguely aware of it before my brother insisted, if we went to China, that we also went to Tibet.
Lots and lots of Chinese tourists come to Tibet - it seemed like we were the only Westerners on the train - and there are huge new breezeblock suburbs being built in Lhasa. Now I have no idea how many of you have seen Seven Years in Tibet or know anything about the place, but breezeblock suburbs are NOT Lhasa. Before the Chinese came along in the 50s, there were exactly three cars in Tibet (all belonging to the Dalai Lama) and no metalled roads at all. Now there's a weird dichotomy between the Chinese part of the city - all broad boulevards, spacious shiny houses, new cars, street lights etc - and the old Tibetan city, with tumbledown buildings but with beautifully painted eaves, smelling of the smoking herbs they use as offerings and of burning yak butter, cycle rickshaws and impossibly wizened-looking old ladies with prayer wheels who have made pilgrimages from all over Tibet and clearly are carrying all their belongings on their backs. But the Chinese are making sure the Tibetan part isn't free of their influence - across the road from the Potala Palace, which is huge and completely undwarfable, is a big plaza with statues and Chinese flags and you-name-it ickiness, supposedly to symbolise the Chinese-Tibetan partnership or whatever they think is going on there... Thankfully the Potala is so bloody HUGE (and you really have no conception of it from photos, you have to see it as we first did, rising up on a vast rocky outcrop over the city at night, floodlit and amazing) that they're not getting anywhere there. They probably just love that when people look out the windows of the Potala they're reminded of Chinese occupation. And the Palace itself is empty anyway - no monks live there any more, it's just full of Chinese tour groups. I don't know where else the Chinese go and see, actually - the Jokhang Temple and the Potala Palace, and the closest monastery (Drepung) to central Lhasa, and that's it.
The rest of Tibet is vast and empty. I have no idea why, or how, the Chinese are living there. I mean, they're mostly in Lhasa, but why would you want to live 14 hours of train journey or 24 hours of dangerous, often cut-off road, away from the nearest other Chinese-populated town - which anyway is Golmud, a horrible, polluted mining town still at nearly 3000 metres above sea level and also in the middle of nowhere. Why do they want to own Tibet? It has very few natural resources (I think some oil or natural gas or something which is their excuse) - I mean, Tibetan food is basically wheatflour and yak products and that's it. You need to read Freedom In Exile (Dalai Lama's autobiography) or see/read Seven Years in Tibet (it has Brad Pitt and David Thewlis, you know you want to) to get even a vague idea of Tibet before the Chinese. It's HUGE and mostly frozen and empty and doesn't even have any air - I felt shitty for the first 2 days and we only stayed for 3. The train we came in on had oxygen piped in. It stopped at places with literally 4 houses and they were the only stops for 4 hours - there's nothing to run a train line to except Lhasa. But the Chinese have built big flashy train stations in all these towns (population 4 except during the yak fairs twice a year, or something like that to give them even a vague purpose for their existence), with proud red-background slogans on banners probably telling all 4 of those Tibetans how lucky they are that the Chinese came through. The Lhasa valley (at the relatively low-for-Tibet altitude of 2700m (um, 9000 feet? Very approximate conversion) above sea level) is the only place I ever saw crops.
I'm not sure if I'm making much point, except that I'm amazed these monks are prepared to put their necks on the line by protesting. It's not like Burma where they're seeking regime change in their own country - they're trying to rid themselves of an occupation; an occupation that has wasted no time in consolidating its position. Han Chinese are being encouraged left, right and centre to move to Tibet and from the people we saw and the rate of building works, they're jumping at the chance (God knows why, but anyway). The whole thing made my brother incredibly angry... and the longer it's left, the harder it'll be to get rid of the Chinese. A lot of people believe in a free Tibet, me included, but most (me included again) don't do more than that. I hope this latest monks' protest gets a LOT of airtime, and that as many people as possible link the cause of Free Tibet to the Beijing Olympics - because China is so so obsessed with those as their entry onto the world stage and their acceptance by the international community etc. They seriously can't stand people implying a connection - right before we arrived they tightened the regulations for tourists because a group of American students unfurled a banner at the Tibetan Everest Basecamp basically doing just that.
So people, if you care, let's do it. Talk about the monks' protest, write to newspapers about it, and keep mentioning it whenever the Olympics come up. This is an information age, the internet is very powerful, and the Chinese sure as hell know it (can't get on any website worth reading from a normal internet-cafe computer in China). And just because I'm wondering - how many of you would say you know or care anything about Tibet? I don't think I was more than vaguely aware of it before my brother insisted, if we went to China, that we also went to Tibet.