Oh, Tell Me the Truth About...Tibet

Amidst the sound and fury of the current standoff between China and the West over Tibet, this National Geographic Magazine feature - presumably written before current events - is about the most balanced that I've read anywhere. Here's a sample:

Tibetans I met acknowledged that along with oppression China has brought a standard of living far higher than that of their parents under the Dalai Lama's rule. The Chinese have built hundreds of schools, where until the 1950s there had been just a handful of nonreligious schools. They've built hospitals. Everywhere I traveled, they'd halted deforestation and are replanting trees, having learned through bitter experience in the summer of 1998 that the denuding of Tibet caused the Yangtze to flood, drowning 4,000 people. They've built airports and are beginning the first Tibetan railroad. They've also installed a telecommunications network, one that enabled me to dial directly to the U.S. Despite having a phone line to India, the best the Dalai Lama could do to send word across Lhasa from the dim recesses of the Potala Palace was to dispatch a runner.

Yet Tibetans almost invariably also said that China was implementing development solely to help exploit Tibet's natural resources. "Their goal is to extract all our treasures—timber, wildlife, gold, uranium—"and to make China rich and powerful," said a man in his late 20s in Chamdo, a town on the banks of the Mekong River.

Permission to Reincarnate, Sir

This would be funny if it weren't so pathetic:

In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation."

(Via Slashdot).

Digital Memories of the Tibetan Uprising

I've written before about how digital technology can be applied by the oppressed and disenfranchised to help preserve their identity. It's good therefore to see new-ish technologies like YouTube being pressed into similar service for a mass online protest focussing on March 10:

On March 10, 1959, Tibetans took to the streets of Lhasa to actively resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet. Tens of thousands of Tibetans risked their lives to protect their nation and their beloved leader, His Holiness the Dalai Lama. They gave of themselves so that future generations could live to continue the fight and regain the freedom of Tibet.

This March 10, we will honor their memory and their sacrifice.

Unhappy New Year, Tibet

Although open access usually refers to journal papers, there are an increasing number of books freely available too, as a previous post noted. One I came across recently is a good example, because it lies at the opposite end of the open access spectrum from the latest research reports.

As its title - "Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: System and Philosophy of Sino-Tibetan Reconstruction" - suggests, this is one of those "work of lifetime" books that both sums up what is currently known, and also provides as starting-poing for future directions.

It is really quite extraordinary - even for someone like me who has no Tibetan or Burman. In fact the book, which is a svelte 3.2 Mb PDF file, can be appreciated by anyone simply as a hermetic artefact. Scrolling through the 805 pages (yes, you read correctly - it really is one of those awe-inspiring tomes) you encounter a cloud of almost completely-inscrutable signs.

It can also be appreciated as poetry, dealing as it does with the relationships between several hundred languages in the Tibeto-Burman family with names like Bal-brang, Jingpho-Nung-Luish, Khualsim, Loloish, Nruanghmei, Ugong and Yakkhaba.

And anyone can appreciate the importance of this book, laid out in its introduction:

The great Sino-Tibetan language family, comprising Chinese on the one hand and Tibeto-Burman (TB) on the other, is comparable in time-depth and internal diversity to Indo-European, and equally important in the context of world civilization. The overwhelming cultural and numerical predominance of Chinese is counterbalanced by the sheer number of languages (some 250-300) in the TB branch.

But as well as providing clues to the origins of Chinese, whose "cultural predominance" grows by the day, this wonderful e-book is also a major contribution to the understanding of the Tibetan language, almost totally ignored in the West, along with its people.

This fact is particularly regrettable at the moment. It appears that China has decided to crackdown on monks in Lhasa who remain steadfast in their allegiance to the exiled Dalai Lama. This is but the latest episode in China's appalling treatment of Tibet after its invasion of that country in 1949. In addition to its continuing abuse of human rights, Chinese authorities have embarked on what the Government of Tibet in Exile terms "ecocide": the reckless and systematic destruction of Tibet's environment. One of the ironies of this is that China too is suffering the consequences of this.

The only consolation is that however brutal China's treatment of Tibet itself becomes, Tibetan culture will live on. As well as a considerable number of Tibetans living in exile around the world (chiefly in India) who keep the flame alive, there are now a number of projects, some major international collaborations, to digitise the unique Tibetan cultural heritage.

Once again, the world of bits offers a partial counterbalance to some of the terrible losses taking place in the world of atoms.