I am a stranger in a strange land. I need connections or I will wither and die. And the connections I need are not just with my native people, or with people similar to me, but with the people who inhabit this strange land. I learned to speak Chinese out of survival instinct and I […]
Tibet
Speaking of rumors …
The Bo Xilai Incident will not die a quiet death. The plodding censors in the Chinese government are stirring up the rumor pot, and no one is sure if that is the goal or just a byproduct of incompetence and the absurdity of Web censorship in general. According to a recent CNN article, “Heavy hand […]
Google unlocks the vault!!!!
Everything the Chinese government has blocked is now available via Google, including pictures of Tiananmen, articles on Free Tibet and the Dalai Lama and everything else. According to Google’s own stats, the most searched for terms in the past 24 hours were Tiananmen and the Chinese for it 天安门 And this picture here says it […]
Moses in the NYT
Dr. Russell Leigh, that is. My old Professor at the U of M was on CNN last year during the Olympics and now he has an Op-Ed in the NYT clearly and coldly explaining what is really going down. Check it out. In my last post i said that the Han arguments of “ingratitude” are […]
Violence in Xinjiang
Uighers in Urumqi rioted over the past 24 hours, destroying property, killing people and fighting the police. The immediate cause for the riots was a brawl in Shaoguan, Canton Province that began after some fool posted a note on QQ saying that 6 Uigher boys had raped 2 Han women. Han workers then rampaged through […]
Tell it like it is
Losar is underway and the NYT and Atimes marked the Tibetan New Year with stories about the seething people of Tibet, pinned down by the boot of Communist China. Kent Ewing in the Atimes wants to know when the policy will change. He hits on the real deal in Tibet briefly, way down in his […]
Moral Authority?
Its not hard to imagine how China manages to get away with being one of the more brazenly oppressive nations to hold the Olympics in recent times. The USSR was able to do so, but only with half the world boycotting and in 1936, Nazi Germany’s Olympics were held before boycotts were widely used as […]
caterpillar fever
Oh, about 5-6 years ago i saw my first pile of cordyceps in Kangding, Tagong and throughout the Kham area of western Sichuan. Tibetans were slanging the dried worms on the ground for several RMB (like 10 – 20) for a pile of about 250 grams. I didn’t buy any, because at the time I […]
We felt it comin …
My friend Rachel wrote the day before the quake: “I feel like the world is shifting” if ya’ll check the first few lines of my post “The Illusion of Coincidence” you’ll see that there was something in the air … just to embellish a bit: yesterday was Buddha’s birthday. The plates that caused this earthquake […]
the sad truth for tibetans and uighers
is that unless China falls apart, freedom will be a dream fulfilled only far from home. we Westerners should consider what exactly drives our support for Tibetan/Uigher/Burmese freedom. The San Francisco authorities did their best to maintain free speech for all while respecting the integrity of the Olympic Flame. This show of strength by a […]
Kun Shan
The western media feels guilty for spearing the Chinese. At least some of them do. After jumping all over the Tibet story from the Tibetan perspective — lambasting Chinese state media along the way — reporters are starting to look for Han Chinese living and working in Lhasa to tell the story from their perspective. […]
Zobel
As told by Markus Tong: “I was guiding a group of people through the Tibetan highlands near Lhasa. we stopped at a village and walked around. We met a young boy, who was selling a piece of paper with Buddhist script and paintings on it. He asked for Y20, I got him down to Y14. […]
the young tibetan diaspora
like i be sayin:you can’t stop the youth
faded
I am just a few short miles from Aba, where the Tibetans burned down a police station last week. Since that incident it has been mostly quiet. This is a big tourist area and the troubles do not seem to have affected business much. Busloads of Cantonese rumble through daily, honking, yapping and taking funny […]
Aint nothin special bout me
i walked back to my house tonight around 2am and i live near the Tibetan district of town. there were police cars on every block with running motors and flashing lights. the entire neighborhood is surrounded and infiltrated. the only things moving were the cops fingers typing out a lazy message to his girl and […]
you’ve lost your smile
well it seems the media blockade is working or I just have not been keeping my ears open. Here a response to my last blog from Big Daddy Villar: “I’m in a bit of a rush and really only had time to look at about two paragraphs of your blog. But from what I’ve read […]
gettin paid
i should be putting this down for an article for Antiwar.com or somebody else, but events move to fast and I enjoy the freedom of this blog. But hell, ninja needs to get paid. Last night I was interviewd by KBOO in P-Town about the Tibet protests. I was caught a little off guard by […]
China censors
It might be hard for an American to imagine what life would be like under a dictatorship of the proletariat. What happens, among many other things, is that news is completely censored as are your modes of communication. My gmail account is spotty and has been for weeks. But since the protests I can barely […]
The diaspora
yesterday i got a message from a young girl — 21 yrs old — and a reporter for the Chengdu Economic Daily. In our society, a young girl will be the bleedingest heart you’ll find. and if she’s smart enough to be a crack reporter, she will most likely be passionate and serious about her […]
Qiangba Puncog must hang
The day after the deadline and people here in China are talking about the protests, both my Laowai homies and my Chinese homies. It is safe to say that foreigners and Chinese disagree 100% on the Tibet issue. An article in the NYT today talks about the long simmering hatred that has finally boiled over. […]
Hold a Fist Up for Tibet
Yesterday I talked with my editor Katherine about Tibet and she asked what was going on. I said well, if people in Kham and Amdo rise up too, then things will get real serious. And today my girl Nicole sends me an Ap story describing protests in Gansu, Qinghai and Sichuan Provinces. So perhaps things […]