Latest pic of Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet

I post published photos of famous places. I saw this photo in a NY Review of  Books article about the issues facing the Chinese Govt because of the Dalai Lama’s announced retirement from political affairs.

This is the first photo I have seen of this site with the Tibetan mountains in the background.

China’s borderlands are gigantic!

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Global Post had an excellent but too short piece this morning about China’s borderlands and here’s an excerpt:

In short, China’s most delicate and dicey challenges are often seen most dramatically on its borders. In the regions where China meets the rest of the world, its own ethnic lines are blurred by intense concentrations of minority populations, sometimes dominating whole provinces like Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Manchuria. Many of these regions have broken away from Chinese control throughout history. Today the borders are strong, but the 14 countries that frame China couldn’t be more different, from Pakistan to North Korea and Mongolia to Myanmar.

It’s no small challenge for China, which, with 13,743 miles of international borders, has more borderlands than any other country in the world.

Based on what I read in public print China does a much  better job than the US does with on its border with Mexico. Here is a small photo illustrating what China has to deal with on its borders with North Korea:

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“Tibetan Exiles to Follow ‘Middle Path’ ” from NY Times

Image by dincordero via Flickr

It certainly would have left another message of bad news if they had chosen otherwise. And this beaten up world needs more movement to the “Middle Path”, especially in the US banking sector.

To read the NYT report click here!

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A glimmer of positive attitudes in China’s approach to sustainable development

Image via Wikipedia

It seems that the environmental news from China is persistently bad. Melamine, toxic water and air pollution, bad after effects of the Three Gorges Dam and on and on.

So it maybe a sign for a better attitude from China’s leaders that the No 2 man, Wen Jibao, had a positive influence on improving a radical plan to develop hydroelectric resources on the Nu River Basin, which is Southeastern China, mostly Yunnan Province. This river which has its source in Tibet flows to the ocean through Burma as the Salween River. So any hydro developments of the Nu will affect a larger population than the Chinese.

Check out this link. The story seemed positive to me. They are going to develop but after firm intervention from Wen Jibao they will mitigate the harsher effects of that development.

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More mountaineering deaths in Tibetan mountains

Image by mckaysavage via Flickr

From NYTimes:

Japanese Climbers Die on Tibet Mountain

By EDWARD WONG
Published: October 3, 2008

BEIJING — Three Japanese climbers were killed while on an expedition to reach the summit of a sacred mountain in Tibet, a mountaineering official said on Friday. The climbers died on Wednesday in an avalanche while scaling Mount Kulagangri, an official of the Tibet Mountaineering Association, Dou Changshen, told The Associated Press.

The bodies of the climbers were found by team members about 980 feet away from a camp that was at an altitude of 19,300 feet. The three people who died were among a team of seven Japanese climbers who left Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, on Sept. 20.

And here’s a clip of the mountain:

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Positive press about China

Image via Wikipedia

These days there is an almost overabundant smorg of anti-China press,during this Olympic year 2008, revolving around Tibet, the Dalai Lama, Darfur, pollution, authoritarian government, miserable human rights record, crushing of simple land rights in most of China, so on and so forth.

So it is a bit startling to read a very upbeat and positive piece about the recovery process post-Sichuan earthquake, published recently by Newsweek a prime player in MSM in the West.

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Discussion of Tibet’s right to self-determination

This is the first para of a post in China Digital Times blog today:

Is Tibet Entitled to Self-Determination?

Paul Harris, a human rights lawyer in Hong Kong, wrote the following piece which explores Tibet’s right to self-determination under international law. A shorter version of the article appeared in the South China Morning Post. According to Harris, after commissioning an expanded version of the SCMP article, the Board of the Hong Kong Law Society’s Hong Kong Lawyer magazine later pulled it, saying the topic was too political. Harris’ original full article follows:

This article includes, at its end, a link to a quite different Chinese view on this timely subject.

According to my “Blog Stats” yesterday

was the first day in months when views of my earliest post about Napoleon were lower than a recent post about “China’s views about Tibet”. Fascinating!

Wiser words about China, Tibet and public grandstanding

The LA Times published an opinion piece titled “China’s view of Tibet”.

With all the public grandstanding by fringe politicians, Hollywood denizens and public hysterics, I found it refreshing that a mainline US newspaper would publish an unconventional view about this international brouhaha.

The opinion ends this way:

The tragedy is that any victims of such moral posturing will be Tibetans, who will suffer the most if a virulent new Chinese nationalism is created in response.

So far, even though Beijing’s record of rule over Tibet is less than perfect, China’s leaders have tried to preserve autonomy for Tibet. Indeed, in theory there is no fundamental disagreement between the position of the exiled Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhists’ foremost spiritual leader, and that of the Chinese government. The Dalai Lama advocates autonomy, not independence; the official Chinese government policy paper on Tibet says that it “regards exercise of regional ethnic autonomy in areas where ethnic communities live in compact communities as a basic policy for solving the ethnic issue.”

Given this, the West should try to narrow, not widen, the gulf between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government. But that is the work of quiet diplomacy, not grandstanding.

Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, wrote “The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East.”

Mr. Harrer’s photo of Potala Palace circa 1955

This view of Potala looks unusual. The colors in the photo look “old”. Here is a link to Google map.

The photo is part of a set published by NatGeographic in its May 2008 issue about China.

The online site offers many other photo galleries, including some unique videos.

Mr. Harrer was the present Dalai Lama‘s tutor when the latter was an early teen.