Word: bhutan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When I first set foot in Bhutan 16 years ago, the "Land of Hidden Treasures" defined its relation to development very simply: it was not, and would never become, Nepal. "Women who will have sex with anyone. Pot, marijuana. People sleeping in the street"-I can still remember a Bhutanese official's voice shaking as he described the "low-class" foreigners his nation had watched streaming into its Himalayan neighbor. Nepalmed by what had come in through its open doors, a Kathmandu that had, up till 1955, barely seen a road was cluttered with Nirvana Tours agencies, 50-cents...
...Bhutan, by contrast, had no television then, no daily newspapers, only medieval buildings. Its capital, Thimphu, basked in a stainless quiet in which everyone wore traditional, medieval clothing (as they still do), and fewer tourists arrived in a year than pile into Disneyland in an hour. The young King Jigme Singye Wangchuk was pursuing a policy of "Gross National Happiness" which said that peace was as important as plenty, and immaterial needs were at least as important as material. There is a point of diminishing returns in development, he was suggesting (in terms that more and more people now heed...
...members of his own party?Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi appealed over the heads of the naysayers to the public, and won a landslide election victory. The only trouble: sometimes, clear leadership engenders not too little trust, but too much of it. In the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, the reformist King Jigme Singye Wangchuck is so popular that he is having trouble persuading his people to replace his own feudal monarchy with a parliamentary democracy. That's not the sort of popularity that is likely to give Jacques Chirac problems any time soon...
Jigme Singye Wangchuck is the man who would rather not be king. When he ascended the throne as Bhutan's absolute monarch in 1974, Wangchuck was the closest thing to God in his tiny, closed Himalayan kingdom of half a million people. His reign has been a benevolent one. Rather than oppose modernization only to be run over by it, the King championed various reforms, such as allowing in foreign tourists, television and the Internet, while limiting their impact in order to preserve the country's values and traditions. Mindful of some pernicious side effects of economic growth, he introduced...
...ultimate aim has long been to replace feudal monarchy with parliamentary democracy. But thanks to his judicious rule, the King's subjects are less than enthralled by the prospect of politics disturbing their peaceful lives. During a nationwide roadshow campaign at the end of last year to convince Bhutan of the merits of elected government, King Wangchuck was met by crowds imploring him to stay on. Wangchuck subsequently postponed his plans until 2008. It's nice to be trusted?up to a point...