Word: hans
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...With their main opponent gone, the Chinese followed the Stalinist puppet state model: They installed a loyal, ethnic Tibetan in charge of the administration and a Han Chinese in the powerful position of secretary of the regional Communist Party. The Chinese constitution technically allows for a “Tibet Autonomous Region,” but Lhasa’s policy decisions are made in Beijing. Slowly but surely, China has asserted absolute power in the last forty years through economic investments, political control, and Han migration, seeking to silence Tibetans forever...
...protests in Tibet were spontaneous, agrees legal expert Lobsang Sangay, but a violent uprising was inevitable. The combination of simmering resentment over the failure of the Dalai Lama's six-year-long negotiations with Beijing, and the influx of Han Chinese settling in Tibet have pushed Tibetans to breaking point, says Sangay, who grew up in exile. "The frustration level has reached very, very high," he says. "If you study violent movements, when these reach a threshold when it starts to affect not only political issues but also bread and butter issues, then it crosses a line and the response...
...point he gently exhorts the reader to place a hand on a life-size photo reproduction of a handprint left by its maker on a ceramic brick, taken from an unearthed Han tomb wall. It's a hauntingly visceral exercise, like shaking hands with a dead man, but precisely the type of immanent encounter with a past typically coffined in museum display cases that Barbieri-Low hopes to inspire. "Understanding these lives," he says, "will allow us to humanize the material remains of the past...
...hazards: dermatitis for lacquerers, mercury poisoning for gilders and exhaustion for manacled convict artisans, often worked into their graves. Convicts, it seems, had it even worse than slaves (who by some counts may have numbered as many as 1 million, or 2% of the total population, during the former Han dynasty) since slaves were considered valuable property and used mostly for light or clerical duties. One to six convict laborers, on the other hand, died each day at a typical large imperial worksite, building roads, opulent palaces and tombs, including the most famous of all: the mausoleum of Qin Shihuangdi...
...Mass-production of goods is Barbieri-Low's dominant leitmotif. Long before China was factory to the world, he suggests, it was factory to itself. The artisans were indispensable cogs in the Qin and Han imperial machinery. Barbieri-Low splendidly reanimates their lost lives, and gives them due credit for greasing the wheels of China's first empires. It's the same sort of credit due to those shunned migrant workers now constructing Olympic stadiums in Beijing, anonymously propping up the superpower of tomorrow...