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...television, depicts her high on the roof of the world wearing Tibetan robes, herding yaks and clowning with nomads. Her first performance in the capital two weeks ago packed Beijing's exhibition center with young Chinese who could afford to spend $50 for a ticket?and one apprehensive Tibetan lama with a shaved head who was anticipating crass exploitation of his heritage. Instead, he saw Dadawa share the stage with Tibetan musicians who played traditional religious tunes. "We Tibetans would never be allowed to celebrate our own culture like that," says the lama...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: China Falls for Tibet Chic | 1/29/2001 | See Source »

...most barbaric system of slavery in human history." Films like the 1963 Serfs, seen in childhood by nearly all Chinese, show venal monks digging out people's eyeballs to settle debts and stretching the skin of dead serfs over drum heads. Communist propaganda vilifies exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama as a "splittist" seeking to restore feudalism. Such images die hard. Yang Bo, a 30-year-old Chinese tourist who absorbed many propaganda films on Tibet, recoiled while visiting one of Tibetan Buddhism's holiest places, the Labrang Monastery in Gansu province: "It was dark, and the spinning prayer wheels...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: China Falls for Tibet Chic | 1/29/2001 | See Source »

Interest in Tibet comes at a critical time. The Dalai Lama is 65, and it's unclear if anyone can unite the fractured community of Tibetan exiles after he dies. The identity of Tibet's second-highest religious figure, the Panchen Lama, is disputed. The Communist Party is promoting one 10-year-old boy and detaining the Dalai Lama's choice, making him the world's youngest religious prisoner. Next in the ranks, the Karmapa, is 15 and stunned Beijing last year by trekking through the Himalayas to India, where he warned that "Tibetan religious traditions and culture now face...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: China Falls for Tibet Chic | 1/29/2001 | See Source »

Photographs in the main hall at the Labrang Monastery convey Tibet's plight: of five portraits on display, the Dalai Lama is exiled, three others are dead or their identities disputed, and the last, Labrang's abbot, is barred from living with his monks. The local party committee hung a sign calling the spiritual place "a center for patriotic study." Even so, Labrang teems with 2,000 monks and many pilgrims, who are often Chinese. "Older monks feel differently, but I didn't go through the Cultural Revolution, so I welcome them," says a monk too young to remember China...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: China Falls for Tibet Chic | 1/29/2001 | See Source »

...mani peme hum (which Dadawa later turned into a pop song). He and his wife converted one of their four rooms into a shrine. At the time, they didn't know anyone else who practiced. Recently, he says, "we hosted an initiation ceremony for 17 Chinese." A senior lama in Beijing says self-organized student groups from the city's leading schools began seeking him out two years ago to ask religious questions. The lama concedes that nearly all Chinese believe that Tibet is part of China, but says: "More are starting to support not independence for Tibet, but greater...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: China Falls for Tibet Chic | 1/29/2001 | See Source »

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