Word: lhasa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...still nearly five months before the olympic torch is to be lit in Beijing, officially starting the 29th Summer Games. But diplomats in the Chinese capital believe that a high-level game of chicken has already begun - one that has now turned deadly in Lhasa, the capital of what China calls the Tibetan Autonomous Region, and in neighboring areas, according to Tibetan exiles and human-rights groups...
...July 2006 Chinese authorities intensified what the Dalai Lama calls "demographic aggression" by launching a high-speed train linking Lhasa to Beijing and other Chinese cities, thus allowing 6,000 more Han Chinese to flood into the Tibetan capital every day. Lhasa, sometimes known as an "abode of the gods," has turned from the small traditional settlement I first saw in 1985 into an Eastern Las Vegas, with a population of 300,000 (two out of every three of them Chinese). On the main streets alone, by one Western scholar's count, there are 238 dance halls and karaoke parlors...
...Lama's example particularly striking-and what was perhaps partly responsible for his receiving the 1989 Nobel Prize for Peace-is that he has had to live these principles and put them to the test during almost every hour of his 72 years. He came to the throne in Lhasa, after all, when he was only 4 years old, and he was receiving envoys from F.D.R. with intricate questions about the transportation of military supplies across Tibet during World War II when he was just 7. He was 11 when violent fighting broke out around him in Lhasa...
...Dalai Lama, true to his thinking, points out that the Beijing-Lhasa train is neither good nor bad. "It is a form of progress, of material development," I heard him say four months ago, adding that Tibetans understand that for their material well-being, it is of benefit to be part of the People's Republic. The only important thing, he pointed out, was how its rulers use the train and whether they deploy it for compassionate purposes...
...Perhaps most significant, some of the people most eagerly drawn to Tibetan tradition and Buddhism are, in fact, citizens of China, who have been denied any religious sustenance for more than 50 years. The last time I visited Lhasa, in 2002, I saw more and more Chinese individuals going to the Jokhang Temple at the center of town as pilgrims, seeking out Tibetan lamas for instruction, even trying to learn Tibetan, the same language that is all but banned for Tibetans. When I traveled across Japan with the Dalai Lama last November, I saw dozens of Chinese people clustering around...