Word: tibet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hasn't changed?Tibetan song-and-dance troupes still pirouette on television to folksy ditties like The Communist Party Turned Bitter to Sweet. The change comes instead from people like artist Li Bing, whose father once oversaw Chairman Mao's travel plans. Backpacking through China, she grew enamored of Tibet. After studying its language for a year, she spent six months on the plateau in 1998 and later produced an exhibition of her work featuring Polaroids of Chinese and Tibetans next to their overlapping handprints. Since then, travel to the Roof of the World has become as common for artists...
Chinese have fallen for Tibet. Growing numbers of Chinese now practice Tibet's form of Buddhism, fill their glasses with Tibetan booze and consider a jaunt on the high plateau a badge of cool. Many of the Tibetan practices they ape can be as tacky as white men in redface doing a rain dance. Yet given that official propaganda has for decades blamed Tibetan culture itself for keeping Tibetans poor, ignorant and not above suspicion of cannibalism, this sudden interest shows the government's decreasing ability to mold public opinion, and the growing independence of Chinese trendmakers. "More information about...
Given what Chinese have learned of Tibet for the past half-century, it's hard to believe they would venture near the place. Eighth-grade textbooks omit mention of Buddhism, emphasizing instead that before China's army "peacefully liberated" the province, "it practiced the darkest, 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...
Stripped of its association with the Arab race, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is an independence struggle between a stateless people and a vastly superior occupying army--not unlike the conflict between Tibet and China. Palestinians are frustrated because they are too weak to win back their freedom. Yet for the most part Americans don't understand why the Palestinians lash out at the Israelis. The reason that Americans don't understand is that they see the Palestinians as part of a hostile mob of Arabs that vastly outnumbers the Israelis. This gives them a distorted picture...
...Public Library "Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World" [IDEAS, Nov. 6], Robert Hughes said, "This is a show about failure." However, there are thousands of successful utopian communities in operation today. Monasteries and other religious communities exist in all parts of the world from Tibet to America...