And always Tibet

I have been blogging from China for half a year and never mentioned the Tibet question. How can this be? Actually, I have been pondering the question "to go or not to go" when thinking about my travel plans for this spring. It seems almost self-evident that as a caring liberal intellectual you just have to go to Tibet. But how come people in the west care so much about Tibet's independence and so little about, oh say, Quebec's? :)

Okay, joke aside, the Tibetans aren't the only ethnic group struggling to preserve their identity. For some reason that I could never quite pinpoint, the thought of traveling to Tibet and entering the statistics as one more caring foreigner always kind of bothered me. Thankfully, there are people out there who much more adequately express their feelings. Tibet is no Shangri-La tells us this article in Foreign Policy. First of all, the myth of Shangri-La was created by James Hilton in the novel "Lost Horizon," is located in Yunnan, not Tibet, and did not really exist until a few years ago when some industrious Yunnanese realized there is money to make from foreigners with a romantically transfigured image of everything Tibetan. I highly recommend this article, I think it finally voices a more rational view on Tibet. I originally came across it on this site, which supplies some insightful comments on the original article but also features many discussion posts, among others from exiled Tibetans. You'll need a bit of patience and have to ignore the odd idiot though :)

One discussion post mentions an excellent article published in 1999 in the Atlantic - I read it yesterday but now the link does not work anymore. You can find a reproduction here. "Tibet through Chinese eyes" provides some interesting historic facts about Tibet before and after the Chinese invasion/liberation. Maybe if we accept the fact the that the Dalai Lama is no holier than the pope (and has the same antiquated ideas about homosexuality) and that China is pumping more money into developing Tibet than it will ever receive in revenues exploiting its natural resources, we can start having a fair discussion about the question of preserving Tibet's cultural identity. Separation would be economic suicide... but then, that didn't stop the Quebecois from trying twice :)