From the Front Lines.... or at Least Close to Them

I found this piece on the TIME China Blog this morning and thought it would be of interest to many you, in light of recent events. One of TIME's Beijing bureau journalists was allowed to head west to see what's going on there:

"It's early evening in Litang, a normally bustling city of some 50,000 in the far west of China's Sichuan province. On a normal day, the streets would be crowded with cars, bicycles, throngs of shoppers, even the odd yak. But today there is an eerie silence, with only the occasional resident hurrying home, eyes to the ground. The shops are all shuttered and the only vehicles on the roads are prowling police cars whose blue and red lights flash in the gathering dusk. Litang, 90% of whose population is ethnically Tibetan, is a city under siege..."

At least as interesting as the article itself (perhaps even more so, depending on your perspective) is the comments section. The China Blog is one of the more high profile China-related blogs around since it's attached to a major global publication, and this means that it attracts all kinds of wing-nut commenters, particularly nationalists who are easily whipped into delirium by anything TIME's foreign journalists say. (Ever wonder what a steady diet of PRC patriotic education can produce? Now's your chance to see some of its more extreme effects.)

It's worth checking out.

There's also been a lot of discussion going on over at The Peking Duck, which you'll have to use a proxy to view.

My friend and classmate at the Granite Studio has posted links to a few history-oriented pieces he's written over the years on T*bet. Everything on this blog is academically-informed, but written in a very accessible and often humorous style. I recommend having a look around there as well.

Finally, I also heard about this article at the Atlantic Monthly-- supposedly a good historical overview that attempts to lay out Chinese perspectives, T*betan perspectives, etc. on the issue.