Absurdity, Allegory and China

Below find several photos from my good friend, Karamibu, who has traveled back to Jiegu (Gyegu, Jyekundu). Click on the photos for a larger version. I would encourage you to also check out the Yushu Earthquake Response team, a coalition of Tibetan NGOs who are frantically busy on the ground in Yushu and coordinating relief [...]

[Read more →]

I have a television, but it stopped working a year ago, and it had probably stopped working long before that. I wouldn’t have known since I’d rarely turned it on. Discovering that it was broken was a mei banfa (what are you gonna do!) moment, the thought of getting it fixed never considered. I am [...]

[Read more →]

Melissa Chan, Al Jazeera’s China correspondent, has written about the gathering of the monks in Jiegu (aka Gyegu, Jyekundu), the county seat of the Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) which is the devastated center of the latest fatal earthquake in China. Monks from the entire Tibetan cultural region have traveled to Jiegu to offer both [...]

[Read more →]

Now that the media have their story in Jyekundu (aka Jiegu and Gyegu), the county seat of Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (TAR), the real work of material relief, emotional support and infrastructure rebuilding is shifting into gear. This is the hard, everyday grind of post-disaster work, which is usually not deemed newsworthy unless it involves [...]

[Read more →]

I have a good friend, a young Tibetan man, who has traveled to Jyekundu (Jiegu) – the center of the Yushu earthquake devastation – to distribute relief aid. He is also a fair hand with a camera. His photos are starting to come in now, and they can be found at Karamibu’s Flickr site. He [...]

[Read more →]

Over the past day I have read several blogs, tweets and comments addressing, once again, the collapse of schools in an earthquake, the latest in the Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (TAP) in Qinghai province. We still have no idea of the numbers of students killed or injured by crumbling schools, though if we can draw [...]

[Read more →]

Over the last 24-hours I have been contacted several times by friends who are aware of my work in Qinghai province, asking if I have any more information than is available through the news orgs. Unfortunately, I do not. Though I know several people from the Yushu area, my involvement is in a Tibetan area [...]

[Read more →]

There is a very good review by Emily Yeh, assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder, at China Dialogue entitled Restoring the grasslands? concerning the Chinese program “retire livestock and restore grassland” (tuimu huancao). Introduced in 2003 the program called for “grazing removal in order to halt and reverse severe grassland degradation.” [...]

[Read more →]

I have taken to reading Ben Schott’s column in the NYT called Schott’s Vocab, “a repository of unconsidered lexicographical trifles — some serious, others frivolous, some neologized, others newly newsworthy.” It is hard not to love our words, since they are at the center of how we tell our stories. How they evolve is always [...]

[Read more →]

On March 10, 2008  the following article appeared in the China Daily: Five-star Beijing-Tibet train to run after Games. Luxury passenger train service from Beijing to the southwestern Tibet Autonomous Region will be launched on Sept. 1 [2008]. The tickets were gaggingly expensive – $5600 USD per person – and the projected departure schedule was [...]

[Read more →]