The Vietnam War is recognized as one of the major foreign policy blunders in recent US history. Its casualties include more than fifty-eight thousand American lives lost, a hundred and fifty thousand US soldiers wounded, three million deaths in Vietnam, and a million deaths in Cambodia and Laos. The environmental damage to Vietnam and Laos... Read More

Westerners appear to have a willful blindness about Tibet, with strong opinions often held by those who haven’t been there and whose knowledge appears gleaned from misguided propaganda in the popular press. The Western media have imposed on our imaginations an image of a fabled theocracy where a reincarnated god rules over a peaceful people... Read More

To understand the context of this tweet from Human Rights Watch's Ken Roth: it might be useful to understand that the United States maintains a refugee channel through Nepal for Tibetans from inside the PRC's Tibetan Autonomous Region to make their way to Dharmsala. The PRC is not happy with this arrangement, since most of... Read More

Hmmmmmmmmm… From an April 2009 US Embassy Beijing cable in the Wikileaks dump as reported by the Guardian: Now, as anybody with a memory more than a nanosecond recollects, in 2010 the world’s press was filled with reports like this one from the April 23, 2010 New York Times: I should comment that I had... Read More

I have an article up at Asia Times Online under the pen name Peter Lee entitled Dalai Lama at apex of Sino-Indian tensions. It's keyed to a high profile news item--the Dalai Lama's provocative visit to a border town in territory held by India but disputed by China--and a significant but rather underreported development--the escalating... Read More

The Information Warfare Monitor (a joint venture of Toronto University’s Citizen Lab at the Munke Centre for International Studies and a Canadian think-tank called SecDev) teamed up with the Tibetan Government in Exile for a nine-month multi-continent investigation to develop a remarkable report on cyberwarfare operations targeting areas of concern to the People’s Republic of... Read More

Long snake quickly moved down the mountain: hundreds of monks ran along a curving paved path from the monastery at the top to the broad polo grounds at the bottom, where the whole population of Leh had gathered to celebrate the Buddha’s Nativity. Powerful, muscular monks in yellow hats and orange robes were accompanied by... Read More

On June 21, the Chinese government was able to claim a victory of sorts, at least in terms of the semiotics of state power, by orchestrating an incident-free, albeit truncated Olympic torch relay through Lhasa. Almost contemporaneously, a 1300-kilometer, ninety day march through India to the Tibetan border organized by the Tibetan People's Uprising Movement... Read More

Tsewang Rigzin, the head of the Tibetan Youth Congress, is getting some unwelcome attention from the Chinese press. From the English People's Daily : I'm afraid I can't improve on that English. All I can provide is the automatic Google translation of Tsewang Rigzin's interview with Corriere Della Serra on March 27, which gives us:... Read More

I'm not about to say that stories about the Tibet People's Uprising Movement (TPUM) are getting spiked in some kind of journalistic omerta dedicated to keeping the existence of this awkward group out of reporting on the Tibetan disturbances... ...but I was interested enough in the issue to send a query about the absence of... Read More

The Chinese authorities did their civic duty by forcibly suppressing the pogroms in Tibet, for the “Tibetan protests and demonstrations� were essentially just pogroms of immigrants, mainly but not exclusively Han Chinese and Uygur Muslims. Some two dozen persons (the Chinese immigrants, Tibetan rioters and security forces) had lost their lives; five immigrants were gruesomely... Read More

The current Tibetan rebellion against Chinese rule has captured world attention and sympathy. Protests from Katmandu to New York have ensured it stays on TV screens almost everywhere — except China, of course. China's government, which has been preparing a massive, carefully orchestrated Olympic summer extravaganza in Beijing, has been deeply embarrassed and lost a... Read More

Amidst the horrific violence of the last few days, somebody’s been working overtime to marginalize the Dalai Lama and undercut him as the leader of the worldwide Tibetan movement. Not just the Chinese. I’m talking to you, Tsewang Rigzin. Tibetan unrest in China is not just a problem for the PRC. It’s a major problem... Read More

Tibetan regions of the People’s Republic of China are experiencing a level of unrest that hasn’t been seen for twenty years. Anti-China and/or pro-independence demonstrations have occurred far beyond Lhasa and the Tibet Autonomous Region. Thousands of monks have reportedly demonstrated at the Labrang Monastery, a major Yellow Hat temple in the Amdo Tibetan ethnic... Read More

Today, India, China, and Russia are gingerly exploring a north-south continental axis bridging Eurasia: developing alliances, trade routes, pipelines, and other infrastructure assets that are bi-lateral rather than internationalized, land-locked instead of sea-based; less vulnerable to the UN sanctions regime and the US blue-water military capability that underpins it; and less dependent on unrestricted access... Read More

I met the Dalai Lama once. This was at Central Hall, Westminster, close to the Abbey, in the summer of 1984. I was doing freelance hack work for the London newspapers, and had reviewed Heinrich Harrer's recent book Return to Tibet for theDaily Telegraph a few weeks before. My review had been sympathetic to the... Read More

I met the Dalai Lama once. This was at Central Hall, Westminster, close to the Abbey, in the summer of 1984. I was doing freelance hack work for the London newspapers, and had reviewed Heinrich Harrer's recent book Return to Tibet for the Daily Telegraph a few weeks before. My review had been sympathetic to... Read More

In 1944 Heinrich Harrer escaped from an Indian PoW camp and trekked over the Himalayas into Tibet. The Tibetans — a hospitable people under enlightened rulers — made him welcome and employed him in civil engineering tasks. Harrer fell in love with the country, as everybody did, and stayed seven years, until the Chinese annexation.... Read More