Thought I'd take a quick break from my travelogue to highlight the significance of the day, March 14, the one-year anniversary of the uprising in Tibet, itself a marking of the now fifty-year anniversary of a rebellion against communist rule. I don't exactly know what to make of it, since I don't have much experience with the region (I do hope to visit someday), and I believe people on both sides of the Tibet issue tend to paint an inaccurate picture of life there. Ask the Chinese government, and they'll say something to the effect of "Tibetans now enjoy a beautiful and harmonious existence." Ask a human rights watchdog group, and they'll say that life there is hell on earth. Of course, it's really somewhere in between. But in any case, I thought I'd provide a couple of links, just in case you weren't up on recent developments.
UPDATE: This pretty well sums it up:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/weekinreview/15WONG.html?hp
A timeline of the past year:
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSPEK80094
Living on a campus in Wuhan, far from the Tibet Autonomous Region, I don't really feel any of the effects, nor do I see any of the demonstrations. Maybe the only manifestation of the central government's alleged oppression that I've experienced firsthand was the blocking of YouTube for a brief period. It's not uncommon for certain "incendiary" websites to be blocked, and a lot of times they're ones you wouldn't expect (like images of tornadoes, for example), but this time they were really out to prevent any kind of incitement to violence, or incriminating evidence, or free self-expression, or whatever you want to insert here. Believe what you want, but I'm trying to reserve judgment until after I actually go there. That is, when it's not closed to foreigners.
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