New Statesman: How China’s strategy of repression has led to decades of violence in Tibet

 In the years following 1958, some 20 per cent of the Tibetan population were arrested and more than 300,000 died. Some committed suicide, others fled into exile. Gonpo and her family survived until the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, when they once again came under attack. Both her ­parents died: her father committed suicide in despair when her mother disappeared after being detained. Gonpo was sent to do hard labour in Xinjiang. [...]

Tibetans are now an underprivileged minority in a land transformed by Chinese roads, railways, big hydro and the inward migration of settlers from China’s poorest provinces, who enjoy the privileges of the coloniser. Many Tibetans are also materially better off than 50 years ago, and do not oppose modernisation, despite the West’s preconception of them as a rural, tradition-bound people. [...]

Demick attributes this phenomenon to intergenerational trauma: the young people setting fire to themselves were the actual or spiritual grandchildren of Tibetans who had fought the Red Army in the 1930s and 1950s. In response, Chinese police patrols began to carry fire extinguishers, and to arrest the families, the witnesses and suppliers of kerosene to the suicides. To avoid arrest, self-immolators took to drinking the kerosene as well as dousing themselves in it, and bound their padded clothing with wire so that it could not be easily removed.

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PolyMatter: China’s Plan to Reincarnate the Dalai Lama

Aeon: Marxism and Buddhism

At least since Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, commented on his Marxist inclination in 1993, it is evident that Buddhism and Marxism have something in common:

Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability … The failure of the regime in the former Soviet Union was, for me, not the failure of Marxism but the failure of totalitarianism. For this reason, I still think of myself as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist. [...]

From a Buddhist perspective, the capitalist motor is fuelled by humankind’s deepest vice: its trṣṇa. Marx understood that the whole economic system is based on consumption, and marketing agencies know how to push trṣṇa to the realms of utter perversion, thereby warranting a continuum of consumption and labour. The worker is the hamster, consumer culture is the hamster wheel. People are tricked into believing that Furbies, iPads and all those other pointless goods and services are necessary for a happy and fulfilled existence. A sense of ‘meaning’ has been replaced with instant, short-term, on-demand happiness. [...]

If something is empty of substance, then it is relations that define the thing. In other words, everything is what it is in virtue of bearing certain relations to other things and, as those things are related to other things, ultimately in virtue of bearing relations to everything else. Everything stands in a unique set of relations to other things, which thereby individuates it without its having to assume a unique and individual substance. You stand in countless relations to your parents, spouse, but also to your car and bank account. The impression that there are such things as houses, selves, spouses, bank accounts, hammers and so on, all independent of a network of relations, is actually a conceptual illusion. This, in short, is the Buddhist notion of emptiness. The notion of emptiness includes the notion of self. The self, too, is empty in that it is exclusively defined by its relations, not some underlying substance. This is the idea of no-self.

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Vox: China's panda diplomacy, explained (Mar 22, 2017)

The Guardian: China 'bans Lady Gaga' after Dalai Lama

Lady Gaga has reportedly been added to a list of hostile foreign forces banned by China’s Communist party after she met with the Dalai Lama to discuss yoga. [...]

Following Lady Gaga’s meeting, the Communist party’s mysterious propaganda department issued “an important instruction” banning her entire repertoire from mainland China, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily reported on Monday.

Chinese websites and media organisations were ordered to stop uploading or distributing her songs in a sign of Beijing’s irritation, the newspaper said. [...]

“Lady Gaga knew how Beijing would react,” Bill Bishop, who runs the Sinocism newsletter, wrote on Twitter. “Good for her to show some courage, unlike most celebrities who are scared of bullying Beijing now.”

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