In today's pages: Tibetans, tribes, and cadavers
Contributing editor Ian Buruma says Tibetan culture may not survive China's modernization, except among the diaspora:
The Chinese have exported their version of modern development to Tibet, not just in terms of architecture and infrastructure but people, wave after wave of them: businessmen from Sichuan, prostitutes from Hunan, technocrats from Beijing, party officials from Shanghai, shopkeepers from Yunnan. The majority of the people living today in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, are no longer Tibetan. Most people in rural areas are Tibetan, but their way of life is not likely to survive Chinese modernization any more than the ways of the Apaches did in the United States.
George Washington University's Jonathan Turley wonders why you can be competent to stand trial, but unfit to represent yourself. And Hope College's David G. Myers says primal urges are to blame for March madness.
The editorial board warns taxpayers that they'll face new risks as Fannie and Freddie buy more mortgages thanks to a rule change. The board also wants to know where scientific exhibits got their cadavers, and thinks the Supreme Court erred by not giving Jose Medellin, a Mexican national on death row in Texas, another day in court.
Readers discuss discussing race. Torrance's David Nelson says, "The article begins: 'How do we start a national dialogue on race?' A better question is: Why should we?"


Oh, give me a break! Is this what happened to American Indians? Why we don't have problem with that, but when Chinese does the same thing, we are crying foul?
This is just the way of life. If you want to live in mordern world, learn computer, learn English, learn math. If you are insists to be a monk, of course, you can't work for Microsoft!
Posted by: John Fillis | March 26, 2008 at 04:48 PM
Tibetans have a choice. Live in poverty and the past or...embrace education; learn Mandarin, attend the new schools, go on to college and return to their homeland with the tools necessary to earn and succeed in the modern world. In the process they can preserve and propagate their unique culture.
It is disingenuous for the Western societies to back an independent, backward and illiterate Tibet. Just like the opium that the US and British freely poured into China in order to control and divide it. Today education will free Asia from the Western hegemony, oppression, influence and intervention. Tibetans need to be educated or else they will become slaves to ignorance and the West.
Posted by: S.K. Duncan | March 27, 2008 at 11:37 AM