Thursday, April 10, 2008
(6:07 AM) | Amish Lovelock:
Unevenness
If this Olympic torch fiasco tells us something about anything at all it reinforces the truth of the unevenness of capitalist development famously embraced by the Webloggian phrase: "Get a Job! ...and some Human Rights!"Take a look at the map of the torch route. It doesn't take one long to draw a corrollation between the places where the big protests have/will happen and the geographic locale belonging to Human Rights discourse.
(Source: BBC)I wonder if there is a modernist Tibetan resistance within contemporary Tibetan nationalism which does not depend upon and is un-co-opted by say Western Buddhism, the Anti-Chinese Right & Left, and International Human Rights-ism? This is the really big question that current events should have us asking. Tsering Shakya is good and interesting but it's also ironic that (New) Left Chinese intellectuals are now anxiously reading his Modern History of Tibet Since 1947 in a translated Chinese version of an English text written mainly in the States and the UK. This fact would seem to have something to do with the corrollation mentioned above. The same corrollation which has excellerated the development of Chinese regional disparity and the stand-of between hard-line local Party officials and managerial Beijing...
It's a full circle, I'd say.
