And perhaps my perceptions are colored by my own experiences, which is far more PRC-oriented (I've probably exchanged 50 ims with one of my best friends from university...her da is a PRC (now retired) diplomat who spent a long time at the UN.) But while dated, I did have contacts on the other side of this argument we are having here as well, not Tibetan, but Bhutanese, also from university days, a woman from my circle of friends who was a daughter of an adviser to the king and also posted for a time at the UN. She went to Scarsdale for high school in America, then the same international university as I (Kofi Annan, among others, was a graduate) at the same time and again in the same circle of friends.

The things she told about Bhutan, and what she would be doing when she graduated, and the typical life of a Bhutanese back then (ie, not going abroad for school in rizty highschools and so on), boggled my mind. I immediately thought of peasant life back in the days of the Shogunate.

I mean, I understand people romanticise this stuff, and I understand also the romanstic appeal of this "national happiness" measure the king of Bhutan has come up with (funny - that's not PR, but "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" somehow is!). But sorry, for me, progress ain't the past, it's now and in the future. Great leaps forward, great enough so that the inevitable steps backward in reaction don't retract the whole of the steps leaped.

   

The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet. Winston Churchill