Tragedy in Crimson
How the Dalai Lama Conquered the World but Lost the Battle with China
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Tragedy in Crimsonis award-winning journalist Tim Johnson's extraordinary account of the cat-and-mouse game embroiling China and the Tibetan exile community over Tibet. Johnson reports from the front lines, trekking to nomad resettlements to speak with the people who guard Tibet's slowly vanishing culture; and he travels alongside the Dalai Lama in the campaigns for Tibetan sovereignty. Johnson unpacks how China is using its economic power around the globe to assail the Free Tibet movement. By encouraging massive Chinese migration and restricting Tibetan civil rights, the Chinese are also working to dilute Tibetan culture within Tibet itself. He also takes a sympathetic but unsentimental look at the Dalai Llama, a popular figure in the West who is regarded as a failure by many of his own people. Staggering in scope, vivid and audacious in its narrative aims, Tragedy in Crimson tells the story of a people on the brink of cultural extinction and the rising nation that is quashing them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Johnson, foreign correspondent for the Miami Herald and former Beijing bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, weaves together interviews with monks, nomads, exiled activists, and the Dalai Lama himself in this evocative account of China's escalating suppression of the Tibetan people and their traditional way of life. He witnesses the Tibetan capital's transformation to a "theme park for visiting Chinese," where Tibetans are now in the minority an agenda China pursues with its minority communities: annexation followed by dilution, then erasure of the indigenous cultures. The gulf between the Han Chinese and Tibetans is mirrored in Beijing's dealings with the Dalai Lama, Tibet's leader in exile since 1959. Revered by the West, reviled by the Chinese, the Dalai Lama is a controversial figure among his own people especially the young who advocate complete independence from China rather than the Dalai Lama's "Middle Way." Despite garnering celebrity allies and visibility for the Tibetan cause, the Dalai Lama is largely ineffectual: China's stranglehold continues and his own people "are only dimly aware of the freedom concerts" and campaigns conducted on their behalf. A sobering, engrossing, and important account of an imperiled culture.
