Millisphere, noun. A ‘sphere of interest’ of roughly one thousandth of the world population. Around seven million people, but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do. A lens to study human geography.
The Dalai Lama suggests: One a year go someplace you’ve never been before. This year that place was the Beach Haven Community Hall, in Auckland, to hear Dr Lobsang Sangay address a meeting organised by the New Zealand Friends of Tibet.
The meeting was opened by Ian Revell, former National MP for Birkenhead/Norcote (1990-99) who, at the time, had chaired the 40-member multi-party parliamentary lobby group for Tibet in 1990s. On a parliamentary trip to China he had the temerity to bring up the subject of Tibetan autonomy with the Chinese deputy foreign minister, who became very angry.
Dr Sangay told the meeting that he had been born in the Tibetan refugee community in Darjeeling, India, and grew up on “one acre, with chickens and two cows,” before winning a US Fulbright scholarship and gaining a PhD in Law from Harvard.
In 2011, when the aging Dalai Lama stepped down from his political role, Dr Sangay was elected the Prime Minister of the government-in-exile. He is now in his second term as PM-in-exile and on his first trip to New Zealand.
Dr Sangay restated the case for an autonomous Tibet. “The Chinese are like our parents, showering us with gold and silver, but what they want is our minerals to dig up, trees to cut down and rivers to dam.
“In Hong Kong, where politicians are being co-opted and activists are disappearing, the people are saying: ‘We don’t want to be like Tibet’,” he said.
His message to New Zealand was: ”It happened to us, it can happen to you”.
There are about 7.8 million Tibetans worldwide, about 7.5 million of whom live in China. What the Chinese call Xizang, or the Tibetan Autonomous Region, has a population of only 3.2 million (90 percent of whom are Tibetan).
The Tibetan people have uniquely evolved to live at high altitudes, but the Tibetan Plateau is a harsh place to live and the Tibetans have traditionally spilled off the plateau.
For Tibet to qualify as a millisphere we would have to extend its boundaries into the surrounding Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan, and Gansu, all of which have sizeable Tibetan populations.
The lowland Han Chinese have built a railway line, over permafrost, to Lhasa from Qinghai in the north; they are building their sixth airport on the Tibetan Plateau and have just completed their first dam on the Brahmaputra River.
Nearly all the major rivers of Asia have their sources on the Tibetan Plateau – the water tower of Asia – and there are now plans to divert some of their headwaters to the China’s parched, polluted northeast.
The Tibetan Plateau has been described as “the third pole” because of the concentration of freshwater in its glaciers – which are now melting at an alarming rate. Chinese bottled water companies are harvesting from melting glaciers (including Everest) – marketing its purity. There are now concerns about changes in the jet stream over Tibet, which in turn is causing heat waves as far away as Europe.
“Journalists without borders” say it is more difficult to get into Tibet than it is to get into North Korea, and Freedom House ranks Tibet near the bottom, just above Syria. Recently all Tibetans, including nomads, were issued with biometric identity cards, which they have to swipe at the omnipresent checkpoints.
By 2006 nearly 300,000 Tibetan nomads have been forcibly relocated to villages and towns as part of “building a new socialist countryside”, and under the communist “comfortable housing” programme Tibetans are required to demolish their “substandard” traditional homes and rebuild, at their own cost, to the new communist standards.
Like the Buddhist monks in Vietnam in the 1970s, Tibetans are committing self-immolation as a protest against Chinese occupation. “Better to die a good death,” Dr Sangay thought. Next year – 2018 – would be a “gratitude year”, he said, to thank all those who had supported the Tibetan cause and his government-in-exile would continue looking for the middle path to true autonomy. The present path was creating an environmental disaster, the alternative was to “be gentle with the earth” and work towards a compassionate, non-violent solution, which included supporting the Chinese democratic movement within China itself, Dr Sangay concluded.