[tibet] one small piece of the chinese puzzle

There are some bloggers one must respect.

While people like myself make references to matters of importance and even offer some detail in passing, it takes someone like Sackerson and his comments on China and Tibet to bring it home and make one determined to run a better post on the matter.

Here is some of what Sackers said:

Tibet is important because of timber, minerals, extra living space for Chinese - and it houses up to a third of China's nuclear arsenal. A major interest is water, because Western China is very dry; among other plans, one is a hydroelectric plant exploiting the Brahmaputra River, which further down flows through Bangladesh and ultimately joins the Ganges.

The Chinese claim it will have twice the output of the Three Gorges Dam. "Work is tentatively scheduled to begin in 2009 but has been described as a 'declaration of war' against India and Bangladesh. One of Tibet's most sacred lakes, Yamdrok Tso, has already been mined, tunnelled and used for hydroelectric development."

My own angle is the fixation of the Chinese with the Silk Road [esp. the Karakorum Highway] so this week I'm going to try to draw all these threads together in the light of the new material on Tibet and try to cobble together a halfway decent post.