This groundbreaking book explores China's efforts to assimilate Tibet, in the process rewriting Tibetan history to conform to Beijing's goals. Warren W. Smith Jr. provides the historical context for understanding the current situation through an overview of China's actual--as opposed to its promised--policies toward Tibet over time. His clear-eyed appraisal of Chinese policy convincingly shows that the PRC's ultimate intention is assimilation rather than autonomy. The author argues that Beijing fears that any genuine autonomy or dialogue with the Dalai Lama will fuel renewed nationalism in "China's Tibet," as the Chinese leadership calls its possession. The book highlights China's past and current propaganda on Tibet to demonstrate China's sensitivity and defensiveness regarding the legitimacy of its rule. It traces the history of Sino-Tibetan dialogue to show how China has tried to use it to defuse Tibetan exile and international criticism, while making no concessions in regard to Tibetan autonomy. In the absence of any solution, Smith advocates the promotion of Tibet's right to self-determination as the most viable strategy for sustaining international attention and maintaining the most essential elements of Tibetan national identity. Smith's thoroughly informed work will be valuable not only to Tibet experts and students, but also to the larger world of Tibet activists, sympathizers, and others attempting to understand China's policies.

This book offers a definitive account of the origins and events of the 2008 Tibetan uprising, which began with peaceful demonstrations by monks of Lhasa's great monasteries on the anniversary of the 1959 revolt. Noted expert Warren W. Smith Jr. argues that the uprising was a widespread response to the conditions of Chinese rule over Tibet, which revealed much about Tibetan nationalism and even more about Chinese nationalism. Interpreting the Tibetan uprising as an attempt to spoil the Beijing Olympics, China's hard-line response was repression, "patriotic education," and propaganda blaming the disturbances on the "Dalai clique" and "hostile Western forces." Smith contends that China's offensive is based upon a belief that China now has sufficient economic and political influence to make the world "thoroughly revise its mistaken knowledge" about the Tibet issue. He convincingly shows that far from becoming more lenient in response to Tibetan discontent, China has determined to eradicate Tibetan opposition internally and coerce the international community to conform to China's version of Tibetan history and reality.

A critical attempt to understand autonomy from both historical and analytical perspectives.

His Holiness The Dalai Lama, the remarkable exiled spiritual and temporal head of Tibet, is a statesman for our troubled times. This collection of 11 essays by scholars, writers, theologians, and others whose lives he has touched represents a broad spectrum of perspectives on this Nobel Peace Prize recipient who is also a living Buddha to six million followers. Included among the contributions are personal reflections by those who have been privileged to get to know His Holiness, as well as illuminating introductions to some of his core beliefs. Editor Rajiv Mehrotra, who contributes the book’s first essay, says of the Dalai Lama, "As with all truly great and inspiring leaders, his life is his message and philosophy." The essays in this volume shed light on that fascinating life . . . painting the portrait of a tireless champion of compassion, altruism, and peace who is both deeply spiritual and disarmingly human.

Encoding the Olympics assembles a uniquely representative international team of media experts to provide a comprehensive review of the global impact of media and cultural communications associated with the Beijing 2008 Olympics. Commissioned by the IOC, this pioneering comparative study – the largest in Olympic Games research –provides a ground-breaking, panoramic, cross-cultural perspective on media responses to the leading sports event of the modern world. The representative team that undertook the study includes media commentators and political analysts, sport and media journalists, Sinologists and observers of the Asian Pacific Rim, academics in Olympic Studies and media and communication studies, scholars of the cultural and sociology studies of sport and festival and events managers. Encoding the Olympics provides a unique, encyclopaedic study that will serve as a versatile resource at several levels – as a textbook or source reference for academic institutions, media public relations agencies that facilitate the work of inter-cultural exchange organisations, and international communication departments of multinational enterprises and international NGOs. This volume analyses global media responses to a mega-sport event on a scale never before attempted. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

An important new study by a leading Tibetan scholar of the historical Sino-Tibetan relationship - traditionally two rival and interlocked states.