JANUARY 29, 2001 VOL. 157 NO. 4

China Falls for Tibet Chic
Despite Beijing's criticisms of lamas and their culture, citizens are getting into prayer-wheel kitsch
By MATTHEW FORNEY Gansu Province

Zhu Zheqin, a struggling, whippet-thin Chinese singer, became her country's pop diva when she incorporated the Tibetan word for moon into her stage name, re-emerged as Dadawa and filled her repertoire with songs like Ballad of Lhasa. Her latest music video, shown repeatedly on Chinese television, depicts her high on the roof of the world wearing Tibetan robes, herding yaks and clowning with nomads. Her first performance in the capital two weeks ago packed Beijing's exhibition center with young Chinese who could afford to spend $50 for a ticket—and one apprehensive Tibetan lama with a shaved head who was anticipating crass exploitation of his heritage. Instead, he saw Dadawa share the stage with Tibetan musicians who played traditional religious tunes. "We Tibetans would never be allowed to celebrate our own culture like that," says the lama.

ALSO IN TIME COVER: People Power—the Sequel Abandoned by even his closest allies, President Joseph Estrada gives in to the chanting crowds on the streets of Manila and agrees to make room for his Vice President • New Boss: Arroyo returns to the palace she grew up in • Viewpoint: Where does democracy end and mob rule begin? THAILAND: God's Army Brats Twin teenage warriors turn themselves in to Bangkok officials CHINA: Turning On to Tibet Despite official vilification, hip Chinese dig Lamaist culture CINEMA: Brilliant Performances Six new actors who may come out of the wings on Oscar night INNOVATORS: Revolutionizing an Industry A few entrepreneurs are changing the way we traverse the planet TRAVEL WATCH: Make Journey Not War on Kinmen Island

Chinese have fallen for Tibet. Growing numbers of Chinese now practice Tibet's form of Buddhism, fill their glasses with Tibetan booze and consider a jaunt on the high plateau a badge of cool. Many of the Tibetan practices they ape can be as tacky as white men in redface doing a rain dance. Yet given that official propaganda has for decades blamed Tibetan culture itself for keeping Tibetans poor, ignorant and not above suspicion of cannibalism, this sudden interest shows the government's decreasing ability to mold public opinion, and the growing independence of Chinese trendmakers. "More information about Tibetan culture has come available, so more people see its value," says Zhao Jia, a travel executive who next month will release an off-the-track guidebook to Tibet's farthest reaches.

Given what Chinese have learned of Tibet for the past half-century, it's hard to believe they would venture near the place. Eighth-grade textbooks omit mention of Buddhism, emphasizing instead that before China's army "peacefully liberated" the province, "it practiced the darkest, most barbaric system of slavery in human history." Films like the 1963 Serfs, seen in childhood by nearly all Chinese, show venal monks digging out people's eyeballs to settle debts and stretching the skin of dead serfs over drum heads. Communist propaganda vilifies exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama as a "splittist" seeking to restore feudalism. Such images die hard. Yang Bo, a 30-year-old Chinese tourist who absorbed many propaganda films on Tibet, recoiled while visiting one of Tibetan Buddhism's holiest places, the Labrang Monastery in Gansu province: "It was dark, and the spinning prayer wheels sounded savage."

Official propaganda hasn't changed—Tibetan song-and-dance troupes still pirouette on television to folksy ditties like The Communist Party Turned Bitter to Sweet. The change comes instead from people like artist Li Bing, whose father once oversaw Chairman Mao's travel plans. Backpacking through China, she grew enamored of Tibet. After studying its language for a year, she spent six months on the plateau in 1998 and later produced an exhibition of her work featuring Polaroids of Chinese and Tibetans next to their overlapping handprints. Since then, travel to the Roof of the World has become as common for artists as a paint-spattered studio, and many galleries peddle their renderings of noble Tibetan rustics. "Chinese who go to Tibet can't help but see it as foreign," Li says.

Neither can consumers, who suddenly face an astonishing variety of Tibetan products, mostly from Chinese state-run companies. Last year's new goodies included Tibet Grass brand ginseng-berry juice, a sorghum liquor called Tibet Fragrant Spring and Tibetan Highland barley wine. "Chinese like our drink because of Tibet's mysterious feelings," says Zai Shudong, who bought ads on national TV for his company's sorghum brew. Trendies in Shanghai can shop for Tibetan jewelry at boutiques just off the glitziest commercial street. At the Traditional Tibetan Medicine Hospital in Beijing, director Renwang Ciren spent a recent morning tending to the ailments of six air-force officers. He says 90% of his patients are Chinese, a vast increase over past years.

Not satisfied with merely importing Tibetan culture and commerce, Chinese are increasingly making the tourist trek to Tibet itself. The region received roughly zero non-Tibetan visitors at the start of the last century, but last year 420,000 Chinese tourists inhaled its thin air, up almost 50% from two years earlier. That means opportunity to people like Ouyang Xu, a cocky 33-year-old entrepreneur who opened the Himalaya Travel Agency last year, and took 700 Chinese to Tibet in six months. They multiply the impact of the many Chinese who have moved to Tibet in the past decade and now constitute more than half of Lhasa's population. Tibetan exiles argue that the influx dilutes the culture. Ouyang counters that Tibetans "don't want to be something people buy tickets to see."He says Tibetans want Chinese things: "If Chinese don't sing karaoke there, Tibetans will sing it themselves." He plans to import a fleet of Land Cruisers for touring Tibet's most forbidding region, known as "The Uninhabited Zone."

Interest in Tibet comes at a critical time. The Dalai Lama is 65, and it's unclear if anyone can unite the fractured community of Tibetan exiles after he dies. The identity of Tibet's second-highest religious figure, the Panchen Lama, is disputed. The Communist Party is promoting one 10-year-old boy and detaining the Dalai Lama's choice, making him the world's youngest religious prisoner. Next in the ranks, the Karmapa, is 15 and stunned Beijing last year by trekking through the Himalayas to India, where he warned that "Tibetan religious traditions and culture now face the risk of total extinction." He has become the exile community's greatest hope for leadership.

Photographs in the main hall at the Labrang Monastery convey Tibet's plight: of five portraits on display, the Dalai Lama is exiled, three others are dead or their identities disputed, and the last, Labrang's abbot, is barred from living with his monks. The local party committee hung a sign calling the spiritual place "a center for patriotic study." Even so, Labrang teems with 2,000 monks and many pilgrims, who are often Chinese. "Older monks feel differently, but I didn't go through the Cultural Revolution, so I welcome them," says a monk too young to remember China's 1966-76 decade of chaos, when ultra-leftist Red Guards took sledgehammers to monasteries.

China has become a nation of spiritual seekers in the past decade, as faith in communism waned following the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre. Wang Ze, a 52-year-old consultant for frozen-foods companies, became a Tibetan-style Buddhist four years ago after meditating to the Tibetan mantra for compassion, om mani peme hum (which Dadawa later turned into a pop song). He and his wife converted one of their four rooms into a shrine. At the time, they didn't know anyone else who practiced. Recently, he says, "we hosted an initiation ceremony for 17 Chinese." A senior lama in Beijing says self-organized student groups from the city's leading schools began seeking him out two years ago to ask religious questions. The lama concedes that nearly all Chinese believe that Tibet is part of China, but says: "More are starting to support not independence for Tibet, but greater autonomy."

Yet the trend toward Tibet Chic hasn't always been smooth. When Dadawa released her first album in England in 1995, she angered both Tibetans and Chinese. Tibetan independence activists accused her of exploiting the culture; some protested outside the London office of her label Warner Records. Back in China, her songs became a sensation among Tibetans when they heard on the background track of her biggest hit the voice of a woman praising, in Tibetan, the current Dalai Lama—the government discovered the track two days after awarding Dadawa its equivalent of a Grammy. She had to recall and re-edit her album, and her videos are still banned in Tibet. Today, Tibet Chic has grown too hot for Dadawa. To avoid looking like a follower of trends, she vows, "My next CD will have nothing to do with Tibet."

Write to TIME at mail@web.timeasia.com