China Falls for Tibet Chic

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.

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."