Over the next fifteen years [since 2004] I returned a dozen times to Tibet and southwest China. 
I witnessed transformations so shocking that I felt I was taking blows to my own bones. Massive dam systems killed rivers and displaced communities, mountains were raked apart to provide gravel for construction projects, and the region was increasingly militarized and surveilled as China tilted toward its grim police state superpower status. Having observed these trends, it was not enough to write about Tibet merely as a fascinating landscape and culture. I began to combine the changes I witnessed with the structure of my original travels, making it a journey through time as well as through physical geographies. What follows, then, is a narrative that evokes the majesty of Tibetan landscapes, the unique dignity of the Tibetan people, and the sensory extremity of navigating almost pre-industrial communities at the edge of the map, while also encompassing the erosion of cultures and ecosystems.
Today China holds one million Uyghurs in concentration camps in Xinjiang, democratic freedoms have been smashed in Hong Kong, human rights lawyers are held in black jails, and the government openly surveils its population. But the systematic oppressions of “empire” are not unique to China. The seizure of land and genocide against indigenous peoples in the United States and elsewhere, the legacy of slavery and the present-day wage-slavery of the global economy, and the colonization of Tibet as a means of territorial expansion and resource extraction — these are all variations of centralized authority exerting power over minority, marginalized, and disenfranchised peoples.
Ethnic ChinaLit 