Game Over

There are, by one returning exile's count, 238 dance halls and karaoke bars along the main streets of Lhasa, and 658 brothels. Plastic palm trees and mushrooms that play pop songs dot the shiny boulevards. And where in 1978 there were fewer than 500 individually run enterprises in the whole of the Tibet Autonomous Region, more than 5,000 new such enterprises came up in 1993 alone. The Chinese who have occupied Tibet for almost half a century may have failed to destroy it with their bulldozers and guns, but the Lhasa of old has nonetheless been developed to the point of...

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