Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town, Demick - B

                  This book is a highly-acclaimed best seller that tells of the takeover and on-going oppression of Tibet and its people by the CCP. Although the book ranges far and wide, it focuses on the town of Ngaba in western Sichuan province. The Tibetan plateau is a vast million square miles with an average elevation of 14,800 feet above sea level. It is larger than India, and is known as 'the roof of the world'. Tibet, prior to the advance of the Red Chinese, had a very loose affiliation with China, but was more of a place than an entity. The residents were nomadic Buddhists in a land with few towns. Beginning in 1950, the Chinese began the forced collectivization and subjugation of Tibetans in what they called their "Democratic Reforms" - a redistribution of land. Tibetans call 1958, the year of an aggressive crackdown, as the time "when the sky and the earth changed places." The temples were destroyed and the Buddhist monks turned out. The Dalai Lama fled to India. Mao's death in 1976 led to change. Economic activity took off. Ngaba began to recover some of the vibrancy it had lost under communism.  The traditional nomads made a fortune harvesting and selling medicinal herbs. Slowly though, the Han moved in, and soon vastly outnumbered the locals. A period of liberalization was reversed in the 1990's, after Tiananmen, when the Han began constructing massive infrastructure projects throughout the plateau. The year 2008 saw Chinese police fire on Tibetans and the beginning of a decade-long self-immolation wave. By the end of 2019, 156 people had committed suicide this way, with about a third of them in and around Ngaba. Tibetans poured over the border and joined a substantial expatriate community in India. The plight of these victims of communism has resonated and garnered sympathy around the world. But like their Uighur neighbors now under the heel of the regime, they are too far removed and isolated from free peoples to ever achieve any semblance of the free life they once enjoyed.