Beijing Eyes Tibetan Buddhist Resurgence

By Calum MacLeod from The Huffington Post via USA Today

Breathless but beaming, Sheng Zisu sounds confident after five months in a maze-like Buddhist encampment high on the eastern Tibetan plateau, nearly 400 miles from the nearest city.

“Look around. They could never find me here,” Sheng, 27, said of parents so anxious about their only child’s turn to Tibetan Buddhism that they have threatened to kidnap her.

Sheng is far from her home — and from the bars where she used to drink and the ex-boyfriends she says cheated on her. She is here with 2,000 other Han Chinese at the Larung Gar Buddhist Institute in Serthar, Sichuan province, the rain-soaked mountainous region of southwest China.

The province is far from the central government in Beijing, and is also a traditional gateway to Tibet, where China’s Communist Party has suppressed Buddhists, sometimes brutally, for decades.

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