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Beijing’s Development Policy and TIBETans
Beijing’s Development Policy and TIBETans
By Tendar
March 15, 2004 | Cultural Survival Quarterly | Issue 28.1
As the juggernaut of China’s Western Development Program rolls on, the
worst fears of the TIBETan people are coming true. Not only has the
Chinese government moved TIBETans from their homelands, but it has also
brought Chinese migrants to TIBETan areas, drastically changing the
economic and physical landscape, and threatening ethnic conflict.
Foreign journalists who visited the TIBET Autonomous Region (TAR) this
year were almost unanimous in their observations that China’s development
policy in TIBET was serving the interests of Chinese migrants rather than
those of TIBETans. Encapsulating the journalists’ findings, Rupert
Wingfeld-Hayes of the British Broadcast Corporation said the Chinese
government had invited them “to see economic development” in TIBET, but
“what we found was a TIBET … where Chinese immigrants and economic
imperialism nurtures growing resentment from a Native population that
feels increasingly marginalized in its own land.”
Ever since Deng Xiaoping unveiled the fabled economic liberalization
policy in the early 1980s, socio-economic development in TIBET has
bypassed rural areas, where the vast majority of TIBETans live: 97 of the
population of TAR is TIBETan and 87 percent of the population in the
contiguous Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Yunnan, Sichuan, and Gansu is
TIBETan. Official connivance and rampant corruption have made Chinese
settlers advantaged over their TIBETan counterparts in higher education
and professional training opportunities. One would be hard-pressed to find
even a single TIBETan among the hundreds of thousands of Chinese students
sent to Western countries for higher education.
In tandem, Beijing has encouraged China’s teeming masses to move to TIBET,
a so-called land of opportunity. The migrants now dominate the local
economy while a pervasive sense of despair prevails among TIBETans, who
see their homeland slipping away to the Chinese settlers.
“In Lhasa, the Chinese immigrants take most of the construction jobs, run
most of the grocery stores and drive most of the pedicabs,” Philip P. Pan
of The Washington Post reported in September 2003. Even in the Barkhor,
the traditional stronghold of TIBETans, Chinese and Hui Muslims now own
most of the shops.
In the nearby town of Tsethang, Wingfeld-Hayes noticed that every single
shop was run by migrants. A fruit seller from Henan said she had come to
TIBET because “it’s easier to do business here.” But the TIBETans Hayes
spoke to said it was not easy to find work. Journalists have reported that
even the railway project, which will link Lhasa (the heart of TIBET) to
China and has been touted as the engine of TIBET’s development, does not
have a single TIBETan among its 27,000 skilled and semi-skilled workers.
Following strong international criticism, the Chinese Railway Ministry
last year took on only 6,000 TIBETans as unskilled manual laborers, a
surprisingly small number given that the project employs a total of 38,000
people and is being undertaken in TIBET, as the government often states in
the press, “for the benefit of the TIBETan people.”
David J. Lynch of USA Today found that TIBETans work on the project as
laborers, making no more than $235 a month. “That’s good by local
standards, but is a fraction of the $725 to $2,400 Chinese technicians
make,” Lynch reported. When he asked construction boss Huang Difu how many
skilled jobs TIBETans held on the rail line, Difu replied “none.”
Although part of the reason for the imbalance may be that the migrants
were better skilled and had better business acumen than TIBETans, as
Chinese economist Zhang Keyun echoed the Chinese government in an
interview with Dexter Roberts of Business Week, this excuse is not the
whole story. For decades, the Chinese government has pursued a policy of
naked colonialism in TIBET that has done nothing to empower the TIBETan
people. Beijing has consistently made a drive to impose a new majority in
TIBET, the policy implemented by luring Chinese settlers onto the plateau
through such incentives as preferential treatments in education, jobs, and
business licensing practices. The latest and biggest step toward this end
is the Western Development Program.
According to Chinese official statements, the program is aimed at bringing
the economies of TIBET and other minority areas on par with the rest of
China. But TIBETans believe that the program’s hidden agenda envisions
Chinese immigrants as its target beneficiaries. On September 30, 2003,
Xinhuanet, an online news service, reported that a group of 800 officials
from China, known as “personnel aid officials,” will be sent to TIBET in
the summer of 2004, and that most of them will serve as leading officials
of local committee of the Communist Party of China and of government
departments at different levels. “Some of them are experts in enterprise
management, and technicians.” This is the fourth group of Chinese
officials to be sent to TIBET as part of the Western Development Program.
To make life easier for these new officials, the TAR government has
reformed the residency registration policy, by which the Chinese workers
can register as residents in TIBETan areas and keep their residencies in
their home areas. While the move makes it easier for Chinese workers to
seize job opportunities in TIBET, TIBETans continue to be subjected to the
old residency registration law, which means they cannot legally move to
other areas of TIBET, for livelihood or any other reason.
The new officials are more likely to concern themselves with implementing
Beijing’s policy of Sinicizing the TIBETan plateau than with helping in
the development of local TIBETans.
Appointed directly from Beijing, these personnel aid officials are
answerable directly to Beijing and make decisions over the heads of their
TIBETan “superiors” in the TAR government. Arrogant and insensitive to the
problem of TIBET, they are resented with equal determination by the
TIBETan cadres and public, many of whom believe that the Chinese
officials’ sole function is to “invite Chinese settlers” and wipe out even
the semblance of autonomy that TIBET enjoys today.
Still another component of China’s Western Development Program envisages
urbanizing rural TIBET, which involves merging villages together and
joining them with the nearest town, and renaming them as one
administrative unit. TIBETans living in the more remote areas will be
ordered to move nearer the administrative towns. This resettlement,
according to the authorities, will allow the government to concentrate
resources in administrative centers, thus making health and education
facilities more easily accessible to adjoining rural populations. Such
reasoning, according to TIBETans in TIBET, is flawed—or the policy is
actually a deliberate strategy to retain more direct control on the lives
of TIBETans. In a land as vast and as unyielding as TIBET, survival
depends on the ability of the population to spread themselves thinly and
extensively. As for health care and education facilities, they are no
longer free in TIBET. If anything, they are prohibitively expensive to the
rural TIBETans, the vast majority of whom live below the poverty line. So,
who is going to benefit from the urbanization program?
One trend TIBETans in TIBET have told visitors they have noticed is that
the Chinese migrants hate to live in sparsely populated rural areas, and
tend to live together in areas where there are fairly high population
concentrations. As the government invests heavily in creating employment
opportunities in the administrative centers of urbanized villages, TIBETan
areas will become more attractive to new settlers.
Andrew Fischer, a development economist who specializes in TIBET, reported
in August 2003 in London's TIBET Information Network News Update: “This
radical restructuring of the TAR economy, which has been accelerated since
the beginning of the Western Development Strategy in 1999, has been away
from productive activities such as agriculture and small-scale industry
and into urban services and large-scale construction projects. This is
despite the fact that the TAR, along with Yunnan, is the most agrarian and
rural province of China.” Because the TIBETans remain “unskilled” despite
more than four decades of “socio-economic development,” Beijing will once
again find itself constrained to invite “voluntary skilled personnel” from
China to man the service and construction projects in the newly urbanized
areas of TIBET.
Although it is not possible to obtain authoritative counts of the size the
Chinese population in TIBET, the presence of Chinese migrants is
well-pronounced in all the towns and cities. Chinese leaders from Mao
Zedong to Deng Xiaoping are on record as having suggested that Beijing has
a deliberate policy to send Chinese settlers to the sparsely populated
region of TIBET. A number of international government agencies have also
testified to the existence of such a policy. A CNN report in 2001 quoted
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell: “It’s a very difficult situation
right now with the Chinese sending more and more Han Chinese in to settle
TIBET. That seems to be a policy that might well destroy that society.”
As well as destroying the TIBETan society, China will also one day find
itself grappling with full-blown ethnic conflicts. From the Middle East to
Bosnia to Northern Ireland, the common variable of ethnic tension is the
transplantation of dominant groups to minority regions. These conflicts
have become so intractable that political analysts grimly predict that the
prospect of world peace and stability will become ever more elusive as the
combatants acquire deadlier weapons.
The leaders in Beijing would do well to learn from the painful experiences
of other countries and rethink their own policy of population transfer.
Thus far, whenever TIBETans and non-TIBETans have voiced concerns over
this policy, Beijing has reacted unrealistically by understating the
Chinese population in TIBET and denying the existence of such a policy.
This tactic is not surprising given that China has never shown willingness
to recognize its failings as far as the issue of TIBET is concerned. What
is perplexing, however, is that Beijing went out of its way to invite
foreign journalists to TIBET. In August 2003, 63 journalists and
camerapersons from 43 media companies participated in a
government-arranged tour that visited Tsetang, Shigatse, Gyantse, and
Lhasa. Certainly the Chinese leaders cannot be so simpleminded as to
believe that the journalists would accept the official line at face value.
But why else did the government invite them? Possibly the leaders in
Beijing had allowed themselves to be completely deluded by their own
propaganda about prosperous and happy TIBETans. Or perhaps, as some policy
experts suggest, Beijing is not getting true reports about the conditions
in TIBET from the local authorities.
By now it should be apparent to Beijing that TIBETans are not the happy
and prosperous lot the smiling faces depict on government propaganda
material. This realization should warrant willingness on Beijing’s part to
consider at least the possibility that there may after all be something in
His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s suggestion that China must look
realistically at the issue of TIBET. Such a move would be a big step
toward resolving the problem of TIBET, following China’s recent positive
gesture to host two visits by representatives of the Dalai Lama.
As the TIBETan leadership and international TIBET experts, including
Chinese scholars, have repeatedly said, lasting peace and stability in
TIBET will become possible only if Beijing works with the Dalai Lama to
address the real problems of TIBETans in TIBET, rather than pretending
that the issue of TIBET is about the personal status of the Dalai Lama and
members of the TIBETan Government-in-Exile.
Tendar is the first secretary of the Office of TIBET in New York City.
215 Prospect Street Cambridge, MA, 02139 • 617.441.5400 •
culturalsurvival@cs.org
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