By mid-morning, Lobsang’s leather cowboy hat is askew, his black robes disheveled and his breath stinks of booze. Once a nomad herder roaming the high Tibetan plateau, instead he stumbles around his sparse new concrete house.
For decades he and his wife grazed yaks and sheep, living a life little changed in centuries, until they acquiesced three years ago to government calls to give up their yak-hair tents for permanent housing. Now they live in a resettlement village, row after row of identical blue-roofed gray shells, an hour’s drive from Aba in Sichuan Province along winding mountain roads.
“Everything changed when we moved to this town,” said Tashi, who like her husband is in her 40s, but not sure of her exact age. “First we ran out of money, then he couldn’t find suitable work, and then he started drinking more and more.”
Photo: AFP
Chinese authorities say urbanization in Tibetan areas and elsewhere will increase industrialization and economic development, offering former nomads higher living standards and better protecting the environment.
Those who move receive an urban hukou — China’s strictly controlled internal residence permits that determine access to social services. The government offers free or heavily subsidized houses, medical insurance and free schooling, but critics say the drive has a one-size-fits-all approach and many former pastoralists have not prospered, despite its promises.
Unlike the voluntary urbanization of the early 2000s, when many adults maintained subsistence lifestyles while sending children and the elderly into towns, Andrew Fischer of the International Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University in Rotterdam said: “The policy lock, stock and barrel shoves nomads into these resettlements thinking that is good for them, but then that gives rise to a variety of related problems like unemployment, social problems, alcoholism, et cetera, which are typical hallmarks of rapid social dislocation.”
Photo: AFP
At the resettlement facility, many former herders complained they lacked work or training.
Dolkar, 42, sold his last 13 yaks for 85,000 yuan (US$13,000) two years ago, a decision he now regrets, and has yet to find stable employment.
“I thought this was a lot of money, but I didn’t realize things in the town would be so expensive,” he said. “A person from the government came and convinced me I should move, but now I see I’ve lost so much. I want to go back, but it’s too late.”
Available urban jobs are low-wage, manual positions in construction or sanitation, but many nomads shun menial labor, having enjoyed wealthy status in the Tibetan community by virtue of their valuable livestock holdings.
“Sending people to urban areas only helps if there are jobs there,” Fischer said. “It’s not like everyone can become a petty entrepreneur selling dumplings in the marketplace, the jobs need to be there and in the absence of that the government moving them to urban areas isn’t going to help.”
Critics say one goal of the urbanization campaign is to give authorities more oversight over the people of Tibet, which has been ruled by Beijing since 1951.
The resettlement village is in what was Kham, the eastern part of preinvasion Tibet, where Khampa warriors fought Chinese Communist Party forces, sometimes with CIA backing, until the late 1960s.
Since 2000, government statistics show that urban residents have leaped by about 60 percent in the Tibet region itself, where officials launched a program five years ago to establish communist cadre teams in every locality.
The region’s top Chinese Communist Party official, Chen Quanguo (陳全國), has said each village should become a “fortress” to “guard against and combat the infiltration of Tibetan separatist forces.”
Urbanization efforts “concentrate people into areas where they are far easier to surveil and where they become more dependent on state subsidies to survive — in other words, where they are easier to control,” Human Rights Watch China director Sophie Richardson said.
Environmental experts also say that rather than protecting mountain pastures, the policy has damaged their ecology, allowing invasive weeds to proliferate and changing the nature of the soil.
“Not using these grasslands long term doesn’t work,” Inner Mongolia Academy of Agricultural & Animal Husbandry Sciences Grassland Research Institute deputy director Sun Jie (孫傑) said.
“It’s always been natural for grasslands to be used for grazing, the plants and the soil need it for healthy growth,” she said. “Otherwise, poor quality foliage moves in and contributes to soil decline.”
Across China, urbanization is a top economic priority, with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) calling it the nation’s “grand strategy for modernization” at a 2014 policy meeting, but benefits such as running water have come at the cost of Tibetan former nomads’ sense of identity, with many complaining their sons and daughters are taught almost entirely in Mandarin.
“My children will never know our history, they won’t understand our Tibetan traditions,” said Dorje, who moved into the resettlement camp six years ago and occasionally works odd jobs. “My grandchildren will never know I used to be a respected and wealthy man, they will only know poverty.”
India and Canada yesterday reached a string of agreements, including on critical mineral cooperation and a “landmark” uranium supply deal for nuclear power, the countries’ leaders said in New Delhi. The pacts, which also covered technology and promoting the use of renewable energy, were announced after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney hailed a fresh start in the relationship between their nations. “Our ties have seen a new energy, mutual trust and positivity,” Modi said. Carney’s visit is a key step forward in ties that effectively collapsed in 2023 after Ottawa accused New Delhi
Gaza is rapidly running out of its limited fuel supply and stocks of food staples might become tight, officials said, after Israel blocked the entry of fuel and goods into the war-shattered territory, citing fighting with Iran. The Israeli military closed all Gaza border crossings on Saturday after announcing airstrikes on Iran carried out jointly with the US. Israeli authorities late on Monday night said that they would reopen the Kerem Shalom crossing from Israel to Gaza yesterday, for “gradual entry of humanitarian aid” into the strip, without saying how much. Israeli authorities previously said the crossings could not be operated safely during
Counting was under way in Nepal yesterday, after a high-stakes parliamentary election to reshape the country’s leadership following protests last year that toppled the government. Key figures vying for power include former Nepalese prime minister K. P. Sharma Oli, rapper-turned-mayor Balendra Shah, who is bidding for the youth vote, and newly elected Nepali Congress party leader Gagan Thapa. In Kathmandu’s tea shops and city squares, people were glued to their phones, checking results as early trends flashed up — suggesting Shah’s centrist Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) was ahead. Nepalese Election Commission spokesman Prakash Nyupane said the counting was ongoing “in a peaceful manner”
‘APARTHEID WALL’: Critics said the wall would not stop crime, and that it aimed to hide the poor and the fact that there is a privileged and privilege-deprived Cape Town Cape Town’s plans to build a wall to prevent attacks on the airport highway have divided South Africa’s tourist hotspot, with critics calling it an apartheid throwback to hide poverty. The nearly 9km wall would separate part of the road that leads in from the international airport from the packed, impoverished settlements that line the route. Attacks — some deadly — have been reported for years along the busy multi-lane route, including hijackings and smash-and-grab ambushes. “They’ll come with a stone and break the windscreen,” e-hailing driver Mustafa Hashim said, recounting stories of attacks on the corridor known as the “N2 hell
RSS