In a room warmed by an open wood stove, Baima says her family converted their white-brick house into a hotel as the Chinese government ushers tens of millions of tourists to the politically sensitive region of Tibet.
Surrounded by mist-covered mountains, nearly 500km from the capital, Lhasa, and close to a disputed border with India, most of the houses in her remote village of Tashigang have followed suit and turned into homestays.
“We used to live a life of herding and farming,” the 27-year-old said. “Then the government encouraged us to run a hotel.”
Photo: AFP
The villagers — who speak Tibetan — have been given Mandarin classes to help them accommodate the Chinese guests whose arrival has boosted their income, but critics warn the surge of visitors risks eroding traditional ways of life.
“Opening hotels is not as hard as herding,” Baima said from her home packed with ornate wooden furniture and brightly painted walls.
Government officials looked on as she spoke.
Tibet is heavily restricted to foreign journalists, who have little chance to visit a sensitive region that Beijing says it “peacefully liberated” in 1951.
It has been near-impossible to report from Tibet independently since 2008, when violent protests broke out in Lhasa, and Beijing clamped down on access to the region and its residents.
Agence France-Presse (AFP) joined a Chinese government-steered tour to the region.
Tourism in Tibet fits with one of China’s key aims — poverty alleviation — but also, experts said, follows a pattern of co-opting and reshaping outlying areas with a history of resistance to Beijing’s rule.
Thirty-five million tourists flooded into the region last year, 10 times the entire population of Tibet.
That has prompted warnings that the influx could overwhelm traditional lifestyles and values.
“The cultural degradation that is involved in this case of hyper-managed mass tourism spectacle is very worrying,” said Robert Barnett of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. “It’s hard to identify though, since of course there is benefit for Tibetans in that trade; what is harder to quantify is the damage.”
Waves of Chinese have flocked to the region, attracted by the scenery, air of mystique and multitude of new transport links. Many dress in traditional Tibetan outfits and pose outside cultural landmarks in Lhasa.
Baima’s hamlet has 51 family hotels, officials said, tying the bulk of its residents to the tourism industry.
AFP did not see any tourists in the village on the visit.
“The government organizes cultural training, national common language training [and] catering industry training,” Chinese Communist Party official Chen Tiantian told a crowd of reporters on the state-organized trip, insisting the programs were “voluntary.”
“Now 80 percent of the people in the village can communicate in Mandarin,” she said.
Baima’s neighbor Cangjie, wearing an identical traditional dress with embroidered sleeves, said their lives have changed.
“With the arrival of outsiders, we are ... exposed to new things,” Cangjie said, four pictures of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) hanging from her walls.
Academics say that Beijing has pumped money into the region in the hope that economic growth would diminish separatist sentiment. Yet that carries the risk of the “commodification of culture,” Barnett said, adding that Beijing expects its investment to be repaid by “gratitude to the [Chinese Communist] Party for its generosity.”
Tashigang comes under the jurisdiction of Nyingtri — a modern city called Linzhi in Chinese that is being dubbed an “international tourism area” by the government, pulling in 8 million visitors last year.
“Our next goal is to strive for international tourists,” said Hu Xiongying from Lunang — Lulang in Chinese — a neighboring district that administers Tashigang.
However, most foreign passport holders are required to have an approved guide and special permit to enter Tibet, so the numbers are low, with only 270,000 international tourists visiting in 2019.
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