After cities, China sinicizing rural Tibet By Pema Thinley (TibetNet, 12 June 2007) THE PRETEXT IS to enable small farmers and herders to have access to schools and jobs, as well as better health care and hygiene. The manifest objective, however, is to strengthen political control and to make rural Tibet look modern and therefore more presentable to the outside world. In a massive campaign that recalls the socialist engineering of an earlier era, the Chinese government has relocated some 250,000 Tibetans--nearly one-tenth of the population of "Tibet Autonomous Region" (TAR)--from scattered rural hamlets to new "socialist villages," ordering them to build new housing largely at their own expense and without their consent, said Tim Johnson of the McClatchy Washington Bureau’s Beijing Bureau in a report published May 6. China calls the year-old project the "comfortable housing programme", with the new housing mostly located along main roads, sometimes only a mile from previous homes. The project comes ahead of an expected influx of millions of tourists in the run-up to next year's Summer Olympic Games to be held in Beijing. Foreign reporters seem to have had a mixed luck in finding out the truth about the project. Johnson reports that Tibetans, including farmers interviewed in the village of Zengshol, said they were happy to be in better quarters than their primitive, ancestral homes of mud brick. The answer, given in the presence of intimidating Chinese officials, was only to be expected. Johnson found that the farmers did not look exactly happy, but were obviously reluctant to voice complaints. But he notes that in other villages, Chinese escorts prevented a visiting reporter from speaking with residents. As a result of the new settlements, cookie-cutter houses, striking in their uniformity, now line the roads at regular intervals. The settlements vary in size but are mostly towns larger than the abandoned villages. The red flag of China flew atop every house. Peasants are required to take out loans worth several thousand US dollars to pay for the houses, which cost an average of $6,000, even though annual rural incomes hover around $320 in this deeply impoverished region, New York-based Human Rights Watch earlier cited witnesses as saying in a report on the issue. Johnson quoted Melvyn C Goldstein, a social anthropologist and expert on Tibet at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, USA, conducting research in the rural areas of Shigatse Prefecture, as saying, "I think it's phenomenally successful, more than I would've believed." However, in a letter May 8 to World Tibet Network News, Canada, Goldstein denies ever having made such a comment. Nevertheless, he does say the housing programme is part of the CCP's attempt to raise the standard of living of rural Tibetans and is also a part of the Western development programme initiated in 2000. He says the housing programme now underway is meant to encourage and financially assist villagers to build new houses. He says the government is giving grants, not loans, and the programme is popular in the areas he and his team are working and is voluntary. Nevertheless, these claims are totally at variance with the accounts of people who have escaped from Tibet, where villagers who criticize government policies, especially when speaking with foreigners, face punishment. Besides, the project does raise other significant questions, including social resentment that China is supposed to be eager to quell in Tibet. "There seems to be a lot of dissatisfaction," the report quoted Robert Barnett, a Tibet expert at Columbia University, as saying. "It's a massive project of social--I don't want to call it engineering--but of forced, heavily regulated social change without normal safeguards of consensus and consultation." The immediate problems created by the new housing include the absence of a place for keeping animals, the main source of the farmers’ livelihood, and the need to walk longer to reach their fields. The report noted that there were vast sociological implications to the programme. The Chinese already almost totally control Tibet's cities; now the focus has shifted to the countryside. "The cities are a loss" as far as Tibetans are concerned, Goldstein has admitted. "The last hope is to keep the villages intact. If there's a battleground for Tibetan identity, it's in the rural areas." But on a reporter’s 11-day trip, said Johnson, the rural areas, at least in appearance, appeared to be already coming under ever greater Chinese control. The Chinese news media have given almost no coverage to the forced relocation. China’s online Tibet news service Tibetinfor.com has been giving the false impression in its briefest of reports about it that the Tibetans were being given new, better houses entirely at state expense. The old homes were compulsorily pulled down. New York-based Human Rights Watch was the first to report on the re-housing scandal, based on interviews with Tibetans who had fled their occupied country. Johnson said foreign reporters, under tight strictures that largely prevent them from travelling to Tibet except on once-a-year trips under Foreign Ministry guidance, risk being removed from the region if they openly interview people. His own report was prepared while undertaking tourism in Tibet. Meanwhile, China’s online Tibet news service Tibetinfor.com (Title News) May 16 reported that 209 households in Lhasa will move into new houses at the end of Sep 2007. (The writer is the editor of Tibetan Review, a monthly English publication of news and features on Tibet and Tibetans. Views in this article are those of the writer and not necessarily those of the Central Tibetan Administration. The writer can be reached at pthinley@gmail.com)

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Last updated: 12-June-2007