The Chinese Government makes constant claims about the improvements that have been made in terms of development in Tibet. In fact China uses the word "development" as a metaphor for their involvement in Tibet since the 1950s. The 50 years under Communist control are presented as a time of enormous growth and alleviation of suffering.(1)

China's government constantly asserts that while there have been difficulties and hardships, things are getting better all the time, and constructional development, in the form of highways, bridges, dams and buildings, is the touchstone for prosperity in people's lives.(2)

According to Chinese governmental doctrine the "primitive and barbarian" pre-communist Tibet is currently transformed into a new "modern" Tibet under the "benevolent" rule of China. From the First Forum on Work in Tibet in 1980 to the Third in 1994, projects to construct highways, hydropower stations, etc. abounded and the continuous disturbance drastically changed the face of Tibet.

But if we look closely at some of these changes and claims we can begin to see the design underlying China's development strategies. Firstly, China aims to totally assimilate Tibetan regions within the People's Republic of China. China has achieved that end by inter-linking Tibet with Chinese cities and pouring thousands of Chinese immigrants onto the plateau. Secondly, to improve its international image and to legitimize its presence in Tibet, China publicizes the sums sent as subsidies for development work in Tibet - a "primitive wasteland".

However, China has never disclosed the actual amount it reaps every year since its occupation from the wholesale looting of cultural treasures during the Cultural Revolution, deforestation and indiscriminate mining projects. The income China accrues from exploiting Tibet's natural resources - such as timber, minerals, oil and animal products - far outweighs the few billion yuan it spends in "developing" Tibet.

Furthermore, China uses development as an antidote to Tibetan nationalism, and a means to solve the rising "separatist activities". The Chinese Government has been increasingly transparent about its strategy of using economic growth and "development" to quell Tibetan resistance.

Most recently Vice-President Hu Jintao, who is also a member of the CCP Central Standing Committee, Political Bureau Standing Committee, commented, "The continuous development of Tibet's economic construction and other social undertakings and the achievements attained in recent years are inseparable from our efforts to maintain social stability."(3)

Given that China has had 50 years to develop Tibet, it really has not matched its claims with any marked improvements and the negative impacts of those developments far outweigh any claimed positive ones.(4) Most of the current development projects facilitate the transfer of Chinese settlers or workers to Tibetan areas, and employ a sizeable and disproportionate number of Chinese. By doing so China consolidates Beijing's control and occupation of Tibet.

During the Third Work Forum, China's then Premier Li Peng announced that China "must expedite Tibet's development and we are fully able to speed Tibet's development". He urged the authorities in "TAR" to firstly ponder on the principle that economic construction was the key while simultaneously promoting "develop-ment and stability". Secondly, the administration is instructed "to step up the pace of reform and opening up' to provide stronger impetus to economic development. And lastly, to invite the enthusiasm of the state for the whole country to support Tibet as well as the willingness of Tibet to achieve self-reliance and be determined to improve infrastructure while building to nurture economic growth and strengthen stamina.

Following the Third Work Forum, "TAR" Communist Party has determined a development strategy for Tibet with a social foundation of a united, prosperous and civilized socialist Tibet(5).

Also, the Third Work Forum established that:

Tibet's economic growth rate will be maintained at about 10 per cent. With that growth rate, Tibet's GNP will be greatly raised by the year 2000, double that of 1993. This growth rate will be greatly higher than the region's six per cent average growth rate between 1981 and 1993 and higher than the eight to nine per cent in the national plan. By then, Tibet will have basically realised self-sufficiency in grain and oil and will have fulfilled the task of eradicating poverty, with the majority of the masses enjoying comparatively well off living standards.

The general level of Tibet's national economy and social undertakings in their entirety will be elevated by a wide margin. The installed generating capacity [power] will be double the existing capacity. Programme-controlled telephone exchanges will be installed in all counties, with 80 per cent of them linked to the national long-distance automatic exchange network. Every county will boast a secondary school and every township a complete primary school, with 80 per cent of school-age children attending. Medical services and public health conditions will be improved markedly and the radio and television broadcast coverage area will be greatly increased.

Development's deeper agenda

To avoid a territorial disaster, as witnessed with the break up of the Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia, China is trying hard to close the economic disparity between its rich eastern coastal regions and poor underdeveloped western regions by a new mass campaign of "revamp the west" and make it more habitable for prospective Chinese settlers.

This much-ballyhooed large-scale Western Development Programme received overwhelming support from Beijing, overseas Chinese and foreign investors. Unlike previous regional five-year plans, this one encompasses 5.4 million sq. kms. and 300 million people across six provinces (Gansu, Guizhou, Qinghai, Shaanxi, Sichuan and Yunnan), three autonomous regions (Ningxia, Tibet and Xinjiang) and one city (Chongqing).

According to the People's Daily, March 20, 2000, the government has announced that it "will make its first investment of 31 billion yuan (US$ 3.7 billion) this year to develop the infrastructure in its western regions". Later, in June, the Chinese Government disclosed a list of 225 projects ranging from agricultural to high-tech sectors, tourism, mining, electronic equipment manufacturing etc., with preferential policies for foreign investors to attract more capital(6) . According to China Daily, "by the end of May 2000, 349,537 foreign companies or enterprises have made investments in [western] China and contracted capital exceeded US$63.3 billion"(7) .

Out of the total 5.4 million sq. km., 2.5 million sq. km. constitute Tibetan areas of U-Tsang, Kham and Amdo. Chen Kuiyuan, in his March 2000 interview with Renmin Ribao staff reporter, acknowledged that this Large-scale Western Development Programme is a chance to take "advantage" of exploiting Tibet's natural resources "both on and under the ground". And as said, for Tibet, the new programme of large-scale development means nothing more than a vehicle for further suppression or colonization of the land and people.

Despite China's avowed aim to alleviate poverty by a certain year and modernize the whole of Tibet, its real intention is to make the Tibetans a minority in their own land through mass population transfer under the banner of "economic development".

Most of the large-scale development projects announced so far for Tibet have been major public works projects: highways, rail lines, international airports and natural gas pipelines that will eventually extend from Amdo's (Ch: Qinghai) Tsaidam Basin all the way to China's coastal city of Shanghai and fertilizer factories will soon meet China's agriculture needs.

Undoubtedly these developmental projects have an underlying agenda to further dilute the Tibetan population and intensify the process of Sinicization.

Results of 'poverty alleviation'

In February 2000 China announced that this year would see poverty eradicated from Tibet. And already, in its February 2000 Human Rights White Paper, Beijing stated that 95 per cent of rural dwellers in the whole of China have enough to eat and wear and that the targets "to solve the problems of food and clothing of the entire Chinese people, and to enable them to live a relatively comfortable life, have already been basically achieved".(8)

In its master plan to eradicate poverty in Tibet, China has focussed heavily on income generation in certain areas of the plateau, hoping that a rise in income statistics - taken out of the context of the many other accepted indicators of poverty such as health, education, nutrition, clothing, housing, quality of life, access to the right to development and so on - will show that poverty in Tibet has been conquered. Furthermore, increases in income statistics often reflect a change from barter to market economics and can paint a false picture of prosperity even when the replacing market economy is entirely insufficient for people's needs but the pre-existing barter economy provided amply.

Even so, vast rural areas on the plateau remain neglected. This raises important questions in terms of access to the development and wealth-generation that is occurring in Tibet. The current rampant development is large-scale, inappropriate, and largely alien to the traditional economy and rich local community life.

Beijing's claims about poverty eradication are purely money-based. In China's latest statistics on income, there are marked differences between urban and rural, and real questions must be asked about the means of calculating such figures by the authorities. Chinese figures state that in 1998 the average annual per capita income of rural Tibetans in the "TAR" was 1,158 yuan, (US$ 144.75 ) while the average income of predominantly Chinese populated urban areas in "TAR" was 5,400 yuan (US$ 675) per annum.(9)

These numbers can be compared to incomes in China as a whole. The average annual income per rural resident in China was 2,162 yuan (US$ 270.25) in 1998, almost double that in "TAR" for the same period, while the average annual income per urban Chinese resident was an equivalent 5,425 yuan (US$ 678.125) in 1998.(10)

This equalization of urban income fits into China's strategy to focus on urban centres in Tibet. China claims that this leaves only 110,000 poor people in "TAR", but as we can see the rural figure in itself leaves Tibetans in the countryside in "TAR" earning nearly half the "one dollar per person per day" global poverty measure (if based on the official exchange rate of roughly one US dollar to eight yuan).

Not only is it true that a narrow focus on income will not give a clear or accurate picture of the level of poverty in its many senses, but the average annual income measure in itself often underestimates the real extent of deprivation by not looking at issues such as access to health and education, the nature of subsistence production, the gap between official income statistics and actual consumption, and more detailed surveys of the standards of living in Tibetan areas.

It is often difficult to find accurate statistics for Tibetans living in areas outside of the "TAR" such as those domiciled in Gansu, Yunnan, Sichuan and Qinghai provinces (erstwhile Amdo and Kham).

There are also indications that the inequalities developing in Tibet go beyond the urban/rural divide. Amdo is relatively more developed than other areas of the plateau; in 1998 the per capita income of farmers in Amdo rose to 1,347 yuan (US$ 168.38) with that of herdsmen at 2,300 yuan (US$ 287.5).(11) These figures still fall well below acceptable rates but begin to reflect regional inequalities.(12)

As the International Commission of Jurists states in their 1997 report, 70 per cent of Tibetans in the "TAR" are living below the poverty line.

In UNDP's 1997 China Human Development Report, the "TAR" and other Tibetan areas ranked lowest on the Human Development Index of China.

Even the Poverty Alleviation Projects launched by China, such as the US$5.5 million UN World Food Program Project in Amdo (Qinghai), are aimed at increasing wheat production for Chinese consumption rather than barley which is the subsistence food of Tibetans(13). The report further argued that in the 1990s, "nearly all Tibetans continue to exist at subsistence level, their lives little touched by China's massive investment in Tibetan infrastructure and superstructure."(14)

Despite China's assertion about its successes in alleviation of poverty and hunger elsewhere in Mainland China, there are many indications that in Tibet poverty and basic subsistence issues dominate the daily structure of life. Over the years, there is little evidence to suggest that this situation has changed, and heavy taxation continues to burden the households of rural Tibet.

Environmental destruction

China's compulsion to "develop" Tibet's economy threatens any attempt to protect the environment. Over the 40 years since its occupation, China has marked, surveyed, mapped, and paved every knoll with any kind of natural resources, and looted minerals, timber, oil and animal products to transport to China; this has resulted in economic marginalization of Tibetans in their own homeland and caused irreversible harm to Tibet's natural environment.

Tibet was once an environmental paradise where species were abundant, unfettered by extensive human contact, protected and respected and Tibetans lived harmoniously with nature. Today in Tibet the escalating environmental destruction and degradation is a cause for great concern (for current data refer to Tibet 2000 Environment and Development Issues).

Massive and rapid urbanization - along with many excessive development projects like big mining sectors, large hydropower stations, and huge infrastructure maintenance - has caused severe environmental degradation and displacement of Tibetans and wildlife. Ecological crises such as water pollution, deforestation, extinction of rare endemic species, soil erosion, climate change, dumping of nuclear materials and wastes and unrestricted mining threaten not only Tibet, but every downstream and neighbouring region.

With China's policies of development, industralization, resource extraction and population transfer, extensive interventions in Tibet's rivers and lakes have occurred. The massive network of dams in Amdo has resulted in disastrous river fragmentation while deforestation is destroying hydro-ecology in the upper reaches of the Yangtze, Mekong and Brahmaputra rivers - all of which originate in Tibet. With China's intensive drive to extract minerals, most rivers on the plateau have been experiencing pollution from toxic mining wastes.

After the Yangtze River's floods of August 1998 and 1999, which resulted in a human death toll of 3,656, an economic loss of US$37.5 billion, and affected more than 66 million people, China - in a significant ideological departure - admitted its culpability due to deforestation of upstream regions and imposed logging bans on those areas(15). Even in its current Large-scale Western Development Programme, China has outlined reforestation and environment protection projects for the upper reaches of the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong rivers as one of its major priorities.

With China's desire to become a respected world power and be a member of the World Trade Organization, the role of "good international citizen" is a priority in its national policy. Environmental diplomacy is a chosen vehicle to enhance Beijing's standing internationally. In actuality, China painfully lacks in environmental protection, legislation, and policy enforcement. Development with blatant disregard for environmental protection will only escalate in the 21st century - especially in Tibet.

Population transfer

An integral part of China's current mass demographic strategy focuses on limiting population growth among minorities in the "backward" western part of the country.(16) With its expertise in propagating oxymoronic rhetoric to justify its ill deeds, China claims, "the rising population in the west, where most ethnic minorities live, could adversely affect regional development as population growth is putting increasing pressure on the environment and resources in the (western) regions". Simultaneously, China is trying to woo Chinese migrants to western regions - including Tibet - by offering them discriminatory incentives of higher wages and a more lenient childbearing policy, ostensibly due to the sparse population of those regions.

The Chinese occupation of Tibet has been characterized by various attempts to diminish Tibetan identity - either through direct violence or structural means such as assimilation. One such indirect means of attempting to change and control the nature of Tibetan culture and identity has been the encouragement of Chinese population transfer into Tibet.(17)

A transfer mostly of officials and army personnel into Tibet marked the early period of the Chinese invasion. Since the 1980s, with the Chinese decision to integrate Tibet into China's economy and social structure, we see a conscious decision by the Chinese government to transfer Chinese peasants, agricultural workers and other groups of labourers and traders into Tibet.(18)

During the Third Work Forum, further decisions were made to implement the Chinese Government's policy to integrate Tibet within the structure of China's economic needs. The major thrust of the implementation strategy was "to open Tibet's door wide to inner parts of the country and encourage traders, investment, economic units and individuals from China to Central Tibet to run different sorts of enterprises."(19)

The population transfer of ethnic Chinese into Tibet has been massive and further enforced by the presence of over 200,000 troops.(20) From the era prior to the 1940s, when there were virtually no Chinese in Tibet,(21) Chinese settlers today outnumber Tibetans in Tibet by "7 to 7.5 million to 6.1 million".(22)

The population transfer of Chinese settlers into Tibet has had devastating economic effects on Tibetans. Settlers, encouraged by government incentives, arrive in search of jobs in an industrialized Tibet. Their presence threatens the livelihood of the Tibetans and is central to the government's integration of the Tibetan economy into the Chinese economy. Chinese settlers have come to dominate the Tibetan economy, and they own virtually all the businesses there.(23)

There appears to be a strong degree of segregation between the mainly urban Chinese settlers and Tibetans in remote areas such as the nomads.

In addition, there is a trend of transferring poor Chinese to Tibet through various resettlement schemes such as the Western Poverty Reduction Project. Although the World Bank withdrew its US$40 million loan to this project, China seems quite adamant that it will go ahead with its own money. The project aims to transfer 58,000 Chinese into the Dulan area of Amdo.

Population transfer into Tibet is one of the greatest threats to Tibetan culture and identity. It also has a great impact on the kind of development that takes place in Tibet. Beijing's subsidies, and much of the infrastructure in place, have been directed at maintaining a distinct, controlling Chinese community in Tibet. This can be seen to be mainly urban, administrative, mercantile or military, and segregated from the bulk of Tibetan communities. The much-heralded, Chinese-sponsored infra-structure projects such as highways, mines and housing have mainly been built to facilitate this settlement, fulfil military objectives and to expedite resource extraction. Subsidized economic growth has encouraged and facilitated Chinese settlement as part of the wider attempt to absorb Tibet.

But in many ways this process has been one-sided and has left much of Tibet's urban landscape Sinicized. Population transfer has also impacted on Tibetan access to land, food and meaningful employment. Tibetans are becoming a minority in their own country, excluded from participating in and benefiting from the development that is being carried out on their land and in their name.

Poverty of development

As the eminent economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen states, freedom is indispensable to development. China's claim to "developing" Tibet is based on Beijing's policies of pursuing economic growth at the cost of destroying Tibet's environment and further disempowering Tibet's people in their homeland.

Thus, in reality, Chinese policy is creating two economies and two societies in Tibet: the urban, wealthy Chinese economy, and the rural poor, undercapitalized Tibetan economy. Also the gap between the official discourse of development and the lives of the people is often blurred by the use of impressive facts and figures. Any development that has taken place in Tibet, rather than benefiting the Tibetan people has actually occurred at their cost resulting in a violation of their socio-economic rights, or broadly their right to development.

The reason why China's development programmes are of no benefit to the majority of Tibetans is clear from the explanation of the Australian Agency for International Development, an agency of the Australian government, which was hired by China to evaluate investment in the Tibetan area of Amdo. The agency concluded that the Chinese subsidies pump money into large superstructures rather than targeting the poor. This approach to poverty alleviation places emphasis on activities that are project oriented in nature and not necessarily on the participation of the poor in identifying and developing solutions to their poverty. It also places emphasis on large enterprise activities and does not target poor households.(24)

The large, cost-intensive projects create such developments as dams and roads that do not directly raise the local income. Not only is much of the budget of large-scale projects spent on equipment, manpower, and materials imported from the Chinese lowlands, but a large fraction is also drained off by the cost of project management. Also the subsidies Beijing regularly give to Tibet have a direct effect on the GDP but do not help the poor in raising their income. Because the wages paid to the construction workers is included in the gross domestic product (GDP), increased subsidies to non-Tibetans will immediately increase the GDP.

For instance official Chinese reports are not short of statements like, "The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the Tibetan Autonomous Region was 3 billion yuan in 1992 and 3.6 billion yuan in 1993. But by 1997 it was 7.35 billion yuan, an increase of 83.57 % since 1993 in adjusted terms and representing an annual increase of 12.9%."(25) Recently China's Statistics Bureau reported that for 1999, "TAR's GDP reached 10.335 billion yuan, up 9.1 percent over 1998, and surpassing the national average for six consecutive years."(26) But what is this rise in GDP, if the lives of the average people are still filled with impoverishment?

Since changes in Tibet have been taken with a preconceived notion of the desired future for Tibet, Beijing could listen to the actual needs of Tibetans in so far as the populace agreed to fall into line with the projects designed for them. Any discordant observations or behaviour on the part of Tibetans will be seen as some kind of deviance or attributed to a "splittist movement" backed by the "Dalai Clique" with "paralysing influence on progress" and will lead to the prison cell or even death.

The Tibetan Government-in-Exile (TGIE) instead of being a "paralysing influence on progress", as China puts it, eagerly awaits some positive development in Tibet leading to real prosperity for nomads and farmers. In Guidelines for International Development Projects and Sustainable Investment in Tibet TGIE even encourages western investors to participate in the sustainable development of the plateau.

TGIE looks to the future for sustainable developments on the plateau that will enhance the ability of Tibetans to fully participate in any transformation of their land and to retain control over their natural resources. Also any projects that empower, educate, employ Tibetans and promote the culture, language and identity of Tibetans are highly encouraged by Tibetans in and outside Tibet.

NOTES:

1. "New Progress in Human Rights in the Tibet Autonomous Region", Beijing, February 1998, pp. 2, 13, 16
2. "50 Years of Progress in China's Human Rights", Xinhua, Beijing, in English, February 17, 2000
3. "NPC Tibet Deputies", Xinhua, March 7, 2000
4. "Developing Tibet? A Survey of International Development Projects, Cultural Survival", Ann Forbes and Carole McGranahan, The International Campaign for Tibet, May 1992, pp. 108-110
5. TIN News Review No. 22. November 8, 1994
6. "Western projects list released" Jiang Chen, China Daily, June 23, 2000
7. ibid
8. "50 Years of Progress in China's Human Rights", Xinhua, Beijing, in English 0632 gmt February 17, 2000 9. Xinhua, September 26, 1999
10. "50 Years of Progress in China's Human Rights", Xinhua, Beijing, in English 0632 gmt February 17, 2000
11. "Agricultural Conditions Improved in Qinghai", Xinhua, Beijing, in English 0930 gmt October 10, 1999
12. See further Gabriel Lafitte, "Remaking the West: China's New Mass Campaign for Development of Western China", Seminar 5 in "Tomorrow's Tibet", Department of Information and International Relations, Dharamsala, March 15, 2000, p9
13. International Commission of Jurists, "Tibet: Human Rights and the Rule of Law," p148
14. ibid
15. "Water Resources" Tibet 2000: Environment and Development Issues, DIIR, p30
16. "China curbs births in the west, but wants more people to move there" Beijing, August 18, 2000 Agence France Presse
17. Tibet: Tightening of Control, Annual Report 1999 Human Rights Violation in Tibet, TCHRD, Dharamsala 2000, pp75-81
18. Tibetan Youth Congress, Strangers in their Own Country: Chinese Population Transfer in Tibet and its Impacts, 1994. See also Tsewang Phuntso, "China's Development Policy in Tibet Since the Early 195Os", DIIR, September 1999
19. Speech given by Raidi, Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Tibetan Regional Congress on September 5 1994 at the Seventh Plenum of the Sixth Standing Committee Session of the TAR Communist Party and distributed internally as "Document No. 5", quoted in Tsewang Phuntso, "China's Development Policy in Tibet Since the Early 195Os", DIIR
20. International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet and Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, The Case Concerning Tibet: Tibet's Sovereignty and The Tibetan People's Right to Self-Determination, Tibetan Parliamentary and Policy Research Centre, New Delhi, December 1998, p70
21. ICLT, The Case Concerning Tibet, p 68
22. International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet, "The Relationship Between Environmental Management and Human Rights in Tibet", A Report Prepared for the U.N. Special Rapporteur for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment, July 1992, p11. A comprehensive study of population transfer conducted in 1995 by the Tibet Support Group (UK) arrived at a more conservative figure while confirming the unreliability of Chinese official statistics for Tibet. They estimate that the total of non-Tibetans in ethnographic Tibet is between 5 and 5.5 million, while noting that Chinese statistics from 1990 put the total Tibetan population at 4.59 million. Tibet Support Group UK, New Majority: Chinese Population Transfer into Tibet, London 1995, esp. pp 157-159
23. International Commission of Jurists, Tibet: Human Rights and the Rule of Law, p117
24. The Australian Agency for International Development, Qinghai Community Development Project: Project Implementation Document, pp 12-19, May 1995.
25. "1999: A Golden Year", China's Tibet, Vol.10, No. 1, 1999
26. "China Facts and Figures on Tibet in 1999", People's Daily, February 8, 2000

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Last updated: 29-September-2000