II. Origin of Rehousing and Relocation Policies

Since the early 1950s, the Chinese government has carried out a variety of policies to modernize and remodel Tibetan rural society and to encourage the sedentarization of nomadic or semi-nomadic people. These efforts have always been closely associated with larger goals: developing the economy, intensifying exploitation of the Tibetan plateau’s natural resources, and securing political control over an ethnic minority in a region where the legitimacy of Chinese rule remains contested.

Tibet’s current relocation and rehousing policies can be traced to the 1994 Third Work Conference on Tibet , which introduced a strategy combining rapid economic growth with increased political and religious repression designed to curtail the Dalai Lama’s influence.[18] All major policies introduced since that session are a continuation of this basic design, implemented through regional Five-Year Plans designed by central government authorities.[19]

This section provides an overview of these policies and their rehousing and relocation components, starting with the launch of the Great Development of the West in 2000 and culminating in the Leapfrog Development strategy introduced in 2010.[20] It also provides a brief overview of the debate about whether Tibetans have benefited from this economic growth.

The Great Development of the West (2000)

The launch of the national “Great Development of the West” (xibu da kaifa) campaign in 2000 heralded an era of major changes in Tibetan areas, with significant implications for farmers and herders through the introduction of “environmental migration schemes.”[21]

The campaign, officially aimed at “eliminating regional disparities gradually, strengthening the unity of ethnic groups, ensuring safety and social stability and promoting progress,” was a watershed in the state’s attempt to integrate ethnic minority areas.[22] It combined major infrastructure investments, especially in transportation and energy; a massive increase in exploitation of natural resources; renewed efforts to draw foreign and domestic investment; and closer integration with developed areas in the eastern part of China.

The campaign also encompassed major projects aimed at responding to what central government policymakers saw as mounting environmental crises marked by increased desertification, degradation of grassland, deforestation, and declining water resources. The government decided to invest in several major environmental protection programs and to develop programs to resettle populations outside areas designated as ecologically fragile, a strategy referred to as “environmental migration” (shengtai yimin).[23]

Two environmental migration schemes introduced then, and still in place today, entail at times relocating communities:

1. “Reverting farmland to forest” (tuigeng huanlin), which entails planting trees on marginal farmland to reduce the threat of soil erosion.[24] In Tibetan areas, this policy requires farmers to provide labor and other inputs for tree planting, and to move off their land and seek alternative livelihoods, though they are given some initial subsidies to help in this transition. In some areas, the policy has been used to justify arbitrary land confiscation. Some schemes have been poorly implemented, leading to adverse ecological consequences.[25] In other places, villagers have been able to take advantage of the policy to receive subsidies from the state, though the ecological benefits remain dubious.
2. “Reverting pasture to grassland” (tuimu huancao), which aims at reversing degradation in pastoral regions by imposing total, temporary, or seasonal bans on grazing.[26] The comprehensive overhaul of the Grassland Law in 2002 increased governmental power to limit herds and resettle people to “protect, develop and make rational use of grasslands.”[27]

The New Socialist Countryside and the Comfortable Housing Campaign (2005-present)

In 2005, radical plans to transform the housing of rural Tibetans in the TAR as part of an effort to improve “the production and living conditions of farmers and herdsmen, and increase their income” were introduced as part of the nation-wide initiative to “Build a New Socialist Countryside” (jianshe xin shehuizhuyi nongcun).[28]

The campaign entails establishing “New Socialist Villages” (xinshehuizhuyi nongcun), “close to communications, transportation and economic activity,” through the renovation or remodeling of villages and settlements, and the construction of new villages where relocation is thought necessary. It also entails providing “eight connections to rural homes” (badao nongjia): water, electricity, natural gas, roads, telecommunications, state media broadcasting, postal services, and an “exquisite environment.”[29]

The “Comfortable Housing” policy (anjugongcheng)—one of the key efforts discussed in this report—was launched in 2006 to carry out the renovation or reconstruction of individual homes as part of the New Socialist Villages policy.[30] According to the government’s 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-2010), the campaign was to ensure that 80 percent of Tibetan farmers and herders in the TAR—1.4 million people—would live in “safe and suitable housing within five years.”[31]

The scope and speed of execution of the Comfortable Housing campaign in the TAR are unprecedented. At the end of 2012, the TAR government reported having met the objectives for the 2006-2012 period, with “2.1 million farmers and herdsmen [having] moved into affordable houses since the affordable housing project started.”[32] About 20 percent, or 280,000 people, of those rehoused between 2006 and 2010 had to be relocated.[33] Post-2010 relocation figures are not available. In February 2011, the TAR government announced its intention to rehouse and relocate 185,000 rural households, or about 900,000 people, within three years.[34]

The Leapfrog Development Strategy (2010)

In January 2010, the central government convened the Fifth National Work Conference on Tibet to design policies in response to the 2008 Tibetan protests. Maintaining its view that its Tibet policies “[had] been proved to be entirely correct,” and confident in the fact that economic growth was the best strategy to counter rising tensions, the government announced an even more ambitious rapid-growth strategy for Tibet, called the “ Leapfrog Development Strategy” (kuayueshi fazhan zhanlüe).[35]

The “Leapfrog Development Strategy” is characterized by even greater investment and even broader plans to spur economic growth and further reorganize the Tibetan countryside.[36] For the first time, the strategy includes Tibetan areas outside of the TAR. Its stated objective is to raise the per capita net income of farmers and herders in Tibet to “close to the national level” by 2020.[37] The “Leapfrog Development Strategy” includes “the combination of economic growth, well-off life, a healthy eco-environment, and social stability and progress,” state media quoted President Hu Jintao as saying at the conference.[38]

The establishment of New Socialist Villages through rehousing, renovation and relocation are a key element of the “Leapfrog Development Strategy.” Government experts claimed that the rationale is to bypass the otherwise long and uncertain process of gradually bringing development and modernity to a vast minority nationality region lagging far behind the rest of the country. In those regions, this view holds, development is hindered by factors including dispersion across a vast, relatively inaccessible territory; differences in settlement patterns that complicate the design and implementation of national development strategies; cultural barriers that prevent or slow the introduction of new policies; and traditional modes of subsistence that are considered incompatible with modernization and the rational exploitation of local natural resources.[39]

To that end, the “Leapfrog Development Strategy” includes a continuation of the radical mass relocation programs initiated under the “ecological migration” and comfortable housing campaigns. In addition to plans in the TAR to relocate over 900,000 people by the end of 2014, the Qinghai government announced in 2009 its ambition to permanently settle all Tibetan herders in the province—over half a million people—by 2014.[40]

The Comfortable Housing policy and the settlement of nomadic communities have also been expanded to other areas with significant ethnic minority populations, also on an unprecedented scale and with unusual speed: the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, home to 8.5 million Turkic-speaking Uighurs, announced it was aiming at rehousing and relocating 1.5 million households between 2011 and 2015 as part of the Comfortable Housing campaign there, at a cost of over 3 billion Yuan.[41] It also announced that 272,000 herding households (about 760,000 people) would be settled within 10 years.[42]

Also reflecting the acceleration of nomad settlement policies, in June 2011, the State Council ordered all 13 provinces with significant grasslands, including Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, to “basically complete the relocation and settlement of nomad [programs] by the end of 2015.”[43] A state media interview with an official from the State Development and Reform Commission (SDRC) in August 2011 noted that the State Council directive was based on the findings of a report by a “joint special investigation task force” involving 28 ministries.[44] Despite the fact that this plan entails the relocation of several hundred thousand people across the country within just four years, there is very little evidence that any consultations were carried out and the report itself has not been made public.[45]

Who Benefits?

The high-growth policies implemented by the central government since the mid-1990s have greatly transformed conditions in the Tibetan plateau.

According to official statistics, the TAR economy more than quadrupled from 1997 to 2007, consistently growing at a faster rate than the rest of the country.[46] Between 2005 and 2010, the average per capita income of farmers and herders doubled, while the number of households earning the lowest income was almost halved, decreasing from 964,000 to slightly over half a million.[47] The tourism industry expanded rapidly, with a tenfold increase in the number of tourists between 2000 and 2010, thanks in part to the new railway and the renovation of the Lhasa airport. In part as a result of these developments, the proportion of farmers and herders in the rural work force decreased significantly, from 76 percent in 1999 to 56 percent in 2008.[48]

Yet socio-economic tensions also became more acute during this period. Most of the recorded growth, official statistics show, came from state-sponsored infrastructure projects and increased exploitation of natural resources shipped to the industrial centers in China proper.[49] Discontent over the rapid increase of the Chinese-speaking population on the plateau, especially migrant workers, as well as a rise in economic disparities and the perceived unequal distribution of the benefits of natural resource extractions, increased sharply.[50] Ever-increasing restrictions on social-cultural expression have further fueled resentment.[51]

In addition, the extent to which local populations have benefited economically from this growth remains a contentious issue. The Tibetan government in exile and Tibetan advocacy groups have consistently claimed that these policies have increasingly marginalized local populations in their homeland and that the primary beneficiaries of increased economic activity are state entities and Chinese-speaking migrants, furthering the goal of cementing China’s control over Tibet.[52] Some scholars have also argued that the state-led growth in Tibetan areas has essentially been “exclusionary,”[53] “an artificially-sustained subsidy bubble”[54] that has accentuated “polarization and effective ethnic discrimination.”[55]

In contrast, other scholars, such as Melvyn Goldstein, a leading Tibetologist and head of the Center for Research on Tibet at Ohio’s Case Western University, have argued that rural Tibetans in the TAR have substantially benefited from the state’s “concerted effort to improve living conditions in rural Tibet,” and that changes in the countryside represent a “major paradigm shift from a predominately subsistence agricultural economy to a new mixed economy in which non-farm income plays a dominant role.”[56] In a joint article in The China Journal published in 2008, Goldstein, Childs, and Wangdui wrote:

In contrast to the widespread academic, political and human rights criticism that the 9th and 10th Five-Year Plans marginalized rather than benefited rural Tibetans, our research has shown that there was a significant trickle-down effect that provided rural Tibetans opportunities to earn non-farm cash income by working as migrant laborers. Rural Tibetans clearly were actively competing in the market economy to improve their standard of living.[57]

While not disputing that Tibetans had little voice in designing these far-reaching policies, the authors suggest that Beijing’s overriding objective remains “to demonstrate to rural Tibetans that their best hope for a positive future lies within the People’s Republic of China.”[58]

Both sides of the debate raise doubts about the sustainability of economic development policies that have rested mostly on massive subsidies and made the Tibetan economy ever more dependent on continued government subsidies.[59] (See Chapter IX for a fuller discussion of Goldstein, Childs and Wangdui’s findings).

Notwithstanding these debates, the unprecedented 2008 protests and the large numbers of self-immolations starting in 2011 seem to indicate that considerable disaffection over Chinese policies on the Tibetan plateau has built up over time.[60] As the authors of a rare independent investigation into the cause of the 2008 protests by a Beijing-based Chinese legal aid group wrote:

In terms of actual benefits, the current rapid process of modernization has not given the ordinary Tibetan people any greater developmental benefits; as a matter of fact, they are becoming increasingly marginalized.[61]

While Beijing put the sole responsibility for these protests on the “Dalai clique,” accumulated socio-economic discontent, along with the twin fears of growing Chinese domination and loss of Tibetan culture, appear to have contributed to the large-scale spontaneous mobilization in 2008.[62] This examination of large-scale rehousing and relocation policies, which shows that improvement in material standards have been achieved during a period of widespread human rights violations, suggests that economic growth alone is unlikely to lower tensions on the Tibetan plateau.