THE SEDENTARIZATION PROCESS IN TIBETAN PASTORAL AREAS

Sedentarization is not a new phenomenon within pastoral societies in China and Central Asia.⁴ Previously, the majority of pastoralists had lived in tents year round. The sedentary way of life among the herders was encouraged in particular by the Household Responsibility System beginning in the 1980s, when the approach to land distribution was grounded on poverty alleviation. This was followed by fencing initiatives, which represented a “transition from a rural ‘nomadic’ lifestyle towards the increased sedentarization of people.”⁵ The construction of permanent houses on the allocated winter pastures was directly supported at that time by the Project to Increase Living Comfort (Ch: Wenbao Gongcheng) launched in 1978, as well as the 1990s Set of Four (Ch: Sipeitao) project.⁶ The Set of Four project was initiated in the southern part of Qinghai (most of which was later to be designated Sanjiangyuan) in 1991.⁷ In the grasslands area, in addition to house construction, the four scheduled improvements included government support for fencing, sowing grass, and animal shelter construction.⁸ To persuade the pastoralists of the advantages of fixed housing, pilot households were selected to try out the new housing arrangements. For this purpose, in addition to the families of pastoral community leaders, former monks and prisoners were also selected, since they already had experience of living in buildings.⁹

In Qinghai the mass sedentarization of pastoralists that started in 2003 was primarily the result of the Returning Pastureland to Grassland Project (through the included Grazing Ban Resettlement), the Ecological Resettlement Project (and the attached Small Town Constructions initiative) and the Nomadic Settlement Project, which started later, in 2009. All of these projects are clearly defined in policy, but in reality it is often difficult to distinguish between them. Their implementation objectives overlap and are modified locally.

At the beginning of this mass relocation in Zeku County, banners presenting policy details were placed at the sites to ease the implementation process. Since 2008, however, with the growing number of new settlements, the information banners vanished, which made it difficult to trace the individual new villages back to a certain project. Additionally, the confusion was intensified through the Chinese habit of relabeling, that is, changing the name of a policy or project while the content remains (almost) identical. Besides leaders’ ambitions to distinguish themselves from their precursors through new project names, there are also financial reasons for relabeling. The agendas of the Grazing Ban Resettlement implemented as part of the Returning Pastureland to Grassland Project and the Ecological Resettlement Project are remarkably similar and usually complementary. According to a member of the Nationalities Cultural Committee in Qinghai, these two projects are actually identical, though they are presented distinctly, as means of ecological protection and of poverty alleviation. This distinction places these two projects under the jurisdiction of different institutions, the provincial Development and Reform Commission, which focuses predominantly on poverty alleviation in degraded pastoral areas (administering the Ecological Resettlement Project), and the Forestry Department and Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Department, which targets the natural protection of grasslands through reducing or banning pastoral activities (administering the Returning Pastureland to Grassland Project; table 2.1).¹⁰ This doubles the central government’s budget allocation for local resettlement measures. Double subsidies enable twice as many pastoralists to be relocated during an annual administration period.

New terms are also invented to relabel old policies in cases where announced outcomes or deadlines are not being met. The implementation then proceeds under a new name but without significant changes to the rules and methods that actually address the causes of the original setback, such as the Ecological Resettlement Project in Qinghai.¹¹ According to a member of the Qinghai Nationalities Cultural Committee, the project ended in 2010 as a result of the increasing number of complaints and criticisms being made by pastoralists and local officials.¹² At the same time, another project, Alleviating Poverty through Relocation (Ch: Yidi Fupin Banqian), witnessed an eightfold expansion in Qinghai, resulting in the relocation of 60,000 people in 2010 (compared with only 7,600 people in 2009). The two initiatives shared a strikingly similar agenda.¹³ Direct confirmation of such relabeling is, however, not easy to establish, especially when even the implementing officials are sometimes unsure about a project’s duration. In 2015, for example, officials from the Zeku County grassland station were still unsure whether the Ecological Resettlement Project was still officially under way, even as they kept paying the associated subsidies to the original project participants.

In Qinghai the differentiation between the areas of special protection of national level interest, labeled as SNNR, and the area of the Sanjiangyuan nature reserve itself sometimes exacerbates label-related misunderstandings regarding the status and dimension of policy implementation. Various environmental projects exist in the SNNR area that include grassland restoration and the prohibition of grazing activities connected to the resettlement process, fencing, and so on. Yet, at the same time, an identical policy is being implemented in the entire Sanjiangyuan region, which means that reports, especially when translated into other languages, can provide misleading figures regarding the impact on pastoral landscapes and populations.¹⁴

It is therefore difficult to estimate the total number of pastoralist households already involved in the sedentarization process in Qinghai, let alone in the whole Tibetan pastoralist area. Data on 86 established migration communities suggest that 61,889 people and 13,305 households had moved from the Sanjiangyuan area to cities and towns through the Ecological Resettlement Project by the end of 2007.¹⁵ An alternative figure of 55,773 people relocated in Sanjiangyuan, corresponding to 13.65 percent of the Sanjiangyuan pastoralist population, appears in more recent Chinese studies.¹⁶ For the SNNR, the Qinghai Administrative Institute records the relocation of 15,000 Tibetan pastoralists between 2003 and the end of 2009. Additionally, as part of the implementation of the Returning Pastureland to Grassland Project, more than 30 local immigrant communities were built to accommodate relocated herdsmen. By the end of 2009, within the SNNR area, more than 6,800 pastoralist households had been relocated to such sites.¹⁷ However, the entire project implementation area of SNNR includes 42,300 households and about 200,000 people. In contrast with the earlier statement suggesting that 100 percent of pastoralists would be affected by the sedentarization policy, a member of the Qinghai provincial government stated in 2009 that the sedentarization projects being implemented at that time would affect only around 80 percent of local pastoralists. In all of Qinghai, it was intended that the overall sedentarization process would be completed by 2014. By then it was anticipated that 134,300 households, more than 500,000 pastoralists, would have started new lives in the new urban areas.¹⁸ However, the timeline for finalization of sedentarization in pastoral areas has been extended. New settlements were under construction as of 2017, and still more were to be constructed within the Targeted Poverty Alleviation Project in 2019. The pastoralists’ creative reactions toward the sedentarization policy have created a gray zone that falls somewhere between a pastoral and sedentary way of life.

Mismatched statistical data and the plethora of overlapping policy projects make it difficult for the implementing officials and the affected pastoralists to maintain a clear overview and also represent a significant challenge for researchers and nongovernment organization involved in this issue.¹⁹ When trying to understand the complex situation around the growing number of new Tibetan grasslands villages, it is therefore not enough to consult only the pastoralists, since they usually do not know the policy background of the relocation project in which they are involved. It is also insufficient to solely study statistics and policy agendas, as practice frequently fails to match theory. Only by comparing the policy agenda with the situation on site can we gain an approximate picture of the state’s intentions, the scope for adapting the project to benefit the government or the pastoralists, and the possible short-term and long-term outcomes of the current mass sedentarization process on the Tibetan Plateau.

RETURNING PASTURELAND TO GRASSLAND PROJECT

The Returning Pastureland to Grassland and Returning Pastureland to Forest Projects are equivalent to the Returning Farmland to Forest or Returning Farmland to Grassland Project implemented in farming areas, which focus on the restoration of destroyed forests, encouraging farmers to plant grass and trees instead of crops.²⁰

The situation in which herders were found to be inhabiting places with insufficient grassland capacity was first mentioned in governmental documents concerning the grazing ban in 2003, the year that the large-scale implementation of the Returning Pastureland to Grassland Project began in eight provinces and autonomous regions: Inner Mongolia, Sichuan, Yunnan, Tibet, Ningxia, Xinjiang, Gansu, and Qinghai.²¹

The initial trials of this project, however, took place in Qinghai in 2000. One of the test sites was Dari County (Ch: Dari Xian; T: Dar lag) in Guoluo Prefecture, where at that time 70 percent of the grassland was already labeled as degraded, and 16 percent classified as experiencing the worst level of degradation and completely unusable for herding purposes. As a result of the serious damage to grasslands, many local households were required to rent pastureland in neighboring counties and take their livestock there. Even though grazing on the degraded pastures was banned, the resettlement of pastoralists was not part of the pilot project. The area was relatively small, and it was possible to direct the pastoralists to rented land.²²

Within the Great Opening of the West development strategy, the Returning Pastureland to Grassland or Returning Pastureland to Forest Projects were then announced as two of the fourteen “key projects” to be introduced in the western regions, with the aim of restoring “100 million mu (6.7 million hectares) of pasture to grassland.”²³ The Returning Pastureland to Grassland Project was managed by the provincial Agricultural and Animal Husbandry Office and included all the grassland areas of western China.

In 2005 the Returning Pastureland to Grassland Project was instated to “restore grassland vegetation, improve grassland ecologies, enhance grassland productivity, and promote harmony between grassland ecologies and pastoral production.”²⁴ The project’s rules remained similar to those of the Returning Farmland to Grassland Project, in that pastoralists were required to allocate a part of their pasturelands to grass cultivation and obtain compensation in money or grain per mu of land protected from herding by fences.²⁵

In the SNNR area, the Returning Pastureland to Grassland Project was to become an important part of the environmental policy. Between 2005 and 2011 it was scheduled to be implemented on 64,389 square kilometers of land (6,438,900 hectares; approximately 56 percent of the SNNR’s total grassland area), with five years of grazing ban and the fencing-off of 20,484 square kilometers (2,048,400 hectares) in the core zones, 15,523 square kilometers (1,552,300 hectares) in the buffer zones, and 28,402 square kilometers (2,840,200 hectares) in the experimental zones.²⁶ The areas to be protected under the project were identified by the officials directly responsible for the task according to the degree of degradation of the pastureland.²⁷ Given this rule, not every household would be required to exclude part of the grassland contracted to them from herding activities. Given the uneven distribution of eroded areas, some households would be required to leave part of their grassland fallow, while in other cases the exclosed area would include land allocated to more than one household. Nevertheless, in practice the situation looked different. For example, in Hainan Prefecture, until at least 2007, the pastoralists could decide to fence off more land and accordingly receive a higher subsidy.²⁸

In the community of Da’e (sTag mgo) in Hongyuan County, Sichuan, each household was told to select a certain amount of grassland to be fenced off as part of the Returning Pastureland to Grassland Project. Local pastoralists were then allowed to select the exact locations themselves; they usually chose remote parts of their pastureland—mountaintops and shaded slopes. The community leader was then responsible for proving that each household had fulfilled its task and fenced off the required amount of land. Based on community leaders’ reports, the government distributed compensation subsidies in the form of money or grain.²⁹

In locations with less severe degradation, livestock herding was prohibited in fenced-off areas during either spring and autumn or for the entire duration of vegetation growth. This prohibition correlated with zones for rotational grazing or seasonal bans. In areas with a high level of degradation, a complete, year-round grazing ban was implemented in fenced-off areas.³⁰

Pastoralists who inhabited the areas under a complete grazing ban could no longer use the pastures and were resettled, at least for the duration of the grazing ban. This corresponds to the Returning Pastureland to Grassland Project measure referred to as Grazing Ban Resettlement (Ch: Banqian Jinmu). The duration of both the pastureland resting approach and the grazing ban approach was normally ten years. During this time, the pastoralist households involved could obtain fodder and grain subsidies from the government. The usual annual fodder and grain subsidy in Huangnan and Hainan Prefectures is ¥3,000 per household involved in the initiative. Households in Yushu and Guoluo Prefectures received a higher annual subsidy of ¥6,000. The distribution of forage and grain subsidies linked to the Returning Pastureland to Grassland Project and the Ecological Resettlement Project were managed by the prefecture and the county agricultural and finance departments. According to official records, subsidy funding should have been maintained in a special account and managed by a qualified person. The subsidy amount for each project in each county must have been approved individually by the prefecture agriculture department, after which the county agriculture department would distribute the money to the selected townships according to the prefecture department’s criteria.³¹ According to the pastoralists interviewed, the subsidy amount changed each year, and payment was irregular.

ECOLOGICAL RESETTLEMENT PROJECT

Ecological Resettlement, in Chinese Shengtai Yimin and sometimes also translated as “Ecological Migration,” had existed since the 1980s. In 1982, as part of the national poverty alleviation approach, residents from areas in Ningxia affected by serious degradation had to be resettled in different locations. The relocation concept continued during the Eight-Seven Poverty Alleviation Reinforcement Plan of 1994–2000, and in 2002 the term Shengtai Yimin was adopted as an official name for the socioeconomically driven relocation initiative implemented in thirteen provinces of western China, including Qinghai.³⁹

Since 2004 the Ecological Resettlement Project in Qinghai was managed by the Sanjiangyuan office of the Provincial Development and Reform Committee. Besides the Returning Pastureland to Grassland Project, Ecological Resettlement was declared to be another of the key projects of the Sanjiangyuan General Plan and part of the Great Opening of the West.⁴⁰ The intention of the project was to immediately benefit pastoralists by offering training courses to improve their skills. Additionally, it aimed to increase the income of pastoralist households through reducing livestock mortality rates, improving the price of animal products, and reducing the period needed to fatten lambs so they could be sold within the first year. Part of the plan was meant to increase livestock turnover and improve animal husbandry practices through the use of animal sheds, which could also serve as greenhouses to plant vegetables during the summer. Pastoralists’ quality of life would be improved through providing water, electricity, roads, schools, medical and veterinary care, and television broadcasting services to each village in addition to increasing access to science and technology and helping pastoralists to absorb, extend, and apply their newly acquired knowledge. Pastoralists were to be taught how to prevent and treat animal diseases, as well as how to effectively use the sheds for animal shelter and vegetable production. Additionally, resettlements would be situated near roads to grant pastoralists better access to the job market and alternative income sources.

The Ecological Resettlement Project also had an environmental focus. According to the government, the potential benefits from sedentarization measures such as the Ecological Resettlement Project and the adoption of grassland resting and the rotational grazing system included a reduction in pressure on the grasslands, which would stimulate the recovery of grassland vegetation and help to protect high-altitude wildlife and natural resources.⁴¹ The recovery of grassland vegetation would also result in a rise in the water table, which would maintain the water volume of the Yellow River area. Additionally, it was hoped that grasslands recovery would reduce soil erosion and prevent desertification. The implementation of resettlement measures would also result in better balance between grassland capacity and livestock numbers. Resettled households were required to sell their entire herds before moving into new houses, and the reduced livestock numbers would mitigate the problem of fodder for the remaining animals.⁴²

One strategy for resettling pastoralist households was the so-called regional settlement approach, which resulted in the concentration of pastoralist households from one region in a single settlement within their original township or county. Regional settlement targeted pastoralists living in poor conditions in dispersed housing within a nature preservation area. This approach included livestock reduction measures and the implementation of a rotational grazing system for the remaining animals. It also involved the construction of settlements in regions with little vegetation, where, through implementation of livestock reduction measures, the elimination of pikas, and fencing initiatives, grassland degradation could be stopped and the grassland ecosystem restored in a relatively short period of time. A second approach was the process referred to as supra-regional relocation, in other words resettlement away from the original place of residence, beyond the county or even the prefectural boundaries. Such an approach was adopted in places experiencing severe desertification and degradation, where the restoration of the ecosystem within a short period of time was considered impossible.⁴³ To further differentiate, “village group resettlement” was community group migration between counties or even prefectures and “individual resettlement” referred to households moving within the same county. The main difference in the treatment of these resettlement groups was the amount of subsidy allowances. The subsidies for participants involved in village group resettlement were higher, ¥8,000 per year, but such households were required to permanently relinquish their pastureland usage rights. Participants in individual resettlement initiatives were required to only temporarily abandon their usage rights, such as for a period of ten years, and received only ¥3,000–¥6,000 in annual subsidy payments. The duration of subsidy payments for both groups, however, was scheduled for ten years only, without differentiating between pastoralists who had the possibility of returning to their land and those who did not.⁴⁴ However, due to problems with economic adaptation in the resettlements, the amount and duration of state payments had to be increased.

Resettlement construction sites were selected by the government. According to the project agenda, the sites needed to be suitable for further industrial development, convenient for residents, easy to administer, and capable of offering enough space for potential population growth. Houses should have sufficient light, be airy, and provide access to hygienic facilities and green spaces. The houses must conform to pastoralists’ expectations and to the allotted budget. The selected areas for construction of a resettlement site could be near the original location of the affected pastoralist households, in a location with sufficient natural resources and state-owned agricultural land, or close to a nearby township or county town.

In reality, a lack of funds often led to the major curtailment of a project’s implementation goals. For the most part, implementation was restricted to building houses, while the building of public facilities and development of service programs were postponed. The majority of resettlements visited consisted of uniformly constructed houses, only sometimes served by paved streets. Other facilities mentioned in the implementation plan and designed according to individual resettlement layout schemes remained uncompleted. Electricity and water networks arrived with significant delays and were rarely connected to every house, public toilets were either lacking or in bad condition, and public waste disposal was nonexistent. Hygiene conditions worsened after the pastoralists moved in. Excrement and garbage often accumulated on the streets and around the resettlement site. Garbage had increased directly with the increase in consumption of commercial goods and packaged food, which was encouraged by the resettlement locations’ proximity to towns.

Although moving into a resettlement theoretically provided pastoralists with better access to goods, health-care services, and the job market, without the skills needed by urban secondary and tertiary industries, former herders struggled to find employment. The scheduled vocational training for relocated pastoralists was only rarely provided. When the training did occur, it was often only short term and did not provide participants with enough confidence in their new skills. It often turned out to be inconsequential, not providing the type of management training that would enable people to establish a livelihood via their newly learned skills. That only a small number of people were able to build a new existence on what they learned raised questions about the entire vocational training program.⁴⁵

The idea of double-use greenhouses also seems to be difficult to implement in reality. Although some rural households from farming areas in Gansu explained to me that they used the sheds to grow mushrooms and vegetables and to raise animals such as pigs, in the pastoral areas of Qinghai, growing vegetables was an alien concept for many of my informants. They often claimed they did not know how to plant and take care of vegetables, did not see vegetables as an important part of their diet, and thus had no reason to grow them. Intensive vegetable production was introduced in Tibetan areas, especially around Lhasa, by the Han inward migrants and was originally intended to feed People’s Liberation Army members, but in the pastoral environment there is not a large market for vegetables, so herders find it difficult to sell their surplus produce.⁴⁶

Due to the lack of sufficient income opportunities in the new villages, pastoralists invented ways of bypassing the disadvantageous aspects of the project, while still receiving all the benefits. The main area of subterfuge concerns the requirement to sell herds after relocation.⁴⁷ In many areas in Qinghai, including Zeku, Henan, and Maqin Counties, it was possible to find households that possessed new houses but also retained their herds. One reason for this practice is that numerous households have decided to split in two, identifying the grandparents as a separate household unit and thus reaping the maximum benefits from the project. These households thus retain the option of abandoning their new houses and joining the rest of their families on the grasslands if they dislike their new lives in the resettlement.

In accordance with the poverty alleviation approach of the Ecological Resettlement Project, the households initially targeted were those classified as poor.⁴⁸ Such households, with minimal livestock, found it difficult to survive on the grasslands, were forced to seek refuge on the new government projects, and were thus more willing to agree to resettlement proposals.⁴⁹ From an environmental protection perspective, however, resettling the poor first cannot have significantly contribute to the aim of relieving grazing pressure on the grasslands, as these households did not possess many animals. Project implementation was more concerned with fulfilling the required quota for resettled households than with adhering strictly to the environmental and socioeconomic goals of the sedentarization policy.⁵⁰

Officially, participation was voluntary, but the resettlement quotas set by the government still had to be fulfilled. The project was sufficiently flexible, allowing the resettlement of households from other communities in cases where there was an insufficient number of households from one pastoral community who were willing to move. It was only when an insufficient number of county households agreed to move that the government applied forced resettlement measures.

The responsible local government representative, or an instructed community leader or member of the local village or herders’ committee, usually explained only the advantages of a new life in a fixed urban dwelling to the pastoralists. The mediators often said nothing about the political background or about any potential disadvantages connected with the resettlement project, such as the abandonment of pastures. Additionally, numerous pastoralists were not literate in either Chinese or Tibetan and could not read the contract they were encouraged to sign.⁵¹ The positive representation of the resettlement projects, strengthened by the pastoralists’ fear of future negative consequences from the government if they refused to participate, usually led to a high level of compliance.

Another persuasive factor is the stricter control on school attendance in the West of China, adopted in Qinghai in 2007.⁵² To enable their children to attend school, many households decide to move closer to a township or county center.⁵³ As is the case in the majority of pastoralist areas of the Tibetan Plateau, in Zeku County, from the first year onward, children board at the school for the whole semester, only returning home during the winter and summer holidays. The lack of adequate road systems and the long distances from homes to schools made it impossible for children to return home each day. Conditions in the schools, especially in remote grassland places, were often quite poor, as government financial support was not enough to provide suitable standards in classrooms and dormitories. Usually there was not enough space in the dormitories for all the children, so in most cases several children had to share a bed. Boarding schools also lead to increased responsibilities for teachers, who are required to live at the school together with their students. Many are not sufficiently trained as caregivers. Therefore, especially in the case of young children, parents prefer to house their children with relatives in a village or town, where the children do not board at school or to move closer to the school themselves. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, compulsory school attendance was seen as a burden by many pastoral families in Zeku County, as it meant a reduction in the labor force.⁵⁴ With the gradual economic and social transformation of western China, however, an increasing number of parents have changed their minds concerning the importance of education and have started to see it as a means of enabling their children to have better opportunities in the future.⁵⁵

Increasing cash demands, the result of market expansion, have also led many pastoralists to abandon the pastures. All this has brought about quite a high number of potential project participants. In Zeku County, the number of assigned participants often exceeded the number of available government houses in any given year.

The high level of pastoralist households wishing to be resettled, as referenced in official reports, gives the impression that there is a strong willingness to relocate, and the government uses this impression to justify the mass resettlement. Whether or not the required resettlement quota can be fulfilled within the scheduled period of time depends in turn on the financial grants obtained annually from central and provincial governments. For various reasons, including corruption, the available funds are reduced as they percolate through all the administrative levels before reaching local governments.⁵⁶ The Nationalities Cultural Committee in Xining claimed that the resettlement houses should be distributed among the pastoralists for free. However, as there are too many applicants for resettlement in some regions, including Zeku County, households are required to pay for their new homes.

Resettlements usually consist of one of the following types: two-story houses with commercial premises (figures 4.4 and 5.9) that can serve as shops on the ground floor and a residences on the second floor; bungalows with small yards to plant vegetables (figures 5.4 and 5.5); and blocks of flats (figure 5.2) situated within existing towns.

SMALL TOWN CONSTRUCTIONS

Linked to the Ecological Resettlement Project is the Small Town Constructions initiative, aimed at widening and enlarging small urbanization centers in the SNNR. Planners hope that the growth of small towns in the grassland areas will stimulate the development of local industry, business, culture, and education and strengthen administrative control. To relieve pressure on the grasslands, the initiative intends to relocate pastoralists to small towns such as Zequ, Zeku County, within the nature preservation zone. The main focus of future local development is expected to be trade and tourism.⁵⁷

NOMADIC SETTLEMENT PROJECT

Another project that includes settlement constructions (figures 3.2 and 3.3) is the so-called Nomadic Settlement Project, introduced in Qinghai in 2009.⁵⁸ At least in the local Tibetan areas, this project might be seen as representing the culmination of all previous settlement efforts, as it covers all Tibetan pastoral households still living without a permanent house or with an unstable house that is in danger of collapse (Ch: wu fang hu he weifang hu)—in reality, this means houses made of earth and wood or stone in the traditional manner (figure 3.1) and thus includes all households that have not participated in any of the previous sedentarization projects. The Nomadic Settlement Project was based on experience gained during the implementation of earlier projects, such as the Returning Pastureland to Grassland and the Ecological Resettlement. However, there is one significant difference: Within the Nomadic Settlement Project, the basis of the households’ everyday life does not shift from animal husbandry, at least not yet. Participating households were allowed to continue their lives as herders and obtain either a government grant to build a new house or a ready-made house constructed by the government. The new house must be inhabited by at least part of the family.

The Nomadic Settlement Project seems in a way to be a continuation of the earlier Set of Four policy. In addition to house building, it promotes the construction of animal sheds, the building of grassland fences, the planting of grass, the establishment of water supply systems for livestock and people, the building of roads, and the construction of solar and methane gas energy facilities.

Eligible households must prove that they were not involved in any other sedentarization project and must consist of at least two family members who have not separated from another registered household unit during the previous two years.⁵⁹ This rule intends to prevent the splitting-up of households, popular among pastoralists participating at the Ecological Resettlement Project.⁶⁰

The Nomadic Settlement Project was managed by the provincial Agricultural and Animal Husbandry Office and encompasses thirty-one counties of six Qinghai prefectures: Haibei, Hainan, Huangnan, Yushu, Guoluo, and Haixi. According to a government investigation from 2009, in Qinghai 134,300 households met the requirements of the Nomadic Settlement Project.⁶¹ Project costs were shared between the central government, the provinces, prefectures, and counties, and the pastoralists themselves. The number of houses built in any one year depends on the annual investment of the central government, which contributes more than 50 percent of all expenses. In 2009, the first year of project implementation, the Qinghai government scheduled the construction of 25,710 houses, with a total investment of more than ¥1.2 billion. Pastoralists were expected to pay 13.8 percent of the total costs. In reality, the pastoralists’ share of the construction costs was decided by local governmental institutions in accordance with the financial resources supplied by the central government and the number of participating households. The government required the new dwellings to be constructed of modern materials dominated by brick, concrete, or metal. The size of each house must be at least sixty square meters, regardless of household size.⁶²

According to the general agenda, the Nomadic Settlement Project was intended to improve both pastoralists’ quality of life and regional development. The new village houses were promoted as a living base for each pastoralist household. In these houses, families would no longer need to move household equipment throughout the year and could accumulate material belongings. The government also hoped that moving the headquarters of pastoralist households closer to urban areas would increase engagement in business and services. However, as with people relocated earlier, only a small number of pastoralists actually tried to obtain additional employment as drivers or planned to open restaurants or accommodations for tourists and transients. The majority of people in the settlements just used the free time to rest, relying on the food supplies from their livestock in the grasslands and financial subsidies from the government. Although household splitting had been made more difficult and, moreover, unnecessary within the Nomadic Settlement Project, the participating pastoralists found other ways to bypass the regulations and obtain the greatest benefit from this kind of state support. Households that lacked children of school age or who had no compelling reason to remain in an urban area often rented out or sold their new houses.

Implementation Variations

The main regional differences in the implementation of the Nomadic Settlement Project are apparent in the following examples of Maqin County (rMa chen) in Guoluo Prefecture, Qinghai, Hongyuan County (rKa khog) in Aba Prefecture (rNga ba), Sichuan, and Zeku County in Huangnan Prefecture, Qinghai.

The government scheduled the construction of 5,128 new houses in the pastoralist areas of Maqin in 2009. According to a prefectural government announcement, these houses were to be built by the pastoralists themselves. The construction had to include a house of at least sixty square meters, a toilet, an animal shed, and an animal yard. According to a public announcement of the Guluo Prefecture government, ¥48,500 were allocated to each house unit.⁶³ According to research conducted on site in Maqin County, any pastoralist household could apply to participate in the project. Even households that already possessed a permanent concrete house started the construction of new ones. Most households built their houses themselves. While it was possible to hire laborers for the construction, doing so would mean additional costs for the pastoralists. The new houses could be constructed either in the winter grasslands or in a new village settlement next to the prefecture seat. Only after building a house in “Tibetan” style, interpreted as a house of the right size with a tiled front (figure 3.4) and a toilet, mostly outside dry ones, was the owner authorized to receive financial support. According to my informants, the amount of the available aid for the house construction was ¥40,000.

The construction of animal sheds was contracted out separately, and participant households had to prepay ¥6,000 to the government in order to later obtain double the total allocation of ¥12,000. By the end of 2009, this money had still not reached the pastoralists, despite the fact that house and animal shed construction preparations had been completed months before.

The grassland conditions in Sichuan are much better than in Qinghai. Nevertheless, large-scale sedentarization is also being implemented there. In Hongyuan in 2009, each household that applied and was chosen to participate on the Nomadic Settlement Project obtained ¥20,000 to build a new house. The total amount spent on the constructions, however, was usually much higher, sometimes even more than ¥100,000, and the pastoralists used their savings to build and equip their new houses with high-quality modern and expensive goods (figure 3.6). In Hongyuan, the pastoralists could apply for a state loan of a further ¥25,000, to be repaid over the three following years. Poorer households, identified as such by the township and county government, received a ready-built house for free (figure 3.7), together with a small governmental subsidy.

In Zeku County, inhabited mainly by pastoralists with lower incomes when compared with the pastoralist households of Maqin or Hongyuan, the government decided to take charge of all house construction projects.⁶⁴ The houses were designed to be built in separate, uniformly designed villages (figure 3.8) near roads or administrative centers. Here, the pastoralists had to pay a certain amount to the government to get the new house.