INTRODUCTION
A red flag flutters above the flat roof of the Tibetan village house. Inside, the family has placed posters of the now five great Chinese leaders—or at least the most recent of them, Xi Jinping. The new family car is parked outside the village, and everyone is dressed in their old clothes. Everything transmits the correct impression of being in need and, above all, grateful to the state and Chinese Communist Party for its national effort to fight poverty and promote modernization in China’s countryside. The village, and especially the family selected to receive support, is ready for a delegation arriving to see the progress of the Targeted Poverty Alleviation (Ch: Jingzhun Fupin) Project and to distribute ever-changing amounts of cash.1
Such scenes have played out repeatedly in recent decades across the Tibetan Plateau, where communities of pastoralists struggle to respond to Chinese economic goals. Targeted Poverty Alleviation, the latest in a long series of state-instigated projects aimed at changing life in the Chinese countryside with the lofty ambition of finally eliminating poverty and “backwardness” among China’s population by 2020, was encroaching on the lives of Tibetan Plateau residents while this book was finalized.2 The project claimed to focus on indirect aid distribution through the provision of additional skills and the mobilization of local financial and labor resources for sustainable economic development in rural areas. The Targeted Poverty Alleviation Project targeted those households the village leader identified as being among the poorest but able to develop sustainable livelihoods with state assistance. In reality, however, households with good relations with the village leader, rather than those most in need, are sometimes selected for the project. Furthermore, like other socioeconomic development projects previously implemented in China’s West, Targeted Poverty Alleviation often resorted to distribution of subsidies in the form of cash or houses in order to demonstrate income increases.3
When I last visited Zeku County (rTse khog), Qinghai, in 2017, the pastoralists there were still waiting to experience the impact of the Targeted Poverty Alleviation Project. Restricted by a tight deadline, however, officials in the Zeku Department for Poverty Alleviation had limited options for raising people out of poverty by creating or supporting local creation of a new production base to generate income. Thus, by 2017 only plans for the construction of housing had been elaborated, with no significant progress in helping settlers integrate socially and economically.
Whether this new project, along with its new and ambitious agenda, will in fact be any different from its forerunners or whether it will also end up using mass house construction and sedentarization to demonstrate development will become clear only in years to come. Statistics from 2020 and beyond will likely show that there are no longer any poor people—those with income below the national poverty line—living on the grasslands of Zeku County and elsewhere. People will be registered as township or county residents, and in cases where there is need, a state subsidy will be used to supplement their income, raising it above the poverty line. If the implementation patterns of top-down control and state-imposed projects with stringent time constraints do not change, real policy outcomes and improvements in the actual lives and livelihoods of the pastoralists will remain illusory.
In parallel with this development, in Zeku County the aim was to gradually bring animal husbandry and the pasturelands under the management of countryside cooperatives, eventually transferring control from the villagers and villages to external enterprises, such as the meat-packing plant scheduled to be built in Zeku to process local livestock.4 While this might represent a new income source for local pastoralists, it will be feasible only if they retain their access to the grasslands, their usage rights, and their herds—an arrangement that contradicts the objective of urbanization implicit in the local implementation approach of the Targeted Poverty Alleviation Project.
These examples of upcoming change help demonstrate the ongoing, vivid, and generally unpredictable dynamics that influence the present world of Tibetan pastoralists, not only in Zeku, but also elsewhere on the Tibetan Plateau. They represent the omnipresence of change, as well as the impermanency of development policies. They also confirm the view of many pastoralists who have become passive recipients of state-induced programs that it makes little sense to invest effort in creating a new existence because circumstances can change at any time, presenting aid recipients with yet more challenges in yet another place.
The Targeted Poverty Alleviation Project in Zeku also encourages the already resettled or sedentarized pastoralists to move yet again into supposedly improved housing facilities. In this case, the impression of definitiveness or at least of definitive change is created through the requirement that project participants tear down their grassland houses. The participants therefore cannot return to the grasslands, as was possible during previous sedentarization projects; they can only go forward, toward “modernity.” The establishment of new countryside cooperatives, which have only a rather dubious potential to benefit the pastoralists economically, was encouraged at the village level. These cooperatives are intended to be shared thereafter by all villagers, ideally expanding in the future to cover the whole county in a system strongly reminiscent of the former communes.
Besides the failure to meet the real targets of the Targeted Poverty Alleviation Project, for example, in the case of the selection of supported households, corruption, and lack of sustainability, other questions are apparent. Can distribution of houses actually lead to modernity or at least help to alleviate poverty? What will happen to the hundreds of abandoned resettlement houses that are not connected to functioning infrastructure or to the thousands of kilometers of wire fencing that have been installed as part of the grassland management policies over the last two decades to help allocate pastures to each household and encourage sedentarization? The fences will hinder the development of a cooperative village- or county-wide herding system. Will the state tear them down? Deinstallation could contribute to the restoration of more balanced livestock distribution patterns and support grassland recovery, but would it be a long-term arrangement or just another temporary measure and another expense the state budget and perhaps the pastoralists will have to carry?
It would be presumptuous to imply that this book can explain the (seeming) irrationality behind many of the development projects and their complex approaches and answer questions associated with the final outcomes of the current Chinese state-induced development policy toward Tibetan pastoralists. But it may serve as a record of the transformation of Tibetan landscapes and peoples during a decade shaped by struggles over contradictory policy designs, inconsequential implementation patterns, and inventive adaptation strategies adopted by officials and pastoralists.
THE COMPLEX ISSUE OF SEDENTARIZATION
This book is about “development” and its effects on the people and rangelands of the Amdo region, a part of the eastern Tibetan Plateau, which currently lies mostly within the administrative unit of Qinghai.5 Of particular concern is the case of pastoralists, for whom development means not only a more urban environment and more “modern” household equipment. Promoting a sedentary way of life as more developed, the current Chinese state-initiated development projects encourage pastoralists to change their entire way of life—including housing, livelihood, and daily routine. The Tibetan pastoralists (’brog pa; high-pasture ones) are often identified as nomads, referring to their tradition of mobile pastoralism.6 The attempt to reeducate and “civilize” them and include them in the general social and economic system of China started with the implementation of various state land reforms in the 1950s.7 Subsequently, not only the land cultivation patterns but also the animal husbandry practices in Tibetan areas have changed so that Tibetan pastoralists have already become more sedentary. Particularly after the introduction of people’s communes and the subsequent Household Responsibility System (Ch: Jiating Lianchan Chengbao Zeren Zhi), Tibetan pastoralists lost their flexibility of movement. Unable to avoid the impact of natural weather conditions by relocating to pastures offering better fodder for their livestock, these people are in the process of losing their “nomadic” status. Therefore, the term nomad is being increasingly replaced by pastoralist.8 Although the Tibetan pastoralists have experienced varying levels of sedentarization for several decades, the current pressure on sedentarization from the state is unprecedented and aims to gradually include all Tibetan pastoralists inhabiting the grasslands.9
The period treated by this book started at the turn of the twenty-first century and is dominated by the Great Opening of the West (Ch: Xibu da Kaifa) development strategy, which aimed to develop and change the landscapes and peoples in China’s central and western regions and to end subsistence-based livelihoods such as Tibetan pastoralism.10 It connected the peripheries and the countryside with the infrastructural networks in the rest of China, enabling those residing there to access modern markets, lifestyles, and livelihoods while enabling the state to gain access to local economically exploitable resources and facilitate the social integration of and political control over China’s minorities. It also addressed concerns about the perceived environmental deterioration in pastoral regions, including the Tibetan Plateau.
In this book, the massive “development” of the Great Opening of the West is reflected predominantly on the example of pastoralist communities from Zeku County and surrounding pastoral regions of Qinghai and Sichuan Provinces.11 It illustrates changes in pastoral society during the turbulent years from 2005 to 2017, a period marked by dynamic transformations resulting from the Chinese planned development policy, as well as the general impact of globalization and a period of forced transition in the rural areas of the Tibetan Plateau.12 The example of Zeku County provides insight into how the Great Opening of the West development strategy worked during the key period that was the beginning of state-driven socioeconomic transformation in Tibetan pastoral areas.
In rangeland areas, the development was represented mainly through induced sedentarization, which technically served as the major tool to introduce “civilization” and install “modernity” and which led to extreme changes in the entire living and survival patterns among Tibetan pastoralists. However, sedentarization is a complex network of intertwined, complementing, and overlapping projects, serving in theory or in practice either the officially promoted preservation of the environment and the socioeconomic improvement of households or the less publicly announced goal of political surveillance.13 Most of the projects serve several of these aims at once. In the West it is common to refer to the current development associated with sedentarization as “forced resettlement” without distinguishing among the different programs and individual project backgrounds or the involvement of the affected pastoralists themselves.
Sedentarization, however, is in reality more complicated. For the general purposes of Chinese state policy, discussion of “development” has been reduced to a series of binary choices: sedentary versus mobile, urban versus rural, and socially and economically integrated versus nature dependent and self-sufficient. All the latter terms characterize pastoralist society and are problems that can in theory be solved through sedentarization. In addition, these narratives coincided with the environmental narrative that pastoralism was degrading the ecology of the plateau. Mass sedentarization thus became a universal solution—it was the way to simultaneously develop the pastoral areas of China’s West (by reducing poverty and increasing social and political control) and protect the ecology (by removing the pastoralists from the grasslands). This policy thus became popular among officials, in particular because of its relatively fast execution timescale and the ease of gathering statistical data. As local officials were forced to meet the state’s ambitious, top-down-imposed scale and time frames, it is understandable that these officials have resorted to the easiest possible strategies for meeting state policy requirements (as much as possible and as fast as possible). The statistically achievable “development” targets made possible by mass sedentarization programs in pastoral areas consequently result in increased levels of urbanization (settlement construction), thus facilitating the delivery of required results on time. When presenting development strategy achievements, the size of the urbanized landscape becomes a proxy for the size of an economically developed landscape.
In pastoral areas, building settlements thus enables officials to measure the “development” not only of a landscape but of the people—the number of pastoralists engaged in sedentarization projects equalizing the number of “developed” people. To prove the achievements of the sedentarization policy, it is enough to show the numbers of registered participants. However, in reality, many registered participants return to pastoralism at least to some extent and cannot really be labeled as being “developed” in the sense of abandoning “backward” lifestyles and livelihoods and engaging in the industrial or service sectors of employment. Neither can the movement of former pastoralists into artificial villages be actually considered urbanization.
The new settlements created as part of the pastoralist sedentarization policy are urban only in the sense that they contain fixed houses organized as centralized units. It is often the case that they are not well connected with infrastructure networks and rarely offer their inhabitants a sustainable livelihood. In many cases, the move to centralized settlements places pastoralists in an in-between position, in which they are no longer really rural but not yet quite urban. People may no longer label themselves as herders, but neither are they farmers, holders of urban registration status, or regularly employed.14 This lack of social and economic security cannot be referred to as a positive development of pastoralists. Neither does it promote the smooth integration of Tibetan pastoralists into modern Chinese society as part of the nation-building objectives outlined in the agenda of the Great Opening of the West.
To achieve tighter control and faster results, China chose the top-down approach in its program for countryside development. However, an evaluation of the actual processes and outcomes indicates that this approach not only results in pastoralists’ becoming the passive recipients of “development” and dependent on state assistance but also hinders state representatives—the implementing officials—from developing appropriate strategies that meet real local needs.
In addition, the concomitant projects of environmental restoration have similarly equivocal results. In line with the pattern of quick decision making, planning, and implementation, the government identified the current use of the grasslands predominantly for herding purposes as a major cause of their deterioration and decided to act accordingly. However, recent studies, supported by examples provided elsewhere in this book, strongly suggest that banning pastoralism might not be helpful in preventing an increase in erosion but might instead lead to an irreversible transformation of the grassland ecosystem, reducing levels of diversity, decreasing the flexibility of local ecology, or even encouraging further degradation.15 Moreover, the rapid reductions in herd and pasture size promoted by the environmental policy serve only to deprive Tibetan pastoralists of their livelihoods, thus further contributing to an increase in poverty, rather than its alleviation.
After over ten years of implementation, the development strategy of large-scale sedentarization in pastoral areas is showing serious weaknesses. However, it would be inaccurate to suggest that Tibetan pastoralists unambiguously oppose all government efforts. The situation is much more complex, and various factors must be taken into account as part of any evaluation. Tibetans are well aware of global trends and alternative ways of living and wish to share the same material advantages associated with international progress. In particular, the younger generation of Tibetan pastoralists desire to be part of the modern world. They prefer to attune their clothes and habits to new influences and participate in urban occupations rather than continue animal husbandry. These socioeconomic factors inspire an increasing number of pastoralists to relocate permanently or temporarily to cities and other urban areas as they seek alternative or supplementary employment and job opportunities. In fact, in recent years, an increasing number of pastoralists have bought apartments in provincial or prefectural capitals. Usually, they need to obtain mortgages to pay the high real estate prices. In many cases the family does not actually move into the city, and the apartments serve rather as a status symbol.
The complete transition from a rural to an urban population will take time, perhaps one or more generations, before a successful and sustainable urban existence with livelihood fundamentals based on new opportunities can be established. This natural and more realistic time frame is not in accordance, however, with the five-year-plan-oriented Chinese policy, which seeks rapid change. This has led to orchestrated development of rural areas in China, including the Tibetan Plateau grasslands, which may generate impressive figures in the short term but can lead to extremely negative consequences in the long term. In the context of global and local development, the main issue, therefore, is not whether Tibetan pastoralists will eventually lead a more sedentary way of life but how this change will take place and what the impact will be of a sped-up transformation on Tibetan pastoralists and the Chinese state.
This book concentrates not only on the implementation of sedentarization measures on site and the attitudes of the specific Tibetan pastoralists affected by them but also on the theoretical background of the development policy as presented in official government records. The individual development projects resulting in sedentarization look different from these two perspectives, and to draw the necessary distinction between them, we must combine attention to both project theory and implementation practice to build a more coherent and comprehensive picture of the situation.
SOURCES AND METHODS
The findings demonstrated in this book stem from twenty-four months of careful observation in the grasslands of Qinghai and the attached areas of Sichuan and Gansu over more than ten years, repeated interviews with more than two hundred pastoralists and officials, and reading of primary government sources on development policy.
I gained insights into the policy plans by gathering available documents that announced and reported on the implementation of development and sedentarization projects at the township, county, prefecture, and province levels. The majority of the documents were available in Chinese; only a few included a Tibetan translation. I supplemented the information provided in the written materials through interviews with Chinese and Tibetan officials responsible for implementing the respective projects at the provincial and county levels. In semistructured interviews, the interviewees provided explanations of official policy and reported on the eventual project modifications implemented in the areas under their supervision.
The official plans, statements, reports, and statistics alone do not provide a comprehensive picture of the situation.16 However, they provide the background information necessary to gain an understanding of the general aims and approaches of the state development strategy and to establish the framework needed to conduct a local survey among the pastoralists. Only in this manner has it been possible to understand the transformation in the correct context and to highlight differences between theoretical outline and realization, between the announced objectives and the actual aims and outcomes. This procedure also allows us to identify the complexity of the various policies involved in sedentarization and the attitudes and adaptation strategies the involved people and institutions adopted. The comparison between official policy and on-site implementation also demonstrates the stress placed on speed and quantity rather than sustainability and quality within Chinese development policy, which can result in conflicts of interest among the institutions and subjects involved.
Information about the actual situation on site, was collected by observation and through qualitative formal and informal interviews with affected Tibetan pastoralists from Zeku County and surrounding areas during about twenty months of fieldwork conducted between 2005 and 2009. Among the interviewees were Zeku and other pastoralists who were still living on the grasslands and also those who were already living in the administration centers of the county after having been offered state-paid positions. The time spent in the field facilitated access to local social structures, and long-term stay among active (and former) pastoralists enabled me to explore their living spaces in the winter and summer pastures and in the “urban” zones, as well as witness the accelerating shift, more economic than social, toward sedentarization in grassland settlements or the expanding areas of the township, county, prefecture, and or even provincial capitals. Between 2011 and 2017 I made several short visits totaling four months to follow up on developments and confirm or question the assumptions made during the previous research stays. Repeated residence in Zeku County and the surrounding areas and repeated contact with same interviewees made possible an in-depth and continuous description of the local transformation toward a “civilized” society.
At the same time, my nearly annual return led to frequent periods of frustration when I was confronted with large changes in local development policies and their implementation. Although the outcome of these shifts often proved to be more rhetorical than real, with little significant impact on the circumstances of the orchestrated development, the constant changes in terminology and the official aims and policy agendas often made it difficult to follow official and actual intentions. On the other hand, only a continuous research program that records the processes involved in the development of policy designs and their interpretation by officials and locals can provide us with a glimpse of the complex and extremely vivid dynamics involved in a challenging state-imposed strategy such as the Great Opening of the West.
After the disturbances in Tibetan areas that began in the spring of 2008, research on development issues in Tibetan pastoral areas, especially those connected to sedentarization measures, has become difficult. Although Zeku County was not one of the main centers of disturbance, it still officially counts as a potential political hotspot. Particularly during the summers of 2008 and 2009, interviews at some settlement and resettlement sites were hindered by the permanent police presence and the closure of certain areas. Under the current Chinese leadership, the atmosphere for studying China’s planned development has not improved. On the contrary, faced with a background of aggressive policies encouraging the “unity of the nationalities” (Ch: minzu tuanjie) and the pursuit of corruption, people prefer to avoid taking responsibility, and cooperation with official institutions and their members becomes increasingly difficult.
THE MAJOR STUDY AREA: ZEKU COUNTY
For several reasons, the case study area of Zeku County (map I.1) exemplifies the implementation of development projects in rural areas of western China. It has no particular economically exploitable tourist or cultural sites that would motivate the government to accelerate the implementation of the modernization and development projects introduced into the western provinces of China as part of the Great Opening of the West development strategy. The landscape of Zeku County is mostly open grassland, without any spectacular mountain ranges to attract tourism. Only the Maixiu Forest on the border with Tongren County and the remote Hor monastery, with its stone-carving tradition, have been considered as areas for the further development of tourism by the provincial government, which has also mentioned the possibility of ethnic tourism, identifying the pastoralist traditions present in this area in its 2007 report.17 There might also be some state mining interests, especially gold mining, in Zeku, though the magnitude of any mining potential is still unknown. There is no large-scale access to caterpillar fungus, so the earnings from this highly valued commodity do not significantly distort the local income.18 Only small areas of the county, especially in sTobs ldan (Ch: Duofudun Xian), provide average-quality caterpillar fungus, and so the main income of the local pastoralists has until recently been derived from animal husbandry.19 As a result, the development work carried out in the county began slowly, and in 2005, when I started my research, the administrative seats designated as township or county towns still resembled the remote towns seen in old Western movies.20
The approaching socioeconomic shift that would come to the pastoral areas through the radical development measures of the Great Opening of the West first arrived in rTse khog in the form of enthusiastic slogans lining local roads and town streets (figure I.1). The paroles promised wealth, happiness, and harmony, better environment and better living. Eager to learn more about the upcoming changes that promised to turn the pastoral areas upside-down and let them enter the era of development and prosperity, I started with a survey among the Zeku pastoralists about the concrete changes they experienced and programs they participated in. This approach turned out to be a failure. None of those I spoke with was able to help me out, and no one could make sense of the term Xibu da Kaifa. The smaller the awareness among the pastoral population in Qinghai about the launch of the new development program of the Chinese leadership, the bigger would be its impact on every aspect of their lives.
MAP I.1. People’s Republic of China, with the study area of Zeku County
FIGURE I.1. Sign in Zeku County town, 2007: Great Opening of the West Means Great Development for Zeku
Eventually the changes did come. The most evident changes brought about by government policy have been the creation of increasing number of resettlement and settlement sites, constructed each year since 2003 on the grasslands of Zeku County. The sedentarization measures are especially widespread and more strictly controlled in pastoral areas of Qinghai, such as Zeku County, in particular because of the Three Rivers’ Headwaters National Nature Reserve situated there.21 The presence of the national nature reserve means that Qinghai is eligible for additional funds. Consequently, numerous projects with a strong environmental basis have been implemented in this area, which has accelerated the need for sedentarization. According to the county government sedentarization plans of 2009, all pastoralists would gradually be affected and the sedentarization of all pastoral households would be completed in Zeku by 2012. Although this ambition plan had a serious impact on every aspect of Tibetan pastoralists’ lives, the plan was not realized completely, and even in 2019 a large number of herders and their livestock could still be observed in Zeku and elsewhere in Qinghai.