Tibet is crucial for Beijing for strategic purposes.
Sitting in a house built by Chinese authorities near the capital of Tibet, Lhasa, one of the highest cities in the world, Sunnamdanba tells foreign journalists on a government-sponsored tour how much the Communist Party has improved life – and how irrelevant religion has become to him.
“I could never have dreamed that my life would be so good,” said the father of two, 41, who traditionally uses only one name, in comments translated by a local official. Foreign journalists can only report on the region on trips organized by the government.
Asked about the Dalai Lama, the 85-year-old spiritual leader of Tibet now living in exile and condemned by China as a separatist, Sunnamdanba said, “I have never met him and I do not understand him.”
What about Buddhism, the religion that has been the foundation of Tibetan culture for over a millennium? “I spend most of my time and energy working and making a living,” he said. “There is less time to devote to religion.”
Why hang a portrait of President Xi Jinping in your living room? “None of this could have happened without the party.”
Legitimacy to the rule
For China, featuring Tibetans singing the praises of the Communist Party helps assert its legitimacy in ruling the region, which has weighed on Beijing’s ties with the West since a failed uprising in 1959 forced the Dalai Lama to resign. flee and set up a government in exile in northern India. It has become more prominent recently as politicians in the United States, Europe and India accuse China of using forced labor, detention and re-education campaigns to assimilate ethnic minorities into its borders.
The Trump administration’s new special envoy for Tibetan issues met with the exiled Tibetan administration chief this month, sparking outrage from China. India, which only recognized Beijing’s sovereignty over the region in 2003, also recently revered a Tibetan soldier who died fighting China this year in the worst clashes along the border since the 1962 war.
Tensions have also mounted in other areas. Earlier this year, an effort by the Chinese government to make Mandarin Chinese the language of instruction in schools in an area inhabited by ethnic Mongols sparked street protests. And in Xinjiang, a province directly north of Tibet, outrage over China’s decision to detain more than a million Uyghur Muslim minority groups in re-education camps has led some U.S. lawmakers to press for actions be declared “genocide”.
Xi personally championed the initiatives in Xinjiang, saying they were necessary to stem terrorism and improve people’s lives. In comments last month, he called the party’s policies “completely correct”, called for more economic development and pushed for more nationalism in education to “allow the sense of Chinese identity to take root. in people “.
Sinofication of Buddhism
At a meeting on Tibet issues in August, Xi told officials to “actively guide Tibetan Buddhism to adapt to socialist society and promote the sinofication of Tibetan Buddhism.”
In Tibet, often referred to as the “roof of the world” due to its high altitude along the Himalayas, ethnic Tibetans make up about 90% of the 3.5 million people living in an area the size of the country. South Africa. Their language has nothing to do with Chinese, most are Buddhists, and many consider the Dalai Lama to be their spiritual leader – if not their political leader.
In 2008, deadly riots broke out in Lhasa, killing at least a dozen. A wave of self-immolations by ethnic Tibetans followed a few years later, with Dalai Lama supporters and human rights activists attributing these actions to the oppression of the government. Beijing has blamed the Dalai Lama for fomenting the unrest, and this sentiment continues to be voiced by officials today who see religion as the root cause of some of Tibet’s greatest challenges.
“Due to some outdated conventions and bad habits – especially the negative influence of religion, people pay more attention to the afterlife, and their desire to live this life better is relatively lower,” Tibet Governor Qi Zhala told reporters at a briefing. was part of the trip. “Therefore, in Tibet, we will not only have to feed the stomach, but also mend the spirit.”
Tibetans are only allowed to continue their religious practices under strict controls: those who openly show reverence and support for the Dalai Lama may face severe punishment.
“This is how you control Tibet”
“Now they want Buddhism taught in Chinese,” Lobsang Sangay, chairman of the exiled Tibetan government, said at a seminar in Washington on September 28. “This is how you control Tibet and this is how you control the Himalayan belt. that’s how you control Asia. “
But Beijing is also investing heavily in Tibet, betting that new roads, jobs, better housing and better access to education and health care will bring stability to the region. It is also relying on modern life to erode the hold of religion on Tibet since the 7th century.
“A gift makes you indebted to the donor,” said Emily Yeh, professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who is the author of the book “Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development”. “The main thing is loyalty to the state and the party.”
Tibet is crucial for Beijing for strategic purposes. Its mountainous terrain adjoins a 4,000 kilometer (2,500 mile) border with countries such as India, Nepal and Myanmar, forming a natural security barrier. Beijing recently beefed up troops stationed in Tibet as it prepares for a long winter in its high-altitude standoff with India.
“To rule a country, it is necessary to rule the border,” Xi said at the Tibet Symposium in August, where the party set the political guidelines for the region’s development. “To govern the border, we must first stabilize Tibet.”
Family moves
For Xi, the key to stifling calls for Tibetan independence and strengthening the Communist Party regime is to generate economic growth in one of China’s poorest regions.
Since 2016, China has spent more than $ 11 billion in poverty reduction efforts in Tibet. Authorities say they have lifted 628,000 people above the country’s absolute poverty line, which Beijing currently defines as those with annual incomes of less than about $ 600, or $ 1.64 per day.
These efforts have included building roads to remote villages, securing safe drinking water and providing access to health care. But they also fueled concern over the loss of Tibetan culture, especially due to widespread relocation of families.
Sunnamdanba is one of some 266,000 Tibetans who have been relocated to new villages over the past five years as part of Xi’s anti-poverty campaign. He said his family now earns around $ 13,000 a year, four times what they earn in a good year, thanks to his job as a security guard, his wife’s work as a housekeeper and the renting three rooms in their new home to Chinese tourists.
The government’s position that it did not force anyone to relocate as part of the fight against poverty was supported by a Tibetan-born researcher who studies relocations in the region. In asking not to be named for fear of reprisal, the researcher said he was aware of villages where only two out of 120 households had accepted the relocation offer.
However, a new government initiative to displace 130,000 people from fragile ecosystems to high altitudes has been less flexible. According to the researcher, the villagers of these localities have no choice.
‘I believe in the party’
Those presented to journalists on the trip seemed happy to change location. Among them, Luoce, 35, who grazed animals in his meadows some 5,000 meters (16,000 feet) above sea level, where he says the scarcity of air made him bleed from nose.
In 2017 he moved to a so-called resettlement village and now works as a security guard and firefighter. His income has tripled thanks to his salary and various government grants, including one he receives for not grazing animals on his land for environmental reasons. Luoce’s goal is to give his seven children the education he never received.
“I believe in the party and in science more than in religion,” he said through a government translator.
Yet a poorly executed resettlement program could also worsen people’s plight and foment the very kind of instability that improved economic conditions were meant to prevent.
A notable example of this happened in Inner Mongolia about ten years ago, when the provincial authorities transferred the shepherds from the steppe to the so-called dairy villages. The Chinese dairy industry imploded soon after following a tainted milk scandal, forcing many herders to make a living doing odd jobs.
Disadvantaged subclass
Large-scale resettlement involves major changes in social structures, family ties, culture, lifestyle, communities and class structure, according to Robbie Barnett, who led the Modern Tibetan Studies program at the Columbia University until 2018 and has written about the area since the 1980s.
“It is impossible to overestimate the enormity of these new forms of development and economic policy in Tibet and the Tibetan regions, especially resettlement,” he said. “To put it at its crudest, the risk is that while some prosper, many farming and herding communities will be turned into a dislocated and disadvantaged underclass.”
Officials interviewed during the reporting trip spoke at length about this risk and highlighted two solutions: teaching Tibetans new skills to earn money and develop education.
Outside of Shigatse, Tibet’s second largest city, low-income families grow mushrooms – something Tibetans have not traditionally done – and then sell them to a government-funded business. More than 600 kilometers from Nyingchi, authorities plan to spend more than $ 100 million on a vocational training center designed for students who failed a test to continue their secondary education after the end of compulsory education in Tibet after the ninth year.
One of those students is Suolanyixi, the 19-year-old son of pepper growers. He’s already mastered cappuccino in his quest to become a professional barista, and one day hopes to land a job at one of Lhasa’s half-dozen or so five-star hotels.
And while none of the other students who studied coffee making at school have ever found employment outside Tibet, Suolanyixi is not ready to dismiss the idea – something that would further the Party’s goal. communist to integrate the region with the rest of China. “Maybe if I’m lucky,” he says in fluent Mandarin Chinese.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
