BEIJING – Life for 2.2 million farmers and herdsmen in Tibet has markedly improved since the late 1970s, but a growing population and static land holdings pose problems for future generations, a new study showed on Tuesday.
Compiled by Melvyn Goldstein, an anthropologist who has written extensively on contemporary Tibet at Case Western Reserve University in the United States, it found that rural Tibetans remain among the poorest in China, and modernization for them will not come easy.
Goldstein and his team surveyed 13 rural Tibetan villages from 1997 to 2000 and found the state’s policies on land tenure, family planning, development and migrant labor have interacted to create serious structural problems. “Tibetan villagers are now trying to cope with increasing population, decreasing land per capita and increasing prices and taxes,” said the study, to be published later this year.
Although well over 90 per cent of rural Tibetans said life was better after the end of the disastrous “rural collectivisation” policies of the 1960s and 1970s, nearly one third of the villages surveyed were classified as “poor.”
“Similarly, only that village had electricity. None of the areas had improved dirt roads, let alone paved roads.”
After “decollectivization” in 1978, the government parcelled out arable land, but after 25 years the amount of land has not increased while each successive generation has had to share a fixed amount of land among growing numbers of family members.
Currently married women aged 35-39 had on average 4.1 live births and those 40-44 had 5.7, fueling a Tibetan population boom.
“The absence of an active family planning policy has fostered population growth which, given the matrix of fixed land resources, has impacted negatively on rural Tibetans by fostering a decrease of 19.9 percent in per capita land holdings since decollectivization,” it said.
Primary education in rural regions also lacked far behind the rest of China, making Tibetans ill-trained to compete with a growing influx of Han Chinese to Tibet’s urban areas.
Beijing’s policies on restricting the size of monasteries were also limiting the numbers of rural Tibetans seeking a monastic life away from the family plot, it said.
China has been pumping billions of dollars in infrastructure investment into the region that is fueling a massive influx of ethnic Han Chinese into the impoverished and isolated area.
Beijing has ruled Tibet since 1951.
