New measures are being introduced in Tibet to combat rising unemployment and a growing underclass of unskilled Tibetan workers due to the influx of skilled Chinese workers to Lhasa and other areas of the Tibet Autonomous Region. The plans reflect an official acknowledgement of the need for vocational training programmes and emphasis on employing local Tibetan workers, but Tibetan cadres and officials are concerned that they may not be enough to counter the increasing disadvantages faced by Tibetans due to growing competition for work from Chinese migrants.
The new plans form part of the China-wide urbanization policies that are now being promoted as fundamental to Tibetan development. An internal report produced by the influential Regional Development and Reform Commission in Lhasa states that more jobs have to be created in urban areas of the TAR to meet the need of more than 60,000 Tibetans moving in from rural areas as well as the growing number of migrant workers from China over the period of the 10th Five Year Plan (2001-05). The Commission is responsible for formulating five-year plans for the region and for allocating state funding for development. It also states in its report that between 2001 and 2005, total ‘surplus labour’ in rural areas (meaning that there is not enough land to support a growing rural workforce) is estimated to rise to 310,000 by 15,000 – 25,000 annually.
Although the Regional Development and Reform Commission report states that more resources are needed to promote vocational education and skills training for the local population, no specific targets for promoting this vocational training have been set in the plan.
The report, drafted last year and due to be approved by the TAR People’s Congress, identifies factors that are favourable for job creation in Tibet. These include major infrastructure projects being carried out under China’s Western Development strategy such as the Qinghai-TAR railway, currently in the process of construction and due to be operational in 2007. The Regional Development and Reform Commission recommends that the railway should be encouraged to use as much ‘surplus local labour’ as possible. But a senior official supervising work on the railway, Huang Difu, admitted to a Western journalist in August that while construction of the railway employs some 6000 Tibetan labourers, none of the estimated 27,000 semi-skilled workers and managers for the railway are Tibetan. Huang Difu added that this is because most work has been sub-contracted to enterprises based elsewhere in China (Asia Business Week, 9 September 2003). The Regional Development and Reform Commission itself has very few Tibetan staff. Many of the Commission’s staff are Chinese transferred from other provinces who work only temporarily in Tibet.
A survey of working patterns in the Lhasa administrative area in the summer of 2001 estimated the prefecture’s total employed workers as 233,500, including migrant workers from China (Lhasa Labour Ministry, 2002). This classification does not include peasants and nomads. Of this total, 70.1% were employed by the government or state-owned enterprises, and only 23.9% by the private sector. The summer figure is always higher than the winter numbers due to the seasonal nature of some employment; many Chinese migrants arrive in Lhasa to work in the summer and leave in winter. According to the same survey, 24,960 people were registered as unemployed in the prefecture. This sample, which is at best approximate, was not bound by registration status, as less than 10% of this total were registered at the Labour Bureau of Lhasa Municipality – usually only state-sector workers register because they are the only ones who receive benefits. An official from the Labour Bureau recently estimated the ‘surplus labour force’ in Lhasa’s rural suburbs as totalling 43,000.
Andrew Fischer, a development economist who specialises in Tibet, says that the unemployment rate of around 10% appears similar to unofficial estimates of unemployment in China as a whole, but adds: ‘This figure does seem high given the intensive development of Lhasa over the past five years, but it makes sense given that growth in the provincial economy, which is largely concentrated in Lhasa, tends to be in administration and capital intensive infrastructure. It is therefore limited in its ability to absorb labour, particularly migrant rural labour.’
The report by the Regional Development and Reform Commission on population, employment and social security in Tibet recommends the acceleration of urbanisation in the TAR as an answer to rural unemployment. According to the 15-Year Plan for the TAR, 106 new urban centres are due for completion by 2005. This policy of urbanization involves the aggregation of smaller townships into larger administrative units. While in many cases this involves the reclassification of existing settlements, it is also likely to have a dramatic impact on Tibetan areas, partly because it will involve the movement of Tibetans from remote rural regions into urban areas, with a resultant change in lifestyle and livelihood.
A paper by Chinese author Li Zibin published by an official journal of the Communist Party of China Central Committee refers to this rural-urban migration as a means to counter the problem of rural underdevelopment: ‘Ecological migration should be practised to relocate poverty-stricken people from the ecologically important areas, areas with a fragile ecological environment and areas where basic conditions for survival are basically non-existent in the western region, and the scale of the migration should be increased step by step.’ (Beijing Qiu Shi, ‘Seeking Truth’, a semi-monthly official journal, in Chinese, 16 February 2003).
The Regional Development and Reform Commission also advocates the transfer of rural labour from traditional sectors to non-agricultural sectors in order to ‘solve the problem of under-employment in rural areas’. This reflects the lower productivity of agriculture in terms of GDP/labour ratios, compared to the secondary and tertiary sectors. While some Chinese academics and economists argue that more resources should be allocated to strengthening agricultural sectors and helping more people earn a living from the land, as part of the debate about China’s Western Development strategies as a whole, most developmentalists hold the view that agriculture should be supported within a policy of also training for ‘off-farm’ employment.
New State Council plans for vocational training
Vocational and skills training are now recognised as key elements of China’s strategies for developing the western regions of the PRC, including Tibetan areas. In September 2002 the State Council issued a new plan on vocational education promotion, particularly focusing on the western regions of the PRC, including Tibetan areas. The plan, published in State Council 2002 Document No 16 (an internal government document), requires education departments in the provinces to take responsibility for planning, co-ordinating and administering vocational education promotion. A further notice was issued by the State Council in February this year requiring local governments to provide various training programmes to migrant workers. It is not yet known if the higher priority accorded to vocational education will result in increased resources for training schemes in Tibetan areas; many of the existing projects for training farmers in rural areas in different skills, for instance, are severely under-funded.
Karma Hardy, Director of the London-based Tibet Foundation, which runs skills training courses for Tibetans in Kham (now incorporated into Sichuan province), said: ‘Vocational training for Tibetans in all Tibetan areas is vitally important – it gives hope and confidence as well as more opportunities on the job market. There should be more training to equip Tibetans for today’s society – in engineering, for hydro-electric power projects, forestry, construction, mining and in tourism. For instance, every town centre now is opening a three or four-star hotel, and the Chinese government is encouraging tourism to Tibet, so it would help Tibetans to give them business or hotel management training.’
Tibetan officials have stressed the importance of skills training specifically for Tibetans, in order to address the inequalities in pay and opportunities in both rural and urban areas. Many Tibetans can only obtain low-paid manual work because of lack of skills. According to one Tibetan official interviewed by a Chinese researcher on the issue of unemployment in the TAR, an unskilled Tibetan labourer normally earns 15-20 yuan ($1.8-$2.4) a day, while a skilled Chinese worker can earn up to 50 ($6) yuan a day. According to a report in the Straits Times based on the reporter’s visit to the TAR, Tibetans employed on the Golmud-Lhasa railway earn 50 to 65 yuan ($6-$8) a day, depending on altitude, compared to a more stable 6,000 to 20,000 yuan ($724-$2416) a month earned by non-Tibetan skilled workers (27 September 2003). Relevant areas for skill training for Tibetans recommended by the same senior official could include forestry, vegetable and flower growing, bee-keeping, maintenance and repair of farming machines, maintenance of solar power generation equipment, tractor or truck driving.
Despite the greater priority accorded to vocational education in the TAR, the same problems remain of finding work for graduates of such schemes. In one scheme in the TAR, farmers were trained in construction skills, but very few of them have been successful in finding a job later in the construction sector, either locally or further afield. A Tibetan farmer from the Lhasa area said: ‘Often it is not enough to have special skills and adequate capital. In so many different areas of business – from mining to shop-keeping – Tibetans are faced with so much competition from more skilled Chinese workers, who prefer to employ other Chinese. Chinese shop-keepers will often undercut Tibetan shop-keepers – for instance in my local town, many Tibetan cobblers have been put out of business by Chinese bringing in much cheaper shoes and selling them more aggressively.’
A Chinese researcher who has studied the employment situation in certain areas of the TAR said: ‘The local job market [intheTAR] is not only small and underdeveloped but also segregated by ethnicity, resident registration and employment status. For certain skills like driving and computer use, the small job market has already become saturated because a sizeable number of people have already received training in the existing programmes run by various government departments and schools. Furthermore, according to local officials, the most important factor for an individual securing a job and staying successful is usually personal connection and wheeler-dealing, rather than qualification, capital or hard work. In this context, the chance for a Tibetan villager with basic skills is very limited, if not entirely hopeless, on the job market in, for instance, Lhasa, Tsedang [Tibetan:Tsetang] or Naqu [Tibetan:Nagchu].’
This is one in a series of independent reports by Kate Saunders commissioned by the Australia Tibet Council, Free Tibet Campaign and the International Campaign for Tibet.
