By Mure Dickie
On a high mountain pass in central Tibet, three men, clad in heavy leather aprons and coated in dust from the road, are making a painful pilgrimage, pausing every few steps to prostrate themselves on the stony ground in a show of their enduring devotion to their Buddhist religion.
The Tibetans’ undimmed faith, despite five decades of often brutal rule by China’s atheist Communist party, is one of the few constants in a land in the throes of tumultuous change. When the pilgrims finally reach Lhasa, the Tibetan capital – four months after setting off – they will find a city that looks increasingly like a Chinese provincial town, its streets lined with Sichuanese restaurants, mobile phone masts sprouting from its rocky outcrops and its suburbs filling up with European-style villas.
Since China took control of Tibet in 1951, the region has been a focus of international protest over Beijing’s often crude attempts to subjugate Tibet by suppressing its culture and religion. Now China’s growing economic might is also proving a powerful instrument of transformation for Tibet’s people. Rapid modernisation, fuelled by massive Chinese investment and carried out on Beijing’s terms rather than of Tibet’s choosing, is binding Tibet more closely to China and posing powerful challenges to one of the world’s most ancient civilisations.
For some, better transport and communications links from a region once dubbed “the roof of the world” offer new business opportunities and the chance of better living standards in a land where most live in poverty. But most Tibetans risk being marginalised in their own economy by the increasing presence of Chinese companies, entrepreneurs and migrant workers.
“There’s no hope for us,” says a businessman waiting for his Jeep to be repaired at a one-street town east of the 5,000m-high Mila Pass. “We can’t compete with the Chinese.”
Perhaps the greatest symbol and driver of change is the 1,080km railway that will from 2007 link Lhasa with Golmud in China’s western Qinghai region. Spanning permafrost wastes and running mostly at altitudes of over 4,000 metres, the line is expected to cost more than Rmb26bn ($3.1bn). Its construction accounts for about 10 per cent of gross domestic product in the Tibet Autonomous Region, says Fu Yushou, a Chinese official responsible for providing support for the project. But its real impact will be felt when it opens in three years time. Mr Fu says the cost of shipping goods to and from Tibet will be slashed from Rmb0.5 per kilometre/tonne to around Rmb0.2.
Trains with pressurised carriages to deal with the high altitude will further boost already unprecedented flows of migrant workers, business people and tourists from China’s interior, who currently must either take costly flights or make gruelling and often dangerous road journeys.
The line is already encouraging international investors to consider Tibet, with Carlsberg, the Danish beer group, saying its construction was a “big factor” in its decision to establish a joint venture with Lhasa Brewery this year.
The railway is part of a wave of Chinese investment in Tibet. Fixed asset investment, mostly by the central government, accounted for Rmb13bn of the region’s Rmb18bn in GDP last year, says Ma Jinglin of the region’s Development and Reform Commission. Though firmly under Beijing’s political sway, Tibet’s status as an “autonomous” region brings it a range of favourable policies such as permission to charge low business tax rates.
China’s richer cities and provinces run their own aid programmes for Tibet and send experienced cadres to strengthen government administration. The result has been regional economic growth of more than 12 per cent for each of the past three years. “Tibet does not pay one cent (in tax) to the central government,” says Mr Ma.
Economic growth has brought the chance to ease poverty and improve health and education standards that lag far behind China’s eastern provinces. Those Sichuanese restaurants are popular with urban Tibetans looking for a change from a local cuisine dominated by barley flour and yak butter. Some are exhilarated at the erosion of Tibet’s isolation. “The railway is a good thing,” says a Lhasa artist. “I hope it will keep going right from Lhasa to India, I hope a line will run from Tibet to Copenhagen.”
Although the gap between urban and rural incomes is widening, many in the countryside, where more than 65 per cent of Tibetans live, are also benefiting. Some farmers in Nyingtri boost their incomes by renting fields to migrant workers from China’s interior. “If we planted the land ourselves we could not make so much money,” says one. “They use greenhouses . . . we don’t know that kind of technique.”
But such examples also underline the central role of migrants from China’s majority Han ethnic group and the Muslim minority Hui in the economy. Traders in central Lhasa’s traditional market district say that increasingly tourist trinkets and religious wares are being sold by Han. Elsewhere in the city, Han shoe-shine ladies ply their trade and even the beggars are from the interior. Despite some legal protection for Tibetan, Chinese is the language of commerce. Even supporters of the Chinese government admit that much of the money spent on infrastructure development flows back to construction companies based in China’s eastern provinces.
The dominant role of the migrants is clear at the site of the railway bridge being built on the edge of Lhasa, where on a recent visit not one Tibetan was to be found. Mr Fu says efforts are being made to ensure most of the permanent staff on the new railway are Tibetan, with hundreds being sent for training in transport colleges around China.
But the government has no interest in trying to restrict the flow of energetic and entrepreneurial Han and Hui into the region. Indeed, one Tibetan official in Lhasa talks cheerfully about how the Tibetan nation can “improve itself through competition”.
Instead, Beijing focuses on trying to ensure that more Tibetans are equipped to succeed in the new economy, an approach that also helps it to promote its vision of Tibet as an integral part of a multi-ethnic Chinese motherland. Tibetans are given preferential access to higher education and to government jobs. Career advancement, however, depends on being seen as supportive of Chinese rule.
Tibetans who join the Communist party, a near-requisite for senior positions, must also espouse its atheist principles, a painful demand for many in a land known for its Buddhist faith.
Tensions between tradition and Chinese-led development are perhaps strongest in the realm of religion. Before the Chinese invasion, many Tibetans saw protection of the faith as the very purpose of a theocratic state led by the Dalai Lama and dominated by the monastic orders.
The Chinese Communist party, however, focused on forcibly liberating Tibetan serfs from the great monasteries and wealthy landowners. During the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution thousands of monasteries, nunneries and shrines were razed and all religious practice banned.
Such extreme policies were abandoned in the late 1970s and displays of devotion are now a common sight. But Beijing is aware of the exiled Dalai Lama’s status as both supreme religious figure and a symbol of Tibet’s separate identity.
In a recent report on Beijing’s policies on religion, the International Campaign for Tibet described tight limits on the numbers of monks allowed to join monasteries, curbs on religious education and continuing efforts to promote atheism, all backed by the overwhelming and sometimes harshly applied power of the state.
While China promises freedom of religion, officials make no apology for requiring monks and nuns to establish their “patriotic” credentials by rejecting both Tibetan independence and the Dalai Lama, whose photograph is banned from all display. “Everything he does is a violation of the spirit of morality that a Buddhist should follow and a contravention of Buddhist discipline,” says Zhang Leying of the regional government’s religious affairs commission. “(The Dalai Lama) has already lost any qualification to be a Buddhist.”
Beijing has even seized control of the process of finding the reincarnations of leading lamas. When the exiled Dalai Lama in 1995 pre-empted Beijing by announcing the finding of a successor to the 10th Panchen Lama, officials detained the chosen six-year-old, anointed another child and demanded that clergy and laity accept their choice.
The resultant conflict of loyalties for Tibetan Buddhists may be a harbinger of an even greater dilemma. The 14th Dalai Lama has said that he will be reborn in a “free country” but China seems sure to insist on finding the next Dalai Lama within its borders.
Avoiding another succession dispute would require compromise between Beijing and the Tibetan government in exile. Despite recent talks, hopes seem faint. China’s growing economic and diplomatic clout arguably makes it less vulnerable to foreign pressure, while the exile movement’s international support depends greatly on the ageing Dalai Lama.
The prospect of continued Chinese control of religious life, economic dominance and untrammelled modernisation makes some Tibetans fear for their cultural survival. But the continuing strength of religious belief under communist rule suggests Tibetan identity will not easily be swamped. There are also reasons to hope Beijing’s hand will lie lighter on the region.
Although debate on issues of sovereignty remains almost taboo, China’s emerging civil society is creating greater room for discussion of cultural differences. Growing interest among urban Chinese in the spiritual riches of Tibetan Buddhism is also challenging the perception of the region as a backwater that must be hustled into modernity. Even if Beijing shrugs off complaints from foreign governments, its treatment of Tibet will affect its international image for years.
Tashi Tsering, a Tibetan scholar and former exile, says the power of Chinese culture means some degree of sinofication is “natural and unavoidable”. But Mr Tsering, a champion of Tibet’s linguistic heritage who is building primary schools in poor rural areas, refuses to be disheartened. “We will retain the best part of our culture, including the writing system and the character of the people,” he says.
