Rivers of Money Not Flowing to Tibetans

Saturday, 31 May 2008, 3:38 p.m.

Sydney: Australian officials
were recently stunned to hear a senior Chinese policy maker give an
honest diagnosis of why China’s Tibet policies had gone so badly wrong.
At that point four weeks ago it was hard to find clear-eyed analysis
anywhere.

Chinese leaders were railing against Tibetan terrorists, foreign
provocateurs and an “evil” Dalai Lama. Tibetan exile groups and their
Western supporters were accusing China of cultural genocide. Both
groups talked in simplistic dichotomies that largely overlooked what
was actually making those rioting Tibetans so angry.

But the Chinese official departed from the script to argue
Tibet was an economic development problem. He told Australian diplomats
and academics in Beijing that rivers of money from the Chinese
Government had ended up with ethnic Han migrants, leaving an angry
class of unemployed Tibetans.

Huge infrastructure investment had not been matched by
education spending, leaving migrants from elsewhere in China in a
better position to snaffle the jobs and business opportunities.

While Chinese Government subsidies account for 75 per cent of
Tibet’s GDP, and Tibet’s GDP grew 14 per cent last year, the Chinese
official said the region’s ethnic and rural-urban inequalities were
getting worse and the challenge of multi-culturalism had not been
effectively addressed.

Later, members of the Australian audience agreed the Chinese
official had drawn on an article in the April edition of the Far
Eastern Economic Review. The article, “Money Can’t Buy Tibetans’ Love”,
was authored by Ben Hillman, one of the stars of the Australian
National University’s new China Institute.

Hillman had spent much of his time in Diqing Tibetan Autonomous
Prefecture in the northwest corner of Yunnan province. The region is
relatively prosperous thanks to its long exposure to trade.

Diqing had hosted the only road to Tibet for more than a
thousand years until the People’s Liberation Army bulldozed new ones in
the 1950s. It is also the place where three of Asia’s great rivers, the
Salween, the Mekong and the Yangtze, tumble out of the Tibetan plateau
towards Burma, Vietnam and eastern China. One town became an instant
tourism haven after changing its name to Shangri-La.

And yet even in this opportunistic corner of the Tibetan
plateau, ethnic Tibetans were missing out on the tourism boom that had
taken off since the late 1990s. Hillman’s rough survey of half-a-dozen
new hotels found that four in every five jobs had gone to non-Tibetan
Chinese.

Hoteliers told him it was a question of skills rather than
deliberate discrimination: “We’re open to hiring Tibetans but they
can’t do the job.”

Tourists were coming to see Tibetan culture. But Hillman found
it was Han Chinese who were dressing up in Tibetan clothes to sell
tickets at Lhasa’s Potala Palace, hawk fake Tibetan barley cakes and
take all the service industry jobs.

Seen in this light, Tibet is not so different from colonial and
post-colonial development problems the world over, including in Africa,
East Timor and indigenous regions of Australia.

Partly it may be a question of cultural attitude. “Tibetans are
fiercely independent,” says Hillman. “In many cases, they’d rather be
poor on the farm than shine someone’s shoes.”

But it is also about skills and education. Forty per cent of
Tibetans have never been to school and only 15 per cent have had any
secondary education. Tibetan schools teach Tibetan languages but
perhaps this has only exacerbated the challenge of connecting Tibetans
to China’s roaring economy.

The Chinese Government is plastering railways and highways and
sticking mobile phone towers all over the Tibetan plateau. But these
have mainly encouraged and served hundreds of thousands of new migrants
from elsewhere in rural China. “It’s a revolving door of Han Chinese
migrants who come, make some money and leave,” says Hillman.

“In the past there wasn’t really direct competition between Han
and Tibetan elite. It’s a different dynamic now, of lower-class Han
Chinese out-competing Tibetans in urban areas. It’s simple economics –
Tibetans don’t have the skills and they have no way of getting them.
There is no official recognition of this problem.”

So these are the angry, unemployed Tibetan young men who turned
peaceful religious protests in March into the largest and bloodiest
uprising against Communist Party rule in nearly 50 years. Hillman
appears to have prompted at least one senior Chinese policy maker to
start thinking about solutions.

But effective policies may still be a while away if, as argued
by Hong Kong scholar Willy Lam in the same edition of the Far Eastern
Economic Review, President Hu Jintao bears too much personal
responsibility for the underlying problems to seriously address them.

Hillman’s influence also hints at the potential of ANU’s China
Institute. ANU is home to one of the strongest concentrations of
world-class China scholars outside China.

–Report posted by John Garnaut, The Sydney Morning Herald, Australia, on 26 May 2008