LHASA, Tibet — The Chinese builders of a railroad bridge here wanted to make a gesture toward anyone still sensitive about outside domination a half-century after Beijing’s soldiers staged the “peaceful liberation” of this mountain kingdom.
The bridge will be painted white, the traditional color of Tibetan prayer scarves. It will have three gently curved arches, suggestive of the exiled Dalai Lama’s renowned Potala Palace. And the supporting pylons will even mimic the splay-legged stance of Tibet’s ubiquitous yaks.
But sensitivity to local needs ends at the employment office. Tibetans work on the project as laborers, making no more than $235 a month. That’s good by local standards but a fraction of the $725 to $2,400 Chinese technicians make. How many skilled jobs do Tibetans hold on the rail line? “Meiyou,” says construction boss Huang Difu, using the Chinese word for “none.”
The $3.2 billion railroad, connecting Lhasa and the neighboring province of Qinghai, is part of a massive investment designed to close a yawning — and politically dangerous — gap between China’s rich coastal cities and poor hinterland. The “Go West” program, launched four years ago, is boosting living standards in Tibet, 10 other Chinese provinces and Chongqing, a city whose administrative borders extend miles into the countryside.
But a weeklong trip through the region suggests that the biggest gains are going to Chinese newcomers, not local residents, leaving the chasm between rich and poor wider than ever.
“The Han (Chinese) have all the big stands. We just have small stands,” says Biama Kazu, a Tibetan vendor selling antiques outside the 1,350-year-old Jokhang Temple. “We can’t compete with the Chinese. … They have government connections.”
Tibet long has been unique for its hold on the Western imagination. But Buddhism’s fabled kingdom in the clouds also shares economic woes with much of China.
Nationwide, the typical rural household has an annual income of $285, just 34.5% of that enjoyed by its urban counterpart, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The poor are further behind the rich today than in 1978, when China inaugurated its market-oriented reforms, or in 1949, when Mao Zedong’s peasant revolt toppled a regime of rich urbanites. “That has to raise alarm bells among the political leadership,” says Andy Rothman of CLSA Emerging Markets in Shanghai.
In trying to spread prosperity to the country’s interior, China’s leaders face a massive undertaking. The 12 western provinces designated for special assistance include more than 70% of the country’s land area and a total of 364 million people — greater than the population of the USA.
Chinese President Hu Jintao, who took office in March, spent much of his early political career in destitute provinces far from the country’s glittering cities. In 1989, as Tibet’s Communist Party secretary, he presided over the imposition of martial law here, so he understands the centrifugal forces tearing at his homeland.
With its top-down mandates, “Go West” — earmarking more than $85 billion for new highways, dams, bridges and power plants — recalls the central planning that characterized China before Deng Xiaoping embraced market mechanisms 25 years ago.
Losing itself?
Rising living standards and the remaking in China’s image of ancient cities such as Lhasa are eroding Tibet’s identity. Still, the high-altitude Tibetan plateau’s sheer isolation hampers development. Lhasa is almost 1,600 miles from the nearest Chinese port. The two-lane artery linking Tibet’s two largest cities, Lhasa and Shigatse, is a mountain-hugging track better suited to goats than vehicles. In places, small bouquets of incense burn by the roadside, perhaps entreating the gods to spare intrepid travelers. Elsewhere, renegade creeks cut the road.
In June 2001, Beijing allocated $8 billion over five years for Tibetan infrastructure projects and subsidies. Last year’s largesse amounted to more than $600 a person in Tibet, the highest in China. The government’s willingness to spend on transport is on display outside Shigatse, where crews of men wearing fedoras and women in ankle-length skirts toil with picks and shovels on a new highway.
China also uses economic development to cement its political control of restive border regions, including Tibet, which it occupied in 1951 and where Buddhist adherents of the exiled Dalai Lama remain resistant to Chinese authority. “They’ve got ethnic unrest in Tibet, Xinjiang, to some extent in Inner Mongolia,” says Richard Baum, a China scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. “They want to keep people happy, so they have to pump money in.”
They are doing just that in Tsetang, 60 miles southeast of Lhasa. Until recently, the sleepy frontier town boasted a cement factory, a restored seventh-century Buddhist temple and not much else.
Beijing’s develop-the-west edict triggered an influx of Chinese businessmen, soldiers and prostitutes, trappings of a town on the make. Downtown, a shiny billboard advertises digital network connections. Scores of construction sites dot the city, even as women and girls spread grain on the road for passing tires to grind.
“Recent years have witnessed dramatic changes,” says De Ji, 44, commissioner of the regional government. “… People’s living standards have improved greatly.”
As proof, government officials arrange a visit to the home of Kelsang Gyurme, 51, and his wife, Dawa Dolkar, 54. Their small living room is lined with posters of Mao and his successors, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, testament to Dolkar’s Communist Party membership. A boom box rests in a corner as gnats hang in the air.
Pouring cups of oily yak butter tea for their guests, the Tibetan couple say that for most of their lives, they survived on the modest income from a pair of milk cows and a sundries shop. Their parents were even less well-off. “Our families were very poor, relying on begging,” says Dolkar.
After saving for six years, they spent almost $11,000 on a Jiefeng truck, which they use to carry sand and stone to construction sites. In the past five years, the truck helped triple their annual income, to about $2,600. Asked to explain their good fortune, Dolkar — speaking through a government interpreter — credits the Communist Party’s “good policy.”
Lack of modern industry
Yet, the local economy remains dependent upon agriculture and animal husbandry. There is little here, or elsewhere in Tibet, to attract the foreign business executives who prowl the rest of China.
Most of the $120 million invested in this region last year, up 34% from 2001, came from other Chinese provinces acting on Beijing’s orders. Regional officials are trying to lure investors with offers of free land and a three-year tax holiday. One official talks of promoting for export the allegedly unique Tibetan chickens, raised in the wild 11,000 feet above sea level.
But even those who aren’t as prosperous as the well-connected Tibetan couple say life is getting better. Down a dirt road in Tsetang’s old quarter, along a narrow alley and up a rough-hewn wooden ladder to the second story of a stone dwelling, a group of young men and women scratch out an almost pre-modern existence. They are nomadic farmers, drawn to town by the construction boom.
Three girls share a spartan room measuring no more than 8 feet by 8 feet with a single window girded by chicken wire. They can’t afford electricity, so between two makeshift beds of cardboard and blankets, a candle flickers on a flimsy table. Cheerful advertisements ripped from popular magazines are tacked to the walls. A few feet beyond the doorway, smoke curls from an open cooking fire.
In the USA, they might be prom-bound. Here, they work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, toting pans of thick cement at the construction site for a new office building. Their Chinese boss pays them each about 20 cents an hour.
Remembering their unforgiving lives on the Tibetan steppe, they are glad to have the work. “It’s not bitter,” says Laba, 17, who like many Tibetans uses one name.
They could be making more in Tsetang’s true growth industry. But the work there is undeniably bitter. Just ask Qixi Zhouma, aspiring-singer-turned-reluctant-prostitute.
Tsetang boasts a mammoth red-light district for a small town in the middle of a devoutly Buddhist land. On either side of the river, extending the length of a city block, are dozens of seedy parlors employing hundreds of girls. Ethnic Chinese are on one side of the water, Tibetans on the opposite bank.
Zhouma, 20, moved to Lhasa from southwest China last year to realize her dream of becoming a professional singer. Then, three months ago, her dance hall closed, and she came to Tsetang. A friend had told her jobs were plentiful.
They weren’t. Now, Zhouma spends her days watching music videos on the big-screen TV in a storefront brothel. She makes about $425 a month, mostly for drinking with and fondling customers. She says she tries to avoid the men who want more, but she concedes she will have sex for money. Her price: 100 Chinese yuan, or about $12.
She feels trapped because her pimp keeps almost all her money to pay off an old debt and anchor her to her work. Clad in a shapeless, funereal black smock, she is the antithesis of the sexy sirens that populate this street. “I regret this,” she says bleakly.
Economists would call the prostitutes surplus labor. Their numbers are an indication that inadequacies in human capital are as glaring as the deficiencies in infrastructure. Many of the women, like those toting cement, are all but uneducated. China’s 2000 census found that 47% of Tibetans — and 60% of women — older than 15 were illiterate, the highest such percentages in the country. (In Beijing, 4.9% of adults can’t read.)
Both the World Bank and Tibetan advocates say Beijing needs to focus more on schooling and less on pouring concrete. “The western development program is not responding to the real needs of the Tibetan people,” says Alison Reynolds of the London-based Free Tibet Campaign.
But Xiang Bapingcuo, Tibet’s deputy Communist Party secretary, has a different view. “Tibet is at its best period in history. … The Tibetan people are confident tomorrow will be even better.”
