Migrants Diluting Tibet Cities

A thousand miles separate this Tibetan city from the Chinese village where Fan Zhangbing was born. But you wouldn’t know it during a stroll through his neighborhood.

There are restaurants where Fan eats the spicy food of his native Sichuan province, and shops where he and the owners bargain in Sichuan-accented Chinese. He hangs out in bars frequented by other Chinese settlers and sings to karaoke machines blaring the latest Chinese pop tunes.

When he wants company, Fan can look up one of his four siblings, who also live in Lhasa, or any of the 200 others from his hometown who have climbed to the roof of the world and established their own little enclave.

In fact, perhaps the most noticeable thing about Fan’s neighborhood in this ancient Tibetan capital is that there’s hardly anything Tibetan about it. “The Chinese and the Tibetans keep to themselves,” said Fan, 27, a cabdriver struggling to make ends meet.

Fan and his fellow villagers are among tens of thousands of Chinese residents who have migrated here during the past 40 years, exacerbating tensions between Tibetans and the Beijing regime.

Like Fan, most come in search of greater economic opportunity, squeezed out of their native towns by a grim combination of too many people and too few jobs. But such settlers also lie at the center of a heated international debate resounding from Lhasa to Hollywood to Washington.

Are these migrants agents of a plan by Beijing to swamp and destroy indigenous Tibetan culture, as critics contend? Or are they welcome bearers of much-needed economic development to what remains a desperately poor region, as the Chinese government insists?

Such questions erupted noisily in June when the World Bank approved a $160-million loan, over U.S. objections, that included money to help move mostly Chinese farmers onto land in Qinghai province, which borders present-day Tibet. Opponents charged that the resettlement would dilute the local Tibetan population, contributing to the “cultural genocide” that activists warn is already taking place in Tibet.

“The very survival of Tibetans as a distinct people is under constant threat,” the exiled Dalai Lama, the Tibetans’ spiritual and temporal leader, declared in an interview published two years ago.

Beyond headlines, however, the realities are more complicated, made up of many interwoven strands like the colorful rugs hawked by vendors throughout Lhasa’s old Tibetan quarter.

To visit the old district of Lhasa today is to see evidence of a remarkably tenacious cultural unity among Tibetans that persists despite half a century of Communist Chinese rule and the effects of spreading globalization.

China has ruled Tibet ever since annexing the region in 1951. Beijing bases its claims to the area on historical patron-client ties that existed between China and Tibet for more than 700 years. Many Tibetans argue that their country acted as an independent state for most of that time.

Despite Chinese domination, the Tibetans remain a devoutly religious people committed to their particular form of Buddhism as expounded by the Dalai Lama. At dawn each day, thousands of worshipers converge on the Jokhang Temple, Tibet’s holiest site, to walk clockwise around the temple three times, burn juniper branches in tribute and prostrate themselves before the temple doors, stretching out on mats too thin to block out the cold of the pavement.

The Tibetan language still buzzes in the market stalls that ring the Jokhang. Yak meat and yak-butter candles are sold everywhere. Distinctive Tibetan dress, splashed with brilliant colors, flashes in the high-altitude sunlight.

Yet the Chinese presence is conspicuous as well, from the five-starred red flag flapping over a building just a few paces away from the temple, to the nearby marquees bearing the names and logos of Chinese banks and the national postal service.

Outside the old part of town, the effects of Chinese policy and of the influx of ethnic, or Han, Chinese settlers are even more obvious.

Economic incentives in the form of tax breaks and lower-interest loans, plus subsidies from Beijing totaling $125 million a year, have encouraged a tide of Chinese entrepreneurs to come to Tibet. There are Chinese-run discos, convenience stores, eateries and trading companies and scores of slapdash buildings covered with the same thin white tiles omnipresent in other Chinese cities. Many street and shop signs are in Chinese only.

“This is part of China now,” a middle-aged Tibetan woman lamented as she leaned against a Buddhist prayer pole, sighing into air saturated with the smoke of burnt offerings.

Exactly how many Chinese live in Tibet is a matter of some dispute. The local government puts the population of Lhasa at 89% Tibetan and 9% Chinese, with the rest belonging to other ethnic groups. In Tibet as a whole, more than 95% are classified as Tibetan. The vast majority of the region’s 2.4 million people live in the countryside and are descendants of the nomadic herders who first settled this Himalayan region.

But the official figures do not include the thousands of Chinese migrants who pour across Tibet’s borders and fail to register with the authorities. Nor do they include the heavy Chinese military presence that has occupied Tibet ever since the People’s Liberation Army first rumbled in nearly 50 years ago.

All told, some estimates say, Han Chinese account for between 15% and 23% of Tibet’s population--higher than what Beijing acknowledges, but lower than claims by members of the Dalai Lama’s government-in-exile that Tibetans are now in the minority.

Each side, Tibetan and Chinese, complains that the other predominates in Lhasa, a city of 200,000 people.

Outwardly, relations between the two communities are placid, partly because of increased familiarity and partly because of stepped-up public security after anti-government riots in the late ‘80s.

Below the surface, however, tension lurks.

“The Tibetans say to us, ‘This land is ours--get out!’ ” said Dong Liangxian, who has lived in Lhasa for slightly more than a year. “What am I supposed to say to that?”

Dong, 27, does not see himself as part of any overarching master plan by Beijing to transfer Han Chinese either involuntarily or permanently into Tibet. He and his wife left their child behind with relatives in their hometown in adjacent Sichuan province, which is bursting with people, for one simple reason: to try to eke out a better living.

Similar economic pressures are driving tens of millions of migrants into other urban areas across China, not just Tibet. And like many, if not most, Chinese transplants here, the Dongs intend to stay for only a few years before returning home with a nest egg. Some stays are even shorter.

Accordingly, many Chinese settlers have little incentive to learn Tibetan or to mix with the local population beyond the regular daily transactions of life. Customs and habits, as well as neighborhoods, remain divided by culture.

“We believe in Buddhism; they’re atheists,” one young nationalist Tibetan said of the gyakuo, a knockoff of the Tibetan term for “foreign devils,” which locals apply to Hans. “They think only of making money.”

Most of the commercial class in Tibet’s two largest cities, Lhasa and Shigatse, does appear to be Chinese. A recent Western study reported that of 1,061 individually operated businesses in the Old Lhasa market area, nearly three out of four were run by Hans or members of the Hui minority, who are much closer to Han Chinese than Tibetans are.

Commercialism Has Seamy Side

The wave of commercialism has its seamy side. Brothels abound, full of migrant Chinese women waiting for customers in storefronts bathed in garish red light. Before a vice unit staged a recent crackdown, gambling dens, technically illegal but widespread in China, operated openly on the same street where the Communist Party, the military and the city government all have their headquarters.

Observers also warn of rising economic resentment among Tibetans as the best jobs increasingly go to better-educated, better-connected, Chinese-speaking Hans.

Although economic growth in Tibet hit 10% last year, outpacing the national rate, government statistics show that most of the growth this decade has been concentrated in urban areas, disproportionately benefiting Chinese settlers, almost all of whom live in the cities. Urban per capita income, about $650 a year, is about five times that of the countryside. Tibet remains the poorest of all China’s provinces.

The question of economic growth is important because from the start, the Communist regime has pointed to its impressive record of economic development in Tibet as justification for its “peaceful liberation” of the region in 1951, when Beijing and the Dalai Lama signed a 17-point charter agreeing to Chinese sovereignty.

“Tibet before this time was a theocracy. It combined government and religion in a feudal, slave-holding society,” said Nyma Tsering, a native Tibetan who is deputy chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region, China’s official designation for the area. (Other parts of the arid Tibetan plateau, home to millions of other Tibetans, have been annexed by other Chinese provinces and are not included in the Tibet Autonomous Region.)

“This social system was dark and backward, a little like the Middle Ages in Europe 500 years ago,” Tsering said. “In the 1950s, while [other countries] were making satellites and modern industry, we didn’t even have roads.

“From 1959, there have been over 111,000 Han comrades who have come here to help us with construction. . . . Why should I restrict them?” Tsering said. “I want them to come.”

The benefits of development have been undeniable: new roads and phone lines spanning the rugged region, life expectancy rates that have more than doubled, more fresh foodstuffs brought in from outside, slowly diminishing levels of illiteracy.

And the line between colonialism and globalization is not always clear. With Chinese-directed development has come the Internet, a bustling stock exchange, Kodak film and the Coca-Cola cans that locals set up in their sidewalk ring-toss games. Men in Shigatse wear bluejeans and L.A. Lakers caps.

In many respects, this city is experiencing the same growing pains as any other city in China, including the struggle to preserve traditional culture, in this case Tibetan, in the march toward modernization.

But critics say Tibet should not be treated just like any other part of China. With historically rich and sophisticated traditions stretching back hundreds of years, they say, Tibet should have greater autonomy to protect its cultural heritage, as was initially envisaged in the 1951 Sino-Tibetan charter.

Instead, after a somewhat relaxed attitude toward diversity in the early ‘80s, when China first began opening up to the outside, government policy in recent years has grown increasingly heavy-handed, bent more on integrating Tibetans with “the motherland” and controlling indigenous culture than on letting it flower unimpeded, analysts say.

Economic Incentives Draw in Workers

Whereas cities like Beijing and Shanghai have moved to seal off the influx of migrant workers, the doors remain wide open in Tibet, where economic incentives are still in place to draw in more settlers from beyond its borders and, in effect, to link Tibet more closely with the rest of China.

“While that’s not a policy of cultural genocide . . . it does show an official encouragement of Chinese migrants to Tibet,” said Kate Saunders, a spokeswoman for the Tibet Information Network, a London-based watchdog group. “That has a very direct impact on the lives and livelihoods of Tibetans.”

Indigenous cultural practices are allowed, but on terms set by Beijing. Fluency in Mandarin Chinese is essential to getting ahead in school and the professional world. Political campaigns in Buddhist lamaseries to vet monks and nuns have intensified. Tibetans can express their private devotion to the Dalai Lama but are punished if it translates into any political challenge to the state.

Many Tibetans fear continued erosion of the way of life they have striven to conserve.

They remember a time when the Chinese government seemed intent on annihilating their culture--or at least wiping out Tibetan Buddhism, which is such a core element of this society that eradicating it is tantamount to cultural extinction.

During the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, fanatical Red Guards crashed into Tibet, wantonly destroying temples hundreds of years old and persecuting the religious in the name of throwing out “reactionary” ways.

Some Tibetans were forced to wear Chinese-style garb, while linguists tried to forge a new “friendship language” that fused Chinese with Tibetan in strange combinations.

Chinese officials rightly point out that all of China suffered damage and desecration during the Cultural Revolution. But Tibet, seen as a stubborn feudal holdout, was hit particularly hard.

No one compares the present situation to that disastrous period. Instead, analysts describe an uneasy standoff and segregation now between Tibetans and the flood of ethnic Chinese.

And in partial restitution for past ravages to Tibetan society, Beijing has spent nearly $12 million building a new museum in Lhasa dedicated to Tibetan culture and expected to house more than 1,000 Tibetan cultural artifacts.

But with perhaps unwitting symbolism, the museum has fallen behind schedule and will not open until Oct. 1--a national holiday celebrating the 50th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.

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Chu, The Times’ Beijing Bureau chief, was recently on assignment in Tibet.