Melissa Chan, Al Jazeera’s China correspondent, has written about the gathering of the monks in Jiegu (aka Gyegu, Jyekundu), the county seat of the Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) which is the devastated center of the latest fatal earthquake in China. Monks from the entire Tibetan cultural region have traveled to Jiegu to offer both physical and spiritual support to the ravaged Tibetan community. It is clearly a potentially volatile situation – a large congregation of monks is a nerve-wracking development for official China. Chan, who does some very good reporting of China, writes,
Surely authorities are looking at the situation very closely, and very nervously. Why they even allow this to be happening is a mystery.
Actually, there is no mystery to it all. What other choice does official China have? Restricting or even limiting monks access to the disaster site would create a nightmarish situation that would, no doubt, spiral out of control on the eve of the opening of the Shanghai Expo. This is not something China can afford to even remotely consider. Tradition, ritual and good sense trumps any possibility of denying the monks access to the dead and the suffering. This is China being diplomatic for the much greater good. Yes, it is a potentially volatile situation – the proverbial tinderbox – but the alternative is a raging fire. No one – not the monks, not the Chinese officials, not the Tibetans or the Chinese people – wants that. I would assume that there is a strict policing of all troops, paramilitary personnel and anyone with an official title. The least scent of provocation cannot, will not be tolerated. We can only hope that all the monks also feel this way. There is a larger issue here, and that’s attending to those who need it most: the victims.
Yushu will continue to be a hotspot for the foreseeable future. The rebuilding of the city may end up being a highly contentious issue. Who will get the jobs? Who will rebuild the homes? Unlike many places in the Tibetan region, the Yushu area has been relatively free from internal migration, and Yushu has generally been peaceful over the last few years while so many other places in the cultural region have not. Tibetans account for more than 95% of the local population. If the major reconstruction effort is conducted by migrant workers from all over China, inevitably there will be many who will come with them, setting up shops and businesses that will certainly be non-Tibetan, and that will, no doubt, exacerbate the current tragedy. The reconstruction phase also must be handled diplomatically, for if it is not there will be problems for the whole plateau, and China, the CCP, as well as the Tibetans, cannot afford this sort of instability. We can only hope that someone is taking the long view on this, and that the view does not include using Yushu as a launch pad for further cultural dilution.
Many of those who were killed and have suffered the most are former nomads displaced by the government’s project, tuimu huancao (“converting pastures to grasslands”) – an attempt to minimize the ecological damage of climate change. It has been a highly controversial program, seen by many as furthering a socio-political agenda – shengtai yimin (ecological migration) – of removing Tibetans from their native lands and resettling them in areas where they are ghettoized in high plains projects. Often they are denied ownership of livestock and forced to live on a fixed, temporary dole. The official line has been that it allows Tibetans access to better schools, medical facilities and social opportunities, though this dispossession has caused overwhelming heartache, loss of social identity and an increase in crime as a society based on shared, though often locally contested, open spaces and seasonal migrations has literally been piled up upon itself. We have just seen the terrible cost of this resettlement. A responsible and ethnically aware reconstruction phase is critical to the future development of not only Yushu, but China as a rising power.
Related links:
Policies for an eco-plateau
Restoring the Grasslands
Nomadic people in Qinghai to settle within five years.
For more in-depth journal articles in pdf:
Green Governmentality and Pastoralism in Western China: ‘Converting Pastures to Grasslands’
Depopulating the Tibetan Grasslands