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Key Text State Growth and Social Exclusion in Tibet: The Challenges of Recent Economic Growth

Author: Andrew Martin Fischer
Date: 2005
Size: 213 pages

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Summary

How has economic growth and transformation in China influenced structural marginality in Tibetan areas? This book uses a macro socio-economic perspective to trace how economic growth and transformation interact with social change and population transitions in the Tibetan areas, and how these processes influence the emergence or exacerbation of structural marginality and social exclusion. It argues that the most pressing economic issues facing the Tibetan regions relate to the socio-economic marginalisation of the majority of Tibetans from rapid state-led growth.

This marginalisation is due in part to the geographic concentration of Tibetans in rural areas. There is a strong correlation between spatial and inter-ethnic inequality in the Tibetan areas, and inter-ethnic inequalities partly reflect the urban-rural disparities throughout China. However, the focus on urban-rural disparities and the integration of traditional rural populations into modern development overlooks the reality that poverty is newly produced through such integration. Peripherality, the structure and sources of economic growth, population transitions and migration, and the role of employment and education, have engendered polarised growth and ethnically exclusionary dynamics. Policies conceived to address the urban-rural divide itself may in fact aggravate this situation.

The educational divide, rather than the spatial divide, plays a far more critical role in determining exclusionary outcomes within the local economy. Illiteracy rates in the Tibetan urban areas are almost as high as rural illiteracy rates.
Tibetans have experienced polarisation and exclusion in the urban areas. The potential emergence of a Tibetan underclass appears as a contradiction to state focus on urban growth strategies and the drive for western development.
There is little scope for rural industrial development in the Tibetan areas or for agriculture to absorb surplus labour, so urbanisation will become a precedent in the next generation.
However, the poorer rural Tibetans migrating to the Tibetan urban areas are strongly disadvantaged in competing for economic opportunities with the better educated Han and Muslim immigrants to these areas.

Comparing the experience of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) with other Tibetan areas in China, particularly those of the western province of Qinghai, demonstrates the degree to which economic development in the TAR is de-linked from the local productive economy. It suggests two similar regions can experience different outcomes and emphasises the importance of tailoring development strategies to local rather than outside priorities. It also suggests that deterministic 'ecological poverty' approaches are questionable. To address both exclusion and growth in the Tibetan areas a massive expansion of social services is needed, primarily education and health, along with a reorientation of economic strategy towards local integration and ownership.

Spending on education and health is likely to be much more efficient than the current focus on construction and government administration in terms of retaining value in the economy and much more effective in terms of spreading this value more evenly, through employment generation for example.
However, education drives must be culturally sensitive (through, for example, bilingual education) rather than simply being used as an excuse for large-scale assimilation.