China to Seek 'Stability' in Tibet via Development
Share with others:
BEIJING -- China's top leaders laid out a strategy last week for bringing "leapfrog development and lasting stability" to the Tibetan regions, the state news agency reported late Friday.
President Hu Jintao and other leaders at a Tibet planning conference decided that "more efforts must be made to greatly improve living standards of the people in Tibet, as well as ethnic unity and stability," the Xinhua news agency reported.
The emphasis on economic development indicates that Chinese leaders still see the solution to the problem of Tibet as one of supplying creature comforts. If the region can develop fast enough, the reasoning goes, then Tibetans will buy into Chinese rule.
But a vast uprising among Tibetans in 2008 and continuing tensions since have shown that even though the region's economy has been growing quickly for years, many Tibetans still feel economically disadvantaged and culturally threatened. In private conversations, Tibetans often express rage over the suppression of traditional Buddhist practice and over the influx of ethnic Han migrants to Tibetan areas.
Tibet remains a point of contention between China and the United States. Tensions are expected to deepen because President Obama has said he will meet with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, early this year.
The Chinese government has invested $45.6 billion in Tibet since 2001, according to Xinhua. Tibet's gross domestic product, estimated to be $6.4 billion last year, has increased 170 percent since 2000, the agency said. Xinhua reported that the average income of Tibetan farmers and herders was expected to match the national level by 2020.
Despite those numbers, ethnic nationalism remains a potent sentiment across almost all Tibetan areas of China. At the conference, which ran from Monday to Wednesday, senior leaders not only laid out policy for central Tibet, the area China designates as the Tibet Autonomous Region, but also drew up plans to develop ethnic Tibetan areas in the provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu and Qinghai.
First Published January 24, 2010 2:00 am
