Government Campaign to Settle Tibetan Nomads Moving Toward Completion

A government program to settle Tibetan nomadic herders has placed about 10,000 families in Qinghai province (89 percent of the nomads) in communities of fixed dwellings, according to an October 4 report in the Sydney Morning Herald. The government program may mean the end of a traditional way of life that Tibetans, Mongols, and other ethnic groups in China regard as integral to their culture and self-identity.

The new settlement rate surpasses the 67 percent settlement rate in Qinghai in 1998, which a March 1998 Xinhua report described. The aim of the national policy is to end the nomadic way of life for all herdsmen by the end of the century, according to statements at the time by Vice Minister of Agriculture Qi Jingfa. Vice Minister Qi noted that the government "began assisting roaming herdsmen to settle down" in 1986, and explained that, "Practices have shown that settlement of local herdsmen helps develop animal husbandry [on] a large scale and promote[s] cultural, technological and educational undertakings in the pastoral areas."

Although some nomads may benefit from settlement programs, achieving improved access to education, medical care, and modern amenities, the resettlement policy does not respect the right of a nomad family to maintain its traditional lifestyle and livelihood. Moreover, Articles 19 and 20 of the Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law (REAL) grant provincial, prefectural, and county governments designated as "autonomous" under the REAL the right to formulate their own laws and regulations on matters such as settling (or protecting) nomads. But official statements from the central government on the resettlement policy, and the resettlement policy’s national scope, seem to show that these legal rights, to which local autonomous governments are entitled under the REAL, are not respected.

For example, a September 2004 Xinhua article posted on the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) government Web site reports that, "A total of 48,000 nomadic Tibetans have settled down in the past three years since the central government launched a pasture construction and nomadic people settlement program in [the] Tibet Autonomous Region in 2001." The project "constitutes one of the numerous key aiding-Tibet projects laid down at the [Fourth Tibet Work Forum]" convened jointly by the Communist Party Central Committee and the government in Beijing in June 2001. Jiang Zemin, who was President and Party General Secretary at the time, presided over the forum. In April 2005, the State Council issued a White Paper on Chinese human rights that reports that a project to settle nomads in the TAR "was carried out continuously" and will settle another 8,000 nomad families (40,000 people) when completed in 2006.

Additional information about China's system of regional ethnic autonomy, and on protecting the cultural heritage of Tibetans, is available in the CECC 2005 Annual Report.