TNAG-2750-FCO40-3965-Most-favoured-nation-status-for-China-Hong-Kong-interests-1993 — Page 181

The town of Chamdo has a Chinese population of about 95% according to eyewitnesses. Some towns in bam did not exist before the arrival of the Chinese in the 1950s. One such is Hong Yuan, which has been in the middle of vast grasslands inhabited previously only by nomads. There are allegations that fertile grazing land has been appropriated by new settlers, forcing Tibetans to higher and more difficult

areas.

Unemployment

In Lhasa and other cities unemployment is a growing problem amongst Tibetans. There are several reasons for this:

Chinese language is the principal medium of teaching and Chinese is required for most jobs. This gives new settlers an immediate advantage, apart from any purely racial advantage they may have in dealings with the Chinese authorities who dispense most of the jobs, residence permits and trade privileges.

There is systematic importation of workers as well as of technical experts and officials to work in TAR. Each of China's 25 ethnically Chinese provinces was obliged to send a work team for a number of building projects. In 1984 alone, Radio Beijing reported 60,000 arriving 'representing the vanguard groups to help in schools, hotels and construction'; Radio Lhasa reported 60,000 peasants arriving to find opportunities for selling clothes, foodstuffs, and for building work; 10,000 technicians also arrived.

Incentives to Chinese immigrants include altitude allowance, remoteness bonus, tax concessions, less hours, longer holidays and greater market opportunities than in China. Professional and official wages are the highest in China and are made up of over 30% bonuses, according to the Chinese Statistical Year Book: a Chinese teacher in TAR can earn five times as much as they would for more work in China. Many Tibetans allege that officials refuse work and residence permits to migrating Tibetans but encourage Chinese to accept them or even work without them. This is particularly true of shopkeepers and tradesmen.

Resettlement policy: a Chinese tradition

Tibetans allege that many of the Chinese workers, often recently retired soldiers, are given jobs in Tibet for security reasons - to help control and infiltrate the local populace, and to take up arms if required. This security function of resettlement was explicit during China's mass settlement campaigns of Manchuria in the late 19th century, and Xinjiang during the 1950s. Manchuria now has a population of 75 million. Chinese to some 3 million Manchus; Inner Mongolia has about 8.5 million Chinese to 2 million Mongols and Xinjiang has 6 million Chinese to about 5 million Uighurs. In the days when these countries were opened up to Chinese settlement - roughly 100, 70, and 40 years ago respectively - the policies of mass resettlement and assimilation were quite explicit, and even in the 1980s Chinese officials were still referring to the great opportunity the western regions held for absorbing China's expanding population: 'The developed areas in the east will help the west achieve rapid and cultural development. The northwest can absorb the population increase in the east, relieving the pressure of its high population density... the population of the four western provinces would increase by 60... to 100 million in less than 30 years.' (Movement Westwards, produced by the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi in 1985.)

Such development is seen as natural in Chinese world views, both imperial and revolutionary. It is also regarded as necessary and beneficial to the 'backward' peoples who could gain from assimilation with the Chinese. It is, however, contrary to international law, where that is applied to occupied territories, and would completely invalidate the question of self-determination, quite apart from its cultural and economic impact.

Both campaigns were explicitly orchestrated by Beijing to consolidate border defences against potential invasion by repopulating non-Chinese fontier areas with munbers of Chinese settlers. Manchuria was resettled to oppose the Russian threat by order of the Empress Dowager in the 1890s; in Xinjiang over a thousand towns and villages have been built by former PLA soldiers settled since the 1950s, in what was then known as East Turkestan.

TSG.UK 11/90

All attempts to discuss Tibet are bedevilled by the Chinese redefinition of the country's borders since 1949. Tibet Support Group.UK uses the term Tibet to refer to the three original provinces of UTsang, Khan and Amdo (sometimes called Greater Tibet). When the Chinese refer to Tibet they invariably mean Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) which includes only one province, UTsang (TAR was formally inaugurated in 1965). In 1949 the other two provinces, Amdo and Kham, were renamed by the Chinese as parts of China proper and became the provinces of Qinghai and parts of Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan.