“Grazing our animals
wasn’t a problem for thousands of years yet suddenly they say it is.”
Range-lands cover more than 40 percent of China, from
Xinjiang in the far west to the expansive steppe of Inner Mongolia in the
north. The lands have been the traditional home to Uighurs, Kazakhs, Manchus
and an array of other ethnic minorities who have bristled at Beijing’s heavy-handed
rule. For the Han Chinese majority, the people of the grasslands are a source
of fascination and fear. China’s most significant periods of foreign
subjugation came at the hands of nomadic invaders, including Kublai Khan, whose
Mongolian horseback warriors ruled China for almost a century beginning in
1271.
“These areas have always been hard to know and hard to
govern by outsiders, seen as places of banditry or guerrilla warfare and home
to peoples who long resisted integration,” said Charlene E. Makley, an
anthropologist at Reed College, in Oregon, who studies Tibetan communities in
China. “But now the government feels it has the will and the resources to bring
these people into the fold.”
The Chinese government is in the final stages of a
15-year-old campaign to settle the millions of pastoralists who once roamed
China’s vast borderlands. By year’s end, Beijing claims it will have moved the
remaining 1.2 million herders into towns. The policies, based partly on the
official view that grazing harms grasslands, are increasingly contentious. The “Ecological
Relocation” program, started in 2003, has focused on reclaiming the region’s
fraying grasslands by decreasing animal grazing. In all, the government says it
has moved more than 500,000 nomads and a million animals off ecologically
fragile pastureland in Qinghai Province. Ecologists in China and abroad say the
scientific foundations of nomad resettlement are dubious. Chinese scientists
whose research once provided the official rationale for relocation have become
increasingly critical of the government. Some, like Li Wenjun, a professor of
environmental management at Peking University, have found that resettling large
numbers of pastoralists into towns exacerbates poverty and worsens water
scarcity. She has said that traditional grazing practices benefit the land. “We
argue that a system of food production such as the nomadic pastoralism that was
sustainable for centuries using very little water is the best choice,”
according to a recent article she wrote in the journal Land Use Policy.
“The idea that
herders destroy the grasslands is just an excuse to displace people that the
Chinese government thinks have a backward way of life,” said Enghebatu
Togochog, the director of the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information
Center, based in New York. “They promise good jobs and nice houses, but only
later do the herders discover these things are untrue.”
In Xilinhot, a coal-rich swath of Inner Mongolia, resettled
nomads, many illiterate, say they were deceived into signing contracts they
barely understood. Barred from grazing lands and lacking skills for employment
in the steel mill, many Xin Kang youths have left to find work elsewhere in
China. “This is not a place fit for human beings,” Tsokhochir said.
Anthropologists who have studied government-built relocation
centers have documented chronic unemployment, alcoholism and the fraying of
millenniums-old traditions. Although policies vary from place to place,
displaced herders on average pay about 30 percent of the cost of their new
government-built homes, according to official figures. Most are given living
subsidies, with a condition that recipients quit their nomadic ways. Many of
the new homes in Madoi lack toilets or running water. Residents complain of
cracked walls, leaky roofs and unfinished sidewalks. But the anger also
reflects their loss of independence, the demands of a cash economy and a belief
that they were displaced with false assurances that they would one day be
allowed to return.
Chinese economists, citing a yawning income gap between the
booming eastern provinces and impoverished far west, say government planners
have yet to achieve their stated goal of boosting incomes among former
pastoralists. Residents of cities like Beijing and Shanghai on average earn
twice as much as counterparts in Tibet and Xinjiang, the western expanse that
abuts Central Asia. Government figures show that the disparities have widened
in recent years.
Experts say the relocation efforts often have another goal,
largely absent from official policy pronouncements: greater Communist Party
control over people who have long roamed on the margins of Chinese society.
Nicholas Bequelin, the director of the East Asia division of
Amnesty International, said the struggle between farmers and pastoralists is
not new, but that the Chinese government had taken it to a new level. “These relocation
campaigns are almost Stalinist in their range and ambition, without any regard
for what the people in these communities want,” he said. “In a matter of years,
the government is wiping out entire indigenous cultures.”
Although efforts to tame the borderlands began soon after
Mao Zedong took power in 1949, they accelerated in 2000 with a modernization
campaign, “Go West,” that sought to rapidly transform Xinjiang and
Tibetan-populated areas through enormous infrastructure investment, nomad
relocations and Han Chinese migration.
Jarmila Ptackova, an anthropologist at the Academy of
Sciences in the Czech Republic who studies Tibetan resettlement communities,
said the government’s relocation programs had improved access to medical care
and education but many people resent the speed and coercive aspects of the
relocations. “All of these things have been decided without their
participation,” she said.
Such grievances play a role in social unrest, especially in
Inner Mongolia and Tibet. Since 2009, more than 140 Tibetans, two dozen of them
nomads, have self-immolated to protest intrusive policies, among them
restrictions on religious practices and mining on environmentally delicate
land. Over the past few years, the authorities in Inner Mongolia have arrested
scores of former herders, including 17 last month in Tongliao municipality who
were protesting the confiscation of 10,000 acres. This year, dozens of people
from Xin Kang village, some carrying banners that read “We want to return home”
and “We want survival,” marched on government offices and clashed with riot
police, according to the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center.
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