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[
back ] Impact
of World Bank projects on nomadic Tibetan life, based on the dynamics of pastoral
nomadism, history and geography, and the latest World Bank documentation to be
made available. By
Gabriel Lafitte The World Bank persists in calling the district where it plans dams, roads, canals and intensive farming "harsh" and "semi-desert." To Tibetans, the Bank's location is in the lower reaches of a river system which rises on the western flank of one of the most sacred mountains of Tibet, Machen Kangri, the highest peak of the Amnye Machen Range, long a place of pilgrimage for nomads to purify their minds and renew their lives. s
a c r e d l a n d s c a p e Even mealtimes have a sacred dimension, with a few drops of tea flicked to the four compass points before drinking, as offerings to the ever-present spirits of place. In a few places shrines destroyed by the Chinese have been rebuilt. There the pilgrims remove their hats and prostrate, do acircuit of the shrine, then a circuit of its encircling wall, then of the wall of stones carved with sacred syllables surrounding the place. In certain places Tibetan saints left in the rock imprints of their hands, which is inked by some of the devout, who then press a clean cloth to it, to create with them a record of Tibet's culture heroes, including the epic king Gesar. In keeping with Tibetan expectations that pilgrimage be arduous, they climb to a cave in a cliff, where past meditators clarified their minds. As they climb, each carries enormous stones on their backs, so heavy that many need help to hoist it into carrying position. The stones are an active remembrance of the kindness of one's parents, a conscious gesture of relearning gratitude. Some pilgrims carry with them a guidebook, written by earlier pilgrims whose meditative clarity led to visions of deities and divine palaces in this landscape mandala. These saintly Tibetan travel writers, in an effort to communicate their insight into the nature of reality, produced theirguidebooks to encourage such epiphanies among subsequent pilgrims. The pilgrims of the 1990 year of the horse not only carried such guidebooks with them, but carried out the prescribed rituals, bringing to life Tibetan religious life which many had supposed was a thing of the past. All this was witnessed by a French ethnographer, Katia Buffetrille, of the Laboratoire d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative at the University of Paris. She has published a detailed account of her participation in that pilgrimage, and a translation of the pilgrimage guidebook. The mountain peak is at 6282 metres, (over 20,000 feet) and its eternal snows feed high perched lakes at 4900 meters. At one of these lakes, "the snow-covered mountains were reflected in the lake, and everyone stood before it for a long time in contemplation." This is a classic Tibetan meditation practice, whereby the nature of the mind, and of all phenomena, may be realised experientially. Although summer is the busiest time for nomads, fattening animals in distant pastures, milking, shearing, making cheese, weaning calves and preparing for winter, hundreds of nomads from distant parts of Amdo made the trek to Machen Kangri, its sacred streams and lakes, before trekking back. b
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s a n d m o u n t a i n s The American explorer Leonard Clark set up camp on the shores of this lake, which he called by its Mongolian name, Tossun Nor, or the Black Sea, months before the People's Liberation Army swept the Chinese Communist Party to power in 1949. He reached the lake "through an amethystine mist, and partly through cutting crystal ice which could only have blown off some tremendous mountains on our left rear somewhere south-east, and then across a yellow-brown, windy and gritty sand-dune desert. All about were thousands of kyang (wild Tibetan ass) and a few antelopes. Gazelles were everywhere, and superabundant?.. By late afternoon at the Black Sea, where many honking geese rose out of the dry grass, their wings flashing in the setting sun?. There was an indefinable, wild, and primeval beauty in the broad alluvial valley lying east of Tossun Nor. The western narrow end, in which the sea lay, was veiled here and there by different snowstorms- white screens shimmering like showers of diamond dust in the glare the slanted sunshine. The air was so clear it was like standing in the centre of a glass ball?.. Game herds and flocks of migrating birds were everywhere in sight?? Around the frosted inland sea towered everywhere gaunt, silent, stony mountains -snow- and ice-covered. Flocks of seagulls dived overhead, white with a small black head. Long-legged waders, nesting ducks and bar-headed geese, small migrating birds of many kinds, were thought to have come up out of India, Burma and Malaya. Swans, pigeons, hawks and eagles also contributed endless calls and a ruffling beauty to this Tibetan sea aviary in the skies." In the nearby mountains were "tracks of wapiti (possible ancestors of the American elk), bear, deer, wolf, musk-deer, yaks, big-horn sheep, various carnivorous cats including snow leopard." However, 33 years later, another American, the conservationist Galen Rowell, found the same area strangely devoid of wildlife, despite what he had been told to expect by his Chinese hosts, and his reading of Leonard Clark and other explorers, who "found the whole region 'one great zoological garden,' filled with blue sheep, gazelles, bears, wolves and deer -a richness of animal life touted to me by the Chinese authorities in Beijing. The Chinese also spoke of dense virgin forests. In fact we saw almost no wildlife and found most of the Amnemaqen region lies well above the timberline and has no forests at all." The lake is fed by an abundant spring, replenished by Amnye Machen snow melt. "The sea's feeder stream here was constant and had a westward direction from the head of the underground outpouring on which we were camped, the current being timed at 6 seconds per yard of flow, average width being 80 feet to 100 feet, depth averaging 3 to 4 feet. It must be one of the main constant feeders of the Black Sea. From it we took sweet water." This lake ensures the perennial supply of water to the parched Tsaidam basin to the north, along the Dong Chu which drains the lake, the Norjong, which drains another lake, and the Yughra, as the river is known as it cuts a steep, well forested canyon through the Burhan Budai mountains before reaching the Tsaidam Basin. Burhan is Mongolian for Buddha. These are the local Tibetan and Mongolian names, as reported by Clark, who commented that "None of these names will be found on any map. The Yughra is marked on Chinese maps as entering the Tsaidam, and is called the Shi-shi. This would seem to be the main river system draining the junction of mountains west of the Amne machin to the Tsaidam." Fifty years after Clark's explorations, Tibetan names still do not appear on the maps. China's name for the Tossun Nor is the Donggi Cona, and the Dong Chu and Yughra river system is named the Xiangride River on the World Bank's official map of the project. Xiangride is a Chinese name for a Chinese fort, more recently a prison labour camp and state farm, all located far downstream in the Tsaidam basin where the river reaches the dunes and is often swallowed by them. p
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2 0 t o 1 9 5 0 The Chinese Muslims who ruled not only at Xiangride but most of northernTibet, were deeply mistrusted by both the Tibetans and Mongolians, in Clark's experience, having been subjected to decades of pogroms and punitive military expeditions. Clark states that in the 1940's Muslims "had been responsible for pogroms among the Buddhist Mongols?. It was the belief of local Moslems that eight thousand Mongols had died in these massacres?. These Hussack (Kazakh (?) Muslims) raids against the Mongols had left only a remnant of these people, and these absolutely stricken and impoverished?.leaving behind the vast, empty, rich grazing grounds of the vanished Mongols whose skeletons alone now peopled it." Clark, on the final stage of his expedition, left Xiangride for the provincial capital, heading back into China and the areas from which Chinese settlers were pouring into Tibet. "Several houses presently appeared -large and flat-roofed, protected by walls of pounded clay. These people were Mongols, growers of ney, the hardy Tibetan barley; old settlers here who are being driven off by the Chinese, who for a 'squeeze', obtain 'legal' ownership from the hsien magistrates. The Sharia Ha Mongols are thus recognized only as squatters on their own lands, now, of course, the new Chinese owner's property?.These desert Mongols usually stay on as labourers, their own women sometimes serving as concubines. Should summary justice be carried out against such legalized robbery, or revenge be undertaken, swift punitive measures are dealt the Mongols." These are the historic roots of the fear, expressed today by the remaining Tibetans and Mongolians of Tulan County, lest a further wave of Chinese and Chinese Muslims be brought into their pasture lands. The punishments, pogroms, expulsions and persecutions of the past are not a distant memory but events which have happened within living memory. None of this has been apparent to the World Bank. The Tibetans of the Yughra river system, its upstream lakes and sacred mountains, are the various Golog clans and the Ong-thag clan, all nomads whose mobile wealth is on the hoof. The Gologs resisted the encroaching Muslim Chinese in the first half of the twentieth century, and maintained a stateless society in the Golog domain, holding off the authority of Lhasa, China and the Muslim warlords. The fiercely egalitarian Golog harassed the Chinese Communist Party's Long March in the 1930's, killing many. It was only in the 1950's that any modern nation state asserted its power over the Gologs, after many punitive expeditions. The People's Liberation Army took many years to eradicate Golog resistance, and the Golog Prefecture, including the headwaters of the World Bank watershed, remains a vast area deprived of modern services, with the lowest literacy and school attendance rates in China. t
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y e s Together these documents, now publicly available from the Bank's InfoShop, constitute the Bank's compliance with its obligations to fully meet all requirements of its own internal Operational Directives on environmental impacts. In itself this is controversial, as the Bank's project design staff have categorized the entire project as Category B, requiring a lesser level of impact assessment than if it were classified as a Category A project. There is reason to believe the failure to categorize this project as category A is also controversial within the Bank, attracting criticism from a Bank consultant asked to comment. However, as will be evident below, these two new documents -the EIP and EIA- add greatly to our overall understanding of the project, not only on environmental issues. These documents reveal -perhaps more than their authors realized- how this Chinese design will impact on the viability of traditional Tibetan nomadic culture. We are now better placed to stand in the shoes of the Tibetan/Mongolian nomads of Tulan County and see this project through their eyes. c
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a m b a s i n However, that enclave of Chinese industry in the Tsaidam, while well connected to China by rail and road, is expensive to supply, as all foods need to be brought from far away, partly because the industrial zone has been so destructive of the forests and pastures, according to Chinese scientists in the Tsaidam. Thus a second wave of colonization began, operating on a very different logic. The first wave was centrally financed by a revolutionary state which felt surrounded by enemies and was willing to spend heavily to build industries and the availability of feedstocks for those industries in rear defense areas remote from possible enemy attack. The second wave had no such national importance, and instead followed the classic logic of Chinese colonization as a bootstrap exercise by local governments making maximum use of the one resource they have in abundance: poor people. The use of the poor as the front line of colonization has an ancient history in China. Their quest for basic food security makes them willing to go into frontier zones and establish Chinese intensive agriculture wherever local conditions make it possible. That is how the Chinese colonized Sichuan a thousand years ago, and Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang in the twentieth century. Until now there have been few statistics on the second wave in Tulan County. The Chinese EIA states that since 1986 28,584 poor people from the overcrowded counties of eastern Qinghai have been transmigrated into Tulan County, and its neighboring county immediately to the east, Wulan. "Since 1986, all together 6,152 households, 28,584 persons have migrated to Dulan and Wulan areas from Haidong prefecture by means of labor invitation and immigration, settlement in relatives' and friends' houses, and village transferring in Qaidam region." Thus the World Bank project is part of an ongoing effort by China to bring in migrants to the oases, to supplement the forced labor brought in over previous decades. The World Bank project should be seen in this wider context, as forced labor pioneers areas never before cultivated, then as such areas mature, they graduate to resettlement schemes utilizing desperately poor people. There is ample evidence that the people being moved are absolutely poor, with incomes below 300 yuan per year an official criterion for eligibility, a sum way below China's very low poverty line. When the transmigrants were interviewed, food security was high on their list of concerns: "Through the analysis of the questionnaires of 1,458 households planning to move out, the first difficulty of the immigrants is lack of food." The fears of the poor transmigrants reflect the necessity of establishing infrastructure if transmigration is to work, and it is the World bank which has offered to finance that infrastructure of dams, canals, roads, agriculture training for Chinese peasants who have no experience farming semidesert oases. As the World bank says, in introducing another project only 20 kilometers from Garze Tibetan Autonomous County in SE Tibet: "Productive land for agriculture production is limited due to population increase and urbanization. Government strategy to ameliorate this is to develop marginal land for agriculture. However, the development of marginal land requires significant investment." c
l a s h o f c i v i l i z a t i o n s However, the World Bank and Chinese government answer to such forecast clashes is not to desist, nor even moderate the scale of the project, but to renew the rhetoric of prohibition, enforcement, discipline and propaganda. The scope for clashes, as revealed in Chinese documentation, is considerable. First, it is apparent, despite the Bank's efforts to define the area impacted by the project in the narrowest way, that this project is in fact several projects, spread across a wide area. The World Bank often emphasizes that the project area is small, only 19,200 ha, with only 352 people in 63 families directly affected. What they state less often is that these prime irrigation areas are spread across an area of almost 2500 square kilometers, or 250,000 ha, which 13 times the Bank's narrowly defined project area. In fact the oases are a chain, spreading from east to west along the foot of a mountain range which trends in the same direction. The various oases into which the 58,000 transmigrants are to be placed are all within a narrow band of land below the steep mountain slopes but above the plain, where it is salty and in places marshy and elsewhere covered in dunes. It is this east west spread, 70 kilometers across, which most threatens the viability of Tibetan/Mongolian pastoral civilization. This is because the logic of nomadic pastoralism in this area is a regular movement north to south and back again, with the seasons. Thus the regular movement of livestock in search of both green feed and water contradicts and bisects the logic of dams, canals, irrigated fields and roads all going from east to west. c
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s The return journey is even more critical, because it takes place in late spring or summer, as the herds are moved south, up to the summer pasture in the mountains. It is in this season that animals are weak and in poor condition, and in need of fresh green pick. It is also in this season that gales are most frequent, and most likely to pick up the soil of the newly leveled and tilled fields, and create duststorms. What is to prevent the immigrant settlers from grazing their livestock on the open rangeland used by the nomads? Again, the OFFICIAL Chinese government/World Bank answer is prohibition, and the tensions which arise. "Grazing on the natural grasslands surrounding the settlement area would be prohibited." k
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f t h e c a n a l s The project designers say they will maintain "corridors" or "pastoral passages" between oases for herders to use, so their nomadic way of life can continue. Yet at the same time the project plans to assimilate all 4000 of the nearby herding population into the project, allocating them the same small portion of irrigated pasture as is to be awarded to the incoming Chinese settlers. This seems tacit admission that the two civilizations are incompatible, and the only likely outcomes are assimilation of the nomads or clashes. w
i l d l i f e , w a t e r , w e t l a n d s First, wildlife. Tibetans and Mongolians seldom hunted, and many visitor to precommunist Tibet commented that wild animals were unafraid of people. The wetlands to be depleted by the capture of the river for irrigation are currently home to 500 to 600 swans and other waterfowl. The open rangeland is also home to herds of Mongolian gazelles, plateau hares and foxes and several bird species. The Chinese immigrants have low protein intakes, and hunger for meat. Their nutritional status was surveyed as part of the preparation of the project, showing that at present their consumption of meat, fish and eggs is below 15 kg per head per year and this project offers them "a large increase of the supply of meat". Elsewhere in Tibet, as the noted zoologist George Schaller has pointed out, the arrival of Chinese settlers has meant decimation of edible wildlife, and Chinese definitions of what is edible are very broad. What is to stop the settlers from shooting and eating the swans and gazelles? The answer, as usual in the command economy of Tibet, is prohibition, discipline and propaganda. During the construction stage of this project only the able bodied men of the migrating families will live in their new homeland. Acknowledging the risk of driving wildlife away, the official answer is: "No hunting the resources of wild animals. To strengthen the propaganda and avoid the ruin of wild animals." Once the project is in operation, the threat to wildlife persists. The answer is "To define the north of the project area as the no hunting area and no one is allowed to go hunting." This top down legislative approach is likely to have three unfortunate consequences. The first is that such bans are ineffective, especially as the project design allocates only 2000 yuan a year (US$250) to monitoring and enforcing such regulations. The second consequence is that the settlers develop an us-and-them mentality, resentful of the seeming privileges given to freely roaming nomads, while they remain confined to specific areas of dense settlement. Third, the migrants come from areas where livestock are penned close to family living and sleeping quarters and infectious diseases transferred from animals to humans are common, especially hydatids and brucellosis. The project designers worry that such infections will become more common among the nomads of Tulan county, through their contact with the immigrants. "The immigration may cause an increase of brucellosis and hydatid disease among the move in farmers, and may also bring some infectious disease to the original inhabitants." Again, the only solution offered is proscriptive: "To forbid those carrying contagious diseases to move", although they have already been selected to move, along with their families. The project captures a perennial river which, despite aridity in its lower reaches, flows around the year. This is due to its origins in snowmelt steadily feeding into a substantial upstream catchment in the mountains, in a system which includes two permanent freshwater lakes perched high on the Tibetan plateau, one in the sacred Amnye Machen mountains. The Amnye Machen is the home of the Tibetan culture hero Gesar, whose exploits are told and retold by praise singers all over eastern Tibet. Because the river flows year round, there are areas, even in the arid downstream basin, where vegetation is quite dense, despite the Chinese perception, repeated often in project design documents that the area is "harsh". At present there are 7883 hectares of natural forest in the project area. Average annual discharge of the river is 12.63 cubic meters per second, and the total flow averages 650 million cubic meters a year. Of this the project designers can guarantee only 115 million cubic meters will be available downstream of the project and this will inevitably impact on the wetland and saltmarsh habitat of the swans and other waterbirds. "The abstraction of water for the project area will come at the possible expense of water supplies to the saline swampy areas to the north of Balong and this may have indirect environmental consequences." w
h e n d r o u g h t s t r i k e s Drought years are the years in which the survival of entire ecosystems istested. Rainfall in the project area is around 100 mm (4 inches) a year,but is highly unreliable. The question is what constitutes a drought yearin such a situation, which is quite unfamiliar to the immigrant farmers whocome from monsoonal provinces farther east. Alarmingly, China's officialassessors of the environmental impact of this project are of the view thatin the move-out area from which the immigrants are to come: "Drought happens in nine years out of ten and there is vicious circle of drought, increasing poverty and soil deterioration" Yet the rainfall in theseareas is between 320 and 530 mm, or three to five times that of the new home in Tulan of poor immigrants in danger of malnutrition. If Qinghai's only official Institute of Environmental Science classifies nine out of ten years a drought; such denial of arid reality bodes ill for water conservation. The detail in the Chinese project design documents acknowledges all these risks. The project design requires specific mitigation measures, and specific sums allocated as investments in environmental protection. Yet the enforcement of national laws on protection of minority nationalities and wildlife are to receive only small sums, for the employment of part time monitors, who are likely to combine such duties with their main employment, which will be implementation of the project. Such conflicts of interest are common in China, especially in remote areas where literate staff able to generate reports attesting to policy compliance are few. c
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s In the area where the project is to be implemented, a survey of attitudes was conducted among Chinese farmers who have transmigrated since 1986 and Tibetan/Mongolian herders whose homeland is here. Questionnaires were distributed, and 104 of 120 were filled in, and 159 households were interviewed, always in the presence of Chinese officials, according to project design team leader Petros Aklilu. The Bank's report of this sole attempt at gauging local attitudes is vague, and conflates the responses of recent Chinese immigrants and Tibetan herders, two widely different groups with different interests. Nevertheless, some indications of a coming clash are evident. "The minority of herdsmen feels worried about it (the project) because the immigrants will occupy their grassland resources?? they worry about the availability of compensation since the construction of reservoirs will be likely to submerge their pastureland??they generally worry about (100%) the cutting of the vegetation will destroy the ecological environment and the wild animal and plant resources. 21% of the population worry about the influx of immigrants and the increase of population will cause more social unrest." p
r e v e n t i n g f o r s e e a b l e c l a s h e s The primary strategy for dealing with discontent among the nomads is to incorporate them, assimilating them directly into the project. That this is the intention of the project design is made clear at many points in the design documentation. The project is defined as the transmigration of 58,000 transmigrants plus the settlement of 4000 herders whose homeland is Tulan County. This inclusion is integral to the project design, and assumes that nomads share the enthusiasm of the state for settling, becoming peasants. Despite the explicit concerns raised by the nomads questioned in the presence of officials, there is no acknowledgment anywhere in the project documentation that the nomads might prefer to remain nomads, or that they do not see their homeland as harsh. The assumption is that if nomads are offered improved pasture as part of the package of inclusion into the oasis cultivation project, they will accept the transformation. Thus, under the heading of "mitigation measures" the discontent of the herders is dealt with: "4000 herdsmen and farmers from 600 households can enjoy the same treatment as the immigrants??. The newly established institutions will help the herdsmen to cultivate the grass." It has long been China's policy to encourage nomads to settle. Implementation of this policy involves fixed allocation of land use rights to specific families, with no fresh allocation when families, over decades, grow. Once families are confined to pasture assigned to them as leasehold, the next step is fencing, and the construction of permanent dwellings. In eastern Tibet, elsewhere in Qinghai province, this is now common, leading to much intracommunal friction among Tibetans, as some land is better than others. The World Bank says the 4000 herders of Tulan who are to be included in the project are free to continue nomadizing. In theory this may seem possible, in practice it is unlikely. The 4000 are to be allocated a small area of improved, irrigated pasture, on which to fatten animals. The project designers state that such pasture produces 11.4 times the biomass of unimproved natural pasture. The herders will be provided with tubewells, electricity, and loans to become peasant farmers, buying the same standardized package of fertilizers, pesticides and other inputs as the transmigrants. They will have access to schooling, a service China has never effectively provided to nomadic families after early experiments with tent schools for nomads were abandoned in the 1950's. The World Bank says it has negotiated with the Qinghai authorities that any of the 4000 Tulan people can opt out of participation in the project, and their indebtedness will be cancelled. This is hard to believe of a country where officials routinely extract payments for services which are legally due to citizens, and are not inclined to take on a debt incurred by others. This aspect of project design creates two classes of peasant farmers: thoseconfined to their small farms, and those free to alternate farming and ranching with open range herding. That is a recipe for ethnic tension and clashes. It creates one group whose land is of two types: my land and our land; and a second immigrant group who may only use my land. There are several anthropological studies in grazing areas of China that show the frictions that occur, and the pressures on open range graziers, especially in drought years when irrigation water is rationed, to accept domestic herds onto the open range, for payment or under duress. The design of this project is a timebomb. If and when clashes do occur, it is always the indigenous Tibetans and Mongolians who are blamed, labeled small nationality chauvinists, and punished. m
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n , n o o t h e r c h o i c e This failure of project design is in contrast to several other World Bank projects in remote mountainous areas of western China, such as the Anning Valley project, literally at Tibet's doorstep. In the Anning Valley: "Livestock development aims to increase the income of poor farm and minority-nationality households through improved livestock production. It would increase the production and productivity of sheep, goats, and ducks by improving breeds, supporting pasture and feed development, and strengthening animal husbandry and veterinary services." In the Tsaidam Basin project, the only way nomads can access any of these services is to assimilate, and become sedentary feedlot producers of penned animals. There can be little doubt that the end result of this project will be to bring to an end the nomadic way of life, in the 2500 sq. kilometers most immediately impacted by this project, if not further afield throughout Tulan County. Nomads will be made into peasants. This is progress. A major reason for this is that the purpose of this project is not only poverty reduction, but also production for export. The Xiangride oases straddle the main highway between China and Tibet. The production of the oasis, once the difficult initial early years are past, will find a ready market in the industrial zone of the Tsaidam Basin 500 kms further west, or in Tibet Autonomous Region, which reports an annual deficit of 3500 tons ofmeat for urban dwellers. The intensive producers of meat on irrigated pasture are direct competitors with any nomads who attempt to enter the commercial market as their only access to increasing incomes. In such a competition, the irrigated pasture will always produce a fatter carcass, in prime condition, and the nomads will become more marginal, reduced to subsistence production. The few Tulan County nomads interviewed by Chinese and World Bank staff were well aware of this danger to their entire nomadic civilization. One of their fears is that: "They worry about the decrease of time in doing part time business after the agricultural development." This fear reflects the knowledge nomads have of what has happened to Tibetan small traders further along the highway, squeezed out of economic niches by newcomers, notably by Muslim Chinese, a phenomenon common across Tibet. o
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f p r o j e c t The Western China Poverty reduction Project will move 58,000 people into the Tsaidam Basin, settling them in oases stretched across the foot of a mountain chain at Xiangride and Balong. The removal of 58,000 people, according to the EIA produced by the Qinghai Institute of Environmental Science, will achieve a reduction in population density from 114.3 persons per square kilometer to 113.6. "Although the population density in the move-out region will only be reduced from 114.3 persons per km2 to 113.6 persons per km2, and the area of arable land will only increase from 0.157 ha to 0.158 ha per capita, it will be possible to return farmlands that slopes of more than 25 to forest and grazing land." Not only is this reduction in population density minuscule, it achieves very little in the context of China's overall population crisis, and in the six counties from which the transmigrants are drawn, on present population growth rates, it will take only four years for the population to increase by 58,000 again. The Chinese documentation actually lists a growth rate between 1993 and 1996 which would indicate that the removal of 58,000 people would be made up in months. EIA gives detailed figures of population growth across the six counties of 11.24% a year, with Hualong County. growing at 17% a year, Minhe at 12.6% a year and Datong at 11.1% a year. On careful examination of these statistics, it is apparent that these are rates per thousand, not per cent. In other words the rate of population growth has been exaggerated tenfold. This is not untypical of the slipshod way the Chinese documentation has been translated into English. These figures are significant for two reasons. First, the source areas providing migrants are themselves traditional Tibetan areas overrun by Chinese migrants only in the twentieth century? Until early decades of the twentieth century, population densities were less than a tenth of present, and the few Chinese settlers mingling with Tibetans respected the culture of their neighbors. The population explosion came in two waves, firstly between the 1920's and 1940's, when the area was under the control of neither the Tibetans nor the Chinese government, but in the hands of the Muslim warlord Ma Pufang and his family, who brought in great numbers of Muslims, displacing Tibetans farmers from the valleys, pushing them to the fringes of arable land on higher slopes. The second wave came after the victory of the Chinese Communist Party, which increased the population of the province from 1.48 million in 1949 to over five million now, heavily concentrated in the six counties which are now the source of the transmigration deeper into Tibet. The counties from which the migrants come are where the present Dalai Lama, the previous Panchen Lama, Tsongkhapa, Shabkar and Gendun Chopel came. Second, this project makes no provision for restoring sustainability to the six source counties, nor is there any mention of regulating the influx of migrants. The insignificant drop of population density cited by the Bank as its rationale for the entire project will in fact disappear in under one year's fresh influx of migrants from other Chinese provinces. In effect, all this project achieves is momentary symptomatic relief for six grossly overcrowded counties, effectively leapfrogging China's population problem several hundred kilometers deeper west into a Tibetan heartland. Annual population growth in the six source counties, even if it is only a tenth of the rate listed in the Chinese official EIA, will mean that in four or at most five years, the 58,000 migrants sent to the Tsaidam Basin would be replaced by the constant population influx. c
o n c l u s i o n s The Bank's intervention in the lives of the Tibetan and Mongolian herders is in the name of poverty alleviation and environmental improvement, but on closer examination of the bank's own documentation, it is evident that the entire projects contributes minimally to relieving the overpopulation of the Tibetan area, now overrun with poor Chinese immigrants, from which the transmigrants are to come. The impact of 58,000 transmigrants on the only permanent river in the Tsaidam Basin will be overwhelming, both for the natural environment, and for the already marginalised nomads who have had to make way for large scale Chinese prison camps and the state farms which grew out of the forced labor camps. The inclusion of the 4000 nomadic herders of the project area, incorporates pastoralists into intensive, highly supervised oasis cultivation. This effectively turns nomads into peasants, in the name of poverty reduction. The host society of Tibetan and Mongolian nomads have not been adequately informed or consulted, and have been asked for their consent in the presence of Chinese officials with power to punish those giving answers contrary to state policy. The assimilation of nomads, their settlement on fixed land leases, and incorporation into Chinese society is a long standing Chinese policy. The World bank says the nomads can persist in their nomadic life, but a careful look at the design of this project shows the nomadic way of life will become unviable, and the new settlers will encroach on the pasture lands, the wildlife and forests of the nomads, increasing the likelihood of clashes. Historically, throughout the twentieth century, clashes between nomads and the state have resulted in devastation, marginalization and dispossession of the nomads, driven back into more arid territory. The World Bank is naÔve to suppose nomadic life can continue in an area of intensive settlement which captures most of the water of an arid area, and which in drought years may capture it all. The demise of the nomadic life is a predictable consequence of this ill-conceived World Bank project. The nomads themselves see this clearly, and in their letters to the world, state clearly that this influx of commercial cultures, in numbers far greater than this area has ever sustained, will be to their detriment. Through their letters, through the record of explorers and ethnographers, and even through the planning language of World Bank documents, we can begin to see through the eyes of the local communities most directly impacted by the World Bank's plans. f
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