BY KARA SUNDBY
Sonam Choezom has never set foot in Lhasa’s bustling Barkhor Street market or turned the prayer wheels at its Jokhang Temple. She has never made the pilgrimage to Mount Kailash to join Hindus, Jains and other Buddhists circling the sacred mountain toward enlightenment.
Instead, her memory of Mount Kailash belongs to her mother, who fled through the mountain pass to Nepal after the failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.
Born and raised in exile in Kathmandu, Sonam grew up among Nepal’s 20,000 Tibetan refugees, most of who arrived after 1959. With no status in China or Nepal they, like Sonam, have never seen Tibet.
Their prospects of returning to their homeland are dim. China’s Western Development policy aims to boost the population and economy of the Tibet Autonomous region. However, the benefits flow largely to migrant Han Chinese workers. Many Tibetans remain marginalized by the region’s growth. They are additionally concerned that enthusiasm for economic development will engulf their own struggle for cultural and political progress.
“These projects are based on the employment of Chinese workers, not Tibetans,” said Ganden Thurman, Executive Director of Tibet House, a non-profit Tibetan cultural institution founded at the request of the current Dalai Lama. “One of the preconditions for being able to work for China in Tibet is that you have to speak Chinese. And since Tibetans aren’t Chinese, they don’t speak Chinese. Which means they can’t get jobs until they speak Chinese.”
The exclusion is fostering increased resentment among many Tibetans. Though their gross domestic project is growing at 12 percent annually – a more robust rate than China as a whole – Tibetan exiles do not see a connection to their cultural and political demands. Additionally, some of them are more concerned about the social and environmental impact in the countryside where the majority of Tibetans still live.
“On the one hand, they’ve hugely, unimaginably boosted the degree of wealth in the urban areas,” said Robert Barnett, Director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program
at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asia Institute. “They’ve created a new middle class of Tibetans who were given a massive boost in their salaries and allowed to buy cheaper housing.”
However, Barnett says, the economic boom in the region does not make up for the dearth of political and cultural progress, and the exclusivity of decision making.
“People in the west like to measure protest by economics, but that is not the question,” said Barnett. “Take the example of architecture. You end up with cities that look nothing like Tibetan cities because the people who should be consulted are not being involved in these decisions.”
This lack of consultation with Tibetans is also reflected in the region’s degraded and polluted environment. China’s massive infrastructure investment is still confined primarily to towns. Subsequent stages of development, however, will include mining excavation, which carries much larger potential for damage. The downsides associated with mining – including downstream pollution and damage to cultural sites and the environment – give it a far greater dimension of risk. These projects proceed without much Tibetan consultation. That which does occur is, according to Barnett, not convincing.
However, according to Dr. Yan Sun, a Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York, the issue with China’s development projects is not one of local exclusion. Rather, she says, the projects have created a fiscal dependency and psychological dependency of the Tibetan people.
“Frankly, Tibet has become a serious welfare case on the rest of China and there is little incentive for local or indigenous officials to come up with effective local ways to develop the economy and alleviate poverty,” said Dr. Sun. “All fiscal shortages and needs are filled eagerly by the center. Local officials simply reach out their hands for more.”
Such words are likely to increase the discord inside Tibet, where nationalism among young Tibetans is very large, especially where they see economic policies trampling over culture.
“China has been it’s own worst enemy in many ways,” said Barnett. “The only reason Tibetan youth hasn’t become more Sino-cized is because of China’s aggressive handling of them. Future culture and identity concerns should be taken seriously and it’s a shame the issue is not given proper attention by the Chinese, who are only concerned with claims to territory.”
As for Sonam, the fraudulent Nepali passport that brought her to the United States in 2004 will not allow her to return to Nepal or make a life in Tibet. She lives now in New York City with her husband, a fellow Tibetan refugee from Nepal, and spends her days trying to preserve her ancestor’s unique culture through the efforts of Tibet House.
Even if she were able to return, Sonam says she would not.
“My father said he would not come back until Tibet is free,” she said. “And I am my father’s daughter. Besides, I have no family left there now.”