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E-book Exile from the Grasslands : Tibetan Herders and Chinese Development Projects

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Whether this new project, along with its new and ambitious agenda, will in fact be any dif er ent from its forerunners or whether it will also end up using mass house construction and sedentarization to demonstrate devel-opment will become clear only in years to come. Statistics from 2020 and beyond will likely show that there are no longer any poor people—those with income below the national poverty line—living on the grasslands of Zeku County and elsewhere. People will be registered as township or county resi-dents, and in cases where there is need, a state subsidy will be used to sup-plement their income, raising it above the poverty line. If the implementation patterns of top-down control and state-imposed projects with stringent time constraints do not change, real policy outcomes and improvements in the actual lives and livelihoods of the pastoralists will remain illusory.In parallel with this development, in Zeku County the aim was to gradu-ally bring animal husbandry and the pasturelands under the management of countryside cooperatives, eventually transferring control from the villagers and villages to external enterprises, such as the meat-packing plant sched-uled to be built in Zeku to process local livestock.4 While this might repre-sent a new income source for local pastoralists, it will be feasible only if they retain their access to the grasslands, their usage rights, and their herds—an arrangement that contradicts the objective of urbanization implicit in the local implementation approach of the Targeted Poverty Alleviation Project.These examples of upcoming change help demonstrate the ongoing, vivid, and generally unpredictable dynamics that influence the present world of Tibetan pastoralists, not only in Zeku, but also elsewhere on the Tibetan Plateau. They represent the omnipresence of change, as well as the imper-manency of development policies. They also confirm the view of many pas-toralists who have become passive recipients of state-induced programs that it makes little sense to invest efort in creating a new existence because cir-cumstances can change at any time, presenting aid recipients with yet more challenges in yet another place. The Targeted Poverty Alleviation Project in Zeku also encourages the already resettled or sedentarized pastoralists to move yet again into suppos-edly improved housing facilities. In this case, the impression of definitive-ness or at least of definitive change is created through the requirement that project participants tear down their grassland houses. The participants therefore cannot return to the grasslands, as was possi ble during previous sedentarization projects; they can only go forward, toward “modernity.” The establishment of new countryside cooperatives, which have only a rather dubious potential to benefit the pastoralists economically, was encouraged at the village level. These cooperatives are intended to be shared thereafter by all villagers, ideally expanding in the future to cover the whole county in a system strongly reminiscent of the former communes.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

338.95147 PTA t

Penerbit

: Seattle : University of Washington Press., 2020

Deskripsi Fisik

189 pgs

Bahasa

ISBN/ISSN

9780295748207

Klasifikasi

338.95147

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Economic Development

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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