Resettlement sites for pastoralists from Zeku

There were two resettlement sites scheduled to be established outside of the Zeku County area, in the neighbouring county of Tongren, the Laka site and the CP school site.

The Laka Ecological Resettlement site in Tongren:

The Laka resettlement is situated in Tongren County, about one kilometre away from Tongren town, the capital of the Huangnan Prefecture, right next to

247 AD I: 4.

the prison on the new road to Xining. It was announced as part of the Ecological Resettlement Project within the Sanjiangyuan environmental protection policy.

• Zeku county Sanjiangyuan Ecological ResettlementProject.

• Size: 7500 m2

• Costs: 3,665,788 RMB

• Start of the work: 12.5.2007

• Estimated end of the work:

30.8.2007

The buildings at the Laka site are two-family bungalows. Each house has two separate flats, each in one half of the building (see figure 35). Most of the workers on the construction site in summer 2007 were Han or Chinese Muslim seasonal workers from Ledu County or Gansu Province. Tibetan workers were very rarely found on such construction sites. According to my worker informants, these houses were built for older pastoralists and small children from Zeku County. There was a plan to build a school within the site, which would make it easier for the children of the pastoralists to attend school regularly. The young parents of the children, the middle generation, were to remain on the grassland to herd the livestock and support the family members in the resettlement with dairy products. This arrangement reflects the pastoralist’s habit of household splitting and was not part of the agenda of the resettlement project.

Figure 35: Construction site of the Laka resettlement in Tongren County, August 2007

Even though those pastoralists appointed for resettlement at the Laka site did not have to give up the whole of their pastureland immediately, they did not seem to be very enthusiastic about the opportunities that life in an urban resettlement could offer to them. While they felt that to possess a house and be on the governmental subsidy list is a positive result, nevertheless they did not want to shift the focus of their life entirely to the village. Tsering, a 27-year-old pastoralist from sTobs ldan, expressed the opinion of the majority of pastoralists affected by resettlement measures:

“I do not know if we can split our family and leave someone on the grassland, [if we move to the resettlement]. I hope we can do so. Anyway I do not want to move there, but I want the house….”²⁴⁸

248 Tsering, a 27-year-old pastoralist from sTobs ldan assigned to resettle to Tongren, interviewed in June 2009.

Being pastoralists is not only an occupation: it is a social group and a way of life, and its members strongly identify with their pastoral identity, wanting to keep their affiliation with their pastoral land and communities in the future as well. This fact might make them less flexible to adapt to the new environment, but the current situation also does not offer many income options for the resettled people. Dorje, a 32-year-old pastoralist from sTobs ldan, described the worries and attitudes towards the resettlement policy as follows:

“We do not know what to do [in the resettlement] for living. If we really have to go there, then there is nothing we can do. At the moment I do not intend to move there, because I do not like the place…Otherwise I usually just follow the others in what they say or do. For example the people from our village area who were assigned for resettlement wrote a proposal to the government to build a house there, where we could do business, with shops or restaurants inside, so we could make some money.

The committee offered us to join this [resettlement project] and said, if we succeed, this project would be helpful for us. I do not have any ideas myself, so I just told them I am following the opinion of the others.

…For me it is the best to be a pastoralist. We can do nothing in a city like Tongren, because we do not speak Chinese and we do not have any skills.

What can we do there? We are just hoping that we do not need to move at all in the future, as the prefecture leader said, that the new house was just a kind of help from the government to us….

The villagers said that the resettlement houses are very good and that we are stupid if we do not want it. So we though the resettlement must be something really good for the pastoralists.

…Sometimes I feel happy and sometimes I am scared. I am happy that we got some support together with the house, but I am scared hearing what happened to pastoralists who resettled in mGo log.”²⁴⁹

The pastoralists find themselves in a complicated situation. They want the benefits from such governmental projects as the demand for cash among the

249 Dorje, a 32-year-old pastoralist from sTobs ldan assigned to resettle to Tongren, interviewed in June 2009.

pastoralist households increases and it becomes difficult to earn enough through animal husbandry only. The dilemma is that these people do not know any other occupation than being a herder, and do not want to change their habits and lead a sedentary way of life. They do apply to participate on projects like resettlement, but only because the government expects this from them and they want to avoid trouble. Still, they retain hope they will not be selected, or that the benefits will outweigh the negatives and that it will be possible to reduce the changes to a minimum. Some pastoralists, like the 38-year-old Nima from sTobs ldan, decide to resell the new house even if this is against the conditions of the resettlement project agenda.

“I do not want to go to the [resettlement] house. I have some yaks, sheep and horses and I love to be a pastoralist. If I go there, there will be nothing I can do. I do not speak Chinese and I do not know even how to read and write in Tibetan. Therefore it would not be a good place for me to live. Because of that, I sold the house to my brother, but the government does not know. We changed the names and all information. I did not give up my land and I did not sign my name to do that…My brother paid me 10,000 RMB for the house. I paid 6,000 RMB to the government, so the actual amount I earned was 4,000 RMB.”²⁵⁰

Even more lucrative is the reselling of apartments built directly in the town in Tongren.

CP school Ecological Resettlement site in Tongren:

This resettlement site, designed for 162 households from Maixiu, is situated directly in the town of Tongren. Its position in the middle of an urban area and the buildings in the form of blocks of flats (see figure 14 and 36) are completely different from all other resettlement sites designed to be built in year 2007. It has no courtyard around. Moving to such apartments will

250 Nima, a 38-year-old pastoralist from sTobs ldan assigned to resettle to Tongren, interviewed in June 2009.

probably be the biggest challenge for the pastoralists concerning the change of lifestyle.

Figure 36: Construction site of CP school resettlement in Tongren, June 2008

Both resettlement sites for the rTse khog pastoralists in Tongren County were not finished before autumn 2008, an almost year-long delay.

Some of my informants among the older Tibetan inhabitants of traditional farming villages that became absorbed into the urban area of Tongren prefecture town earlier, expressed their discontent with the plan to move the pastoralists from Zeku County to Tongren. They described the pastoralists as dirty, and lacking any culture of living in houses.²⁵¹ The farmers were afraid that the pastoralists, having no work and not enough money, would come to town to steal and make trouble. Historically, Tibetan pastoralists and farmers have usually had good relations with each other. Each group had their own area to live and to work and they partly depended on one another. Pastoralists supplied the farmers with milk products in exchange for grain. Both of them lived in areas defined by nature and living conditions, and they met only for the

251 Tibetan village representative and local government member, age 59, interviewed in August 2007.

purposes of trade. Both parties respected the lifestyle of the others. However, in the case of moving pastoralists from Zeku County into the resettlement near Tongren town, the pastoralists would penetrate into the sphere of the farmers, who subsequently perceive this physical coexistence as a kind of threat.