Pilgrims and progress

ON THE corner of Ramoche Temple Road, a bustling alley where the ethnic violence that engulfed Lhasa nearly two years ago first broke out, finishing touches are being put to a fried-chicken fast-food restaurant. Opposite, a newly opened second-floor café offers coffee, sandwiches and well-cushioned seating. On the street below, five helmeted riot police—one of them with a rifle—stand rigid and vigilant. Hard as it tries to look normal, Lhasa cannot quite pull it off.

The fried-chicken outlet, called Dico’s, is on the site of a building stoned and ransacked by Tibetan rioters on March 14th 2008. Almost every shop along Beijing East Road, into which the alley leads, was torn apart that day. Some were burned. The contents of most were piled up in bonfires on the street. Their Han Chinese owners fled the scene, but 18 died in the conflagration or from physical assaults. Hundreds of businesses were badly damaged by the Tibetans. The government said losses amounted to 280m yuan ($41m). An unknown number of Tibetans were killed, too—most of them elsewhere, as protests and riots flared across the plateau.

The authorities are now trying to lure business and visitors back to Lhasa. But they clearly fear that without the scattered groups of (Han Chinese) riot police, and occasional patrols through the city by armoured riot-control vehicles, mayhem could break out again. Riot police with guns are also stationed on balconies and rooftops overlooking Ramoche temple and the nearby Jokhang temple. These are the holiest shrines of Tibetan Buddhism in Lhasa, and flashpoints for its periodic outbreaks of anti-government protest and racial violence. Sera monastery, 3km (2 miles) north of Lhasa, crawls with police.

The authorities’ decision to allow this correspondent a rare visit to Lhasa was part of their attempt to display a bit more confidence. So too was their decision to hold talks with representatives of the Dalai Lama at the end of January, the first since November 2008. It was noteworthy that China agreed to talk at all, given its furious denunciation of the Dalai Lama team’s position at the previous round. But the talks concluded with little sign of compromise by either side. The political mood in Beijing has turned increasingly hostile in recent months both to dissent at home and to foreign pressure. Shortly after the Dalai Lama’s envoys arrived in Beijing, a senior official in Lhasa gave The Economist an earful about the “splittist” behaviour of Tibet’s spiritual leader.

Hundreds of Tibetans, many of them Buddhist monks and nuns, are believed to remain in custody after a draconian crackdown on dissent in response to the unrest. There have been persistent reports of torture. Officials have tightened control over monasteries. Hundreds of monks staying temporarily at Lhasa’s big three lamaseries (as many are wont to do in order to further their studies) have been sent back to their home regions, leaving behind only those officially classed as permanent residents. A senior lama at Sera says 500 monks are staying there now. A Chinese press report last year suggested there might have been at least twice as many when the riots broke out. “Patriotic education” of monks—including denunciations of the Dalai Lama—has been stepped up. This year the government plans to complete a drive to ensure that every monk and nun in Tibet is officially registered. China’s bureaucrats are past masters at keeping files on people to control them.

But the authorities also hope to win hearts and minds. January 18th saw China’s first large agenda-setting meeting on Tibet since 2001, a year before China’s president and party chief, Hu Jintao (a former party secretary in Tibet), came to power. The “Tibet Work Conference” predictably called for efforts to combat “penetration and sabotage” by Tibetan separatists. But it also stressed the importance of “leapfrog development” in Tibet, a goal also raised at the last such meeting, and dwelt on the need to raise rural incomes.

The streets of Lhasa reveal why the countryside matters for stability in Tibet. Dark-faced rural residents throng around the Jokhang at this time of year (the winter slack season), prostrating themselves before it. Visitors from the countryside are thought to have played a big role in the riots of March 2008. In cities such as Beijing and Shanghai migrant rural workers sometimes protest over conditions but have little to do with urban political dissent. In Tibet the unifying power of religion and reverence for the Dalai Lama give urban and rural Tibetans strong common cause.

Chinese officials have long been fretting about the backwardness of the Tibetan countryside. Two years before the riots they launched what they call a “comfortable-housing project” in rural areas. These are home to some 80% of the Tibetans who live in the Tibet Autonomous Region (more than half of China’s Tibetans live in neighbouring provinces). The project has been a huge undertaking. Late last year the government said it had completed, a year early, its target of building or refurbishing 230,000 houses by the end of 2010. The programme is due to be completed this year with the rehousing of another 40,000 rural families. By then the scheme will have covered 70% of households, at a direct cost to the government of nearly $500m, or as much as its total planned spending on Tibet’s rural areas in 2010.

The impact of this is already obvious. Newly built (or rebuilt) settlements are common along the 300km (185-mile) road between Lhasa and Tibet’s second-biggest city, Shigatse, to the west. Multicoloured Tibetan prayer-flags flutter above the houses, sometimes bunched together with China’s red national flag. Near Shigatse, officials display the new two-storey home of a peasant, Bianba Tsering, who describes the benefits showered upon him by local authorities in the past five years: money to start a chicken farm, land to start a brickmaking business, wood to build his house (a few hundred metres from his water-deprived old one). Portraits of China’s leaders from Mao Zedong to President Hu adorn the wall of his living room.

Not all peasants, as the unrest showed, are as happy as Bianba Tsering. As one of its members, he enjoys the favour of the party, which has trouble recruiting in rural Tibet because of its insistence on atheism. Often the rehousing project has involved moving people only short distances, and providing better supplies of water and electricity. But it also affected nomads. The government says settling them in fixed abodes helps preserve overgrazed grassland and makes it easier to provide education and health care. Critics allege that nomads have often been given no choice. Robbie Barnett, of Columbia University in New York, says that in Tibetan areas of other provinces officials have been “especially severe” in forcing nomads to settle.

Nomadic no more

Lhasa Evening News, an official newspaper, reported in December that 37,161 houses had been built for nomads in Tibet by October, or 92% of the official target. Construction was supposed to be finished by the end of the year, it said. Activists say an ancient way of life risks being wiped out. But the government believes that grouping rural dwellers together will help them pool resources and lead to better incomes, even though those affected, except the poorest, have to pay some of the money for the new houses themselves (helped by subsidised loans). In 2006 Tibet’s party chief, Zhang Qingli, said the comfortable-housing programme and job creation in the countryside were an essential foundation for keeping “the upper hand in our struggle with the Dalai clique”.

Figures alone might suggest that Mr Zhang (a hardline Han Chinese) is making headway. Rural incomes have been rising fast—last year by 13%, the seventh successive year of double-digit growth. But they were still only 70% of the national rural average per person (5,000 yuan, or $730). President Hu said at the Tibet Work Conference that Tibet should strive to catch up with the national average by 2020. Officials admit this could be tough. Some of this rural-income growth has been generated by the spate of housing construction (Bianba Tsering’s brickmaking business has been an obvious beneficiary). This is coming to an end.

Road- and railway-building has been a help too. Tibet’s infrastructure has been improving fast. A Nepali businessman says that shoes he transports by lorry used to take three days to reach the border with Nepal. Now it takes a day-and-a-half, thanks to an upgrade of the Friendship Highway, as the China-Nepal road is called, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Tibet’s first rail link with inland China, opened in 2006, is blamed by many Tibetans for a surge of migration to Tibet by ethnic Han Chinese, an influx that helped trigger the unrest two years ago. By 2012, says a senior official in Lhasa, it will be extended to Shigatse.

But unlike the rest of China, where a manufacturing boom in recent years has been the biggest engine of rural-income growth as poor farmers flock to the factories, Tibet has little in the way of labour-intensive industry. Nearly ten years after its launch, the Lhasa Economic and Technological Development Zone is still a mostly desolate expanse on the edge of the city. A senior manager at Lhasa Brewery, a joint venture with Carlsberg, a Danish brewer, says his company might be the biggest industrial employer in the city. It has a mere 240 workers (70% of them Tibetans, an official proudly boasts). The brewery is planning to open another plant in the development zone this year, but it will be more automated. Almost all of the beer is consumed in Tibet. The region is much too far from affluent markets, and still too ill-connected, for most manufacturing businesses to think of setting up there.

There is still tourism from elsewhere in China, rapidly picking up again after a slump in 2008 (foreigners are kept on a tight leash lest they foment unrest). Last year tourism provided 42,000 jobs for rural Tibetans, compared with fewer than 35,000 in 2007, according to official figures. Service industries produce more than half of Tibet’s GDP and Han Chinese are likely to be the biggest beneficiaries of the growth. Despite the destruction of Han businesses in 2008, many if not most of the city’s shops, even in the old Tibetan quarter around the Jokhang, are run by Han Chinese. One Han grocery shop owner says he is glad there are still riot police stationed around the area because there would be no time to call the police if there were more unrest.

Another technique the government is adopting to make rural citizens happier is to give them big discounts on household electrical appliances. A similar scheme was spread nationwide last year, but in Tibet peasants enjoy subsidies of 20% compared with 13% for the rest of the country. At a white-goods shop in Lhasa, a manager predicts Tibetan farmers will soon be snapping up discounted freezers. This is because the shop is about to apply the subsidy to a supersized model “that could accommodate an entire yak”.

Let them eat yak

It will take a lot more than a handy supply of frozen yak-meat, however, to keep Tibet stable. In public, at any rate, officials have yet to undertake any critical re-examination of how their policies went wrong in 2008. China’s official news agency, in its report on the Tibet Work Conference, described these policies as “totally correct”. An official in Lhasa professes the belief that foreign analysts are quite mistaken to think that the unrest might have been fuelled by the economic marginalisation of Tibetans amid an influx of Hans. Rather, it was the “Dalai clique” that used a “very small group of people” to mislead the public into rioting. Unwilling to acknowledge the depth of Tibetan resentment, China looks doomed to repeat its mistakes.