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Rethinking China's Tibet Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Ben Hillman
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Both official Chinese and exile Tibetan responses to the protests that broke across Tibet last month followed a familiar, worn-out script. For the Tibetan exiles and their international supporters, this was a last gasp for independence by the victims of cultural genocide. For the Chinese government this was premeditated mayhem orchestrated by the “Dalai clique” and “criminal elements” bent on splitting China. Both sides have it wrong.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 6 , Issue 6 , June 2008 , e4
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2008

References

Notes

[1] Family planning policies since the 1980s have not been applied as strictly in Tibetan and other ethnic minority areas as they have been in majority Han Chinese areas.

[2] Han Chinese patrons are an important and growing source of financial support for Tibetan Buddhist temples and sacred sites. For more detail on the growing interest in Tibetan culture among Han Chinese, see Ben Hillman and Lee-Anne Henfry, “Macho Minority: masculinity and ethnicity on the edge of Tibet”, Modern China (32) April, 2006, 251-272. Since the protests, Tibetan areas have clearly fallen out of favor with Chinese tourists. Tour operators in Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan Province report that arrivals in May, one of the busiest times of the year, are only one third what they were one year ago.

[3] In Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan Province, law requires senior heads of local government to be ethnic Tibetans, and while it is an unwritten rule, local officials acknowledge that heads of major government agencies are mostly reserved for Tibetans.

[4] For these and other comparative education statistics in China, see the Chinese government's official statistics web site, http://www.stats.gov.cn.

[5] Andrew Fischer has done the most detailed analysis of socioeconomic indicators based on China's official statistics to assess the degree of marginalization. See State Growth and Social Exclusion in Tibet: Challenges of Recent Economic Growth, NIAS Press, 2005.