NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #26/NN_1992_26.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/8214

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Subject: MM: CHINA'S ASSAULT ON TIBET'S ENVIRONMENT
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THE SCORCHED EARTH

CHINA'S ASSAULT ON TIBET'S ENVIRONMENT

By Justin Lowe

[Published in the October 1992 issue of Multinational Monitor]

TIBET'S ISOLATION IS LEGENDARY.  For centuries the country lay
inaccessible between the high wall of the Himalayan mountain range to
the south and forbidding deserts on the north.  Successive Tibetan
leaders discouraged contact with the outside world for fear of
disturbing the serenity of this Buddhist state.

A hundred years ago, foreigners attempted to circumvent Tibet's
official policy, vying to be the first to reach the country's fabled
capital of Lhasa, the "forbidden city."  A century later, the race is
not for fame, but fortune, as the People's Republic of China (PRC) fur-
ther exploits its occupation of Tibet by opening the remote region to
increased development.

The Chinese government treats Tibet as if it were an endless frontier
with limitless raw materials--where old-growth forests can be felled,
lakes and rivers dammed and minerals and fossil fuels extracted--
principally for the benefit of China.  China's assault on Tibet is
threatening not only the country's delicately balanced ecosystems, but
the survival of Tibetans and millions of people throughout Asia.

The impact of Chinese occupation

Mao's Red Army first invaded eastern Tibet in 1949, reasserting an
outdated territorial claim based on a thirteenth century arrangement of
political convenience between Tibetan rulers and the Mongol conquerors
of China.  The country had been free of Chinese influence for decades,
having expelled the last of China's representatives from Lhasa early
in the century.  For almost 40 years,Tibet had remained independent,
establishing bilateral relations with many of its Himalayan neighbors
as well as with foreign governments further afield.  In 1959, China's
increasing encroachment on Tibetan sovereignty forced the fourteenth
Dalai Lama, the political and spiritual leader of 6.2 million
Tibetans, to flee the country.

The PRC has always claimed that the "peaceful liberation" of Tibet was
for the benefit of Tibetans and that their lives would improve as a
result of Chinese occupation.  Tibetans, however, have little to show
for their "liberation."  Tibet has one of the lowest standards of living
in the world, ranking 15 out of the 160 nations evaluated in the United
Nations Development Program's human development index.  The PRC's sys-
tematic violation of Tibetan human and democratic rights has been
reported by numerous human rights organizations and Tibet solidarity
groups.

Tibet has maintained a Buddhist culture since the seventh century,
integrating the religious and the secular through out society.
Historically, both Buddhist doctrine and the Tibetan government
promoted environmental protection through religious teachings, as well
as by formal edicts called Tsatsigs.  These directives forbade the
taking of animal life (wolves and hyenas excepted), the pollution of
water sources, the unnecessary disruption of soil or the overcutting
of forests.  "Overexploitation of natural resources and hunting were
prohibited both by government decree as well as by social stigma,"
writes Tenzin Palber, a Tibetan lama originally from Amdo in eastern
Tibet, in May/June 1990's Tibetan Bulletin.

To China, Tibet with its wealth of resources has long represented a
valuable, unexploited western treasure house.  The PRC's occupation of
Tibet has provided the Chinese government the opportunity to plunder
this natural bounty.

The Tibetan Plateau, which includes all but the easternmost reaches of
traditional Tibetan territory, is the world's highest and most extensive
landform.  With an average altitude of 4,000 meters (13,000 feet), it
has a primarily arid climate.  Historical Tibet covers 2.47 million
square kilometers, encompassing the central provinces of U and Tsang,
along with Amdo to the northeast and Kham to the southeast.  China has
divided this occupied territory among its western provinces of
Qinqhai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan, recognizing only 1.2 million
square kilometers as "Tibet," known in China as the Tibet Autonomous
Region (TAR) .

Many of the world's highest mountains border Tibet, and seven of
Asia's major rivers originate on the Plateau--China's Yellow and
Yangtze, the Indian subcontinent's Arun, Brahmaputra and Indus, and the
Salween and Mekong of Southeast Asia--eventually flowing throughout much
of Asia and providing sustenance for an estimated 47 percent of the
continent's population downstream.

Spread across the isolated tableland, much of it frozen for months, are
deposits of dozens of valuable minerals; oil, coal and natural gas
reserves; thousands of plant species (25 percent of which are found only
in Tibet); and a variety of native wildlife, much of which exists
nowhere else in the world or is limited to the Himalayan region.

The exiled Tibetan government detailed the exploitation of Tibet's
natural resources in "Tibet:  Environment and Development 1992," a
report prepared for the United Nations Earth Summit in June 1992.  The
report is the first comprehensive, in-depth study of the impact of
China's environmental and economic development policies on Tibet.

The report, compiled from Chinese and international sources, as well
as from interviews with Tibetans in their country and in exile, is a
distressing litany of environmental neglect and abuse.  "China's
occupation of Tibet," it asserts, "is a classic example of colonialism.

The basic intent of Tibet's 'development' is to support the Chinese
population in Tibet, provide raw materials and products for China's
industries and income for China's profits."

Rinchen Dharlo, the Dalai Lama's North American representative at the
Office of Tibet in New York City, expresses hope that the Tibetan
national report will "convince the Chinese authorities to reverse their
disastrous environmental policies in Tibet."  That seems unlikely,
however.  Although the Embassy of the PRC declined to answer specific
questions from Multinational Monitor about the report, shortly after
its release in June, Wu Jianmin, a Beijing Foreign Ministry official,
said that the report was "not worth commenting on," calling it "full
of distortions of the real situation in Tibet."

The report says that since 1949, China has cut 40 percent of Tibet's
estimated 221,800 square kilometers of southeastern old growth, tropical
and subtropical montane forests, consisting of spruce, fir, pine,
larch, cypress, birch and oak.  The Chinese clear-cut most of these
trees from old-growth forests more than 200 years old . Official Chinese
documents indicate that between 1959 and 1985, $54 billion worth of
timber was shipped east to China or used for the PRC's purposes in
Tibet.  Although the PRC claims to be conducting extensive and
successful reforestation projects, the Tibetan report asserts that,
"reforestation and afforestation have been minimal."

Both Tibetans and foreigners have observed the disappearance of wildlife
native to Tibet.  The first Western visitors to the country frequently
commented on the extent and variety of Tibetan wildlife.  Some of this
wildlife, such as the wild yak, snow leopard, blacknecked crane,
Tibetan antelope and Tibetan gazelle, is unique to Tibet or the
Himalayan region.  A wide range of habitats harbor an estimated 10,000
species of plants, a quarter of which are native only to Tibet.  Many
are of potential economic value, including 1,000 species of medicinal
herbs.

In keeping with Buddhist tradition, little of Tibet's wildlife
population was exploited by native hunters.  Over the last 40 years,
however, Chinese soldiers and settlers, as well as economically deprived
Tibetans, have intensively hunted much of Tibet's wildlife to supply
China's extensive market with meat and animal products.  In addition to
supplying routine demands by Chinese settlers in Tibet, hunters target
some of the more exotic species for export--blue sheep for the German
meat market and Tibetan antelope for their wool.  China continues to
offer some of Tibet's more spectacular wildlife, such as the argali
sheep, to foreign trophy hunters, in spite of international efforts to
protect these species.  According to data compiled by the
International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural
Resources. 30 of Tibet's 500 bird and 188 of its animal species are rare
or endangered.

In the last decade, China has set aside 20 protected areas for Tibetan
wilderness and wildlife, totaling more than 296,000 square kilometers,
or 12 percent of historical Tibetan territory.  However, Tibetans and
foreign environmentalists are concerned that some of these areas may be
mere "paper parks"--protected in name, but lacking any comprehensive
planning or adequate regulatory control or enforcement.  They are also
wary of any protection plans that do not allow for traditional land uses
by local people.

Much of the Tibetan Plateau consists of an extensive high-altitude
grassland, known as the Chang Tang.  The area has historically been
sparsely inhabited, principally by hardy Tibetan nomads who tend herds
of yak, goat and sheep.  These nomads traditionally managed their range
with a sophisticated system of "pasture books" that indicated which
areas could be used, when and for how long they must lie fallow.

Over the four decades since the Chinese invasion, range conditions in
some parts of the Chang Tang have deteriorated dramatically.  While
Chinese officials claim that the decline is the result of the nomads'
tendency to overstock pastures, the Tibetan report attributes the
degradation to increased demand for meat by the Chinese, as well as to
China's resettlement policies in Tibet which have caused expanding
desertification and forced nomads out of traditional grazing areas and
onto more marginal lands.

Similar population pressures are also affecting Tibet's scarce
agricultural land, according to the report.  The settlement of Chinese
immigrants in Tibetan towns and in the best of Tibet's few agricultural
areas has displaced Tibetan farmers and forced them to cultivate less
productive land.

China's mining operations are placing new pressures on Tibet's
ecosystem as well.  Tibetans traditionally refrained from extensive
mining for fear of "diminishing the strength of the land," according
to Tenzin Atisha, deputy secretary of the Tibetan government-in- exile's
environment desk, but the occupying Chinese have no such compunctions.

Qinghai province, China's "Wild West," is the country's sixth-largest
gold-producing region.  Most mining in the province takes place in areas
of former Tibetan territory near the origins of the Yellow and Yangtze
rivers.  The mineral wealth has created a regional gold rush that has
brought an estimated 80,000 prospectors into the area.  The PRC is
attempting to double the province's gold production by 1995.

The Tibetan report states that only 20 percent of China's mines have
satisfactory safety records and says that environmental safeguards at
mines in Tibet "are virtually non-existent," potentially leading to
ground and surface water contamination by heavy metals, slope
destabilization, river siltation and habitat destruction.

Persistent reports and rumors of nuclear activities and waste dumping in
Tibet prompted the Dalai Lama's government to observe in the national
report that China's nuclear waste "is suspected to be stored at several
places in Amdo province" and near another nuclear facility close to the
town of Nyakchuka in central Tibet.

While there is no direct evidence of China storing nuclear materials in
Tibet, the PRC did offer to accept nuclear waste from foreign countries
for storage in China and Tibet during the 1980s.  The Chinese govern-
ment insisted the proposal was only preliminary, and has never disclosed
a specific disposal location.  It is still unclear whether any of the
nations approached by China, including Germany, Switzerland and France,
have taken up the offer.  China has also invited foreign companies to
ship toxic waste to Tibet and has conducted chemical weapons exercises
on the Plateau.

The PRC continues to insist that environmental conditions on the
Tibetan Plateau are among the best in the world and specifically denies
that any nuclear waste dumping is taking place, calling the exiled
Tibetan government's assertion "purely fabricated rumor."

International consequences

Continued despoliation of the Plateau environment has potentially
far-reaching transboundary impacts.  "The degradation of Tibet is not
just a Tibetan issue, it has become an Asian issue," says Sanjeev
Prakash, an Indian research consultant on the Tibetan national report.

Ninety percent of Tibet's river runoff flows downstream to much of the
rest of Asia.  Several of the major rivers that originate in Tibet,
including the Brahmaputra, Yellow and Yangtze, are among the most
heavily silted in the world.  Deforestation and subsequent soil erosion
in eastern Tibet exacerbate this natural condition, contributing to
downstream flooding.  The frequency of floods on all three of these
rivers increased in the 1980s, according to the national report, as a
result of rising sedimentation levels from sources in eastern Tibet.

Just as the Plateau serves as an Asian watershed, it is also an
"airshed" for much of the continent to the south and east.  The northern
jetstreams flowing over the high Plateau determine the timing and force
of the seasonal South Asian monsoon in India and Southeast Asia.
Atmospheric scientists have theorized that deforestation on the
Plateau could delay and weaken the summer monsoon, endangering the
livelihoods of millions of farmers in Asia who depend on these rains,
and could affect weather patterns as far away as the mid-Pacific.  The
report notes that, "the degradation of the Tibetan Plateau ... may have
crucial transnational impacts on weather phenomena, like the Indian
monsoon"

Planning for Tibet's future

The greatest threat to Tibet's environment, and to the Tibetan national
identity, may arise not from present projects so much as from future
development plans.  Tibetans consider the population transfer of Chinese
to Tibet to be a dire threat that has made the Tibetan people an
"endangered species," according to Atisha.  Since 1949,7.6 million
Chinese, including an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 People's Liberation
Army troops, have been relocated to Tibet.  They outnumber the six
million Tibetans and are overstressing the carrying capacity of the
Plateau.

The Tibetan government believes that Chinese social, infrastructural
and resource development programs initiated in Tibet in the 1980s have
primarily benefitted China's economy, since they have been established
mostly in urban areas where there are majority Chinese populations.
Tempa Tsering, general secretary of the Dalai Lama's Department of
Information and

International Relations, warns, "From our experience, these projects do
not help.  What actually happens is that they assist the settlement of
even more Chinese, which is worse, not better, for the ecology of
Tibet."

In May 1992, the PRC announced plans to create a "special economic zone"
in Central Tibet to attract foreign industry and investment through
"preferential policies," including tax breaks and low costs for land
use.  Chinese officials say that the goal of development is to raise
living standards and modernize industry in the TAR.  However, John
Ackerly, director of the Washington, D.C.-based International Campaign
for Tibet, says, "The biggest threat to Tibet could be Chinese-style
capitalism, if Tibetans are not in control of decision- making" on
economic, environmental and development projects.

For the time being, the development of Tibet's resources and the
protection of its environment remain beyond the control of most Tibetans
who are not Communist Party members.  This exclusion, however, has not
prevented Tibetans inside the country and in exile from developing plans
for the future of Tibet.

In 1987, the Dalai Lama announced a "five-point peace plan" for Tibet.
The proposal calls for the abandonment of China's population transfer
policy in Tibet; the protection of Tibetans' human and democratic
rights; the restoration and protection of Tibet's environment and the
prohibition of any nuclear activities; the conversion of the entire
country into a zone of Ahimsa, or non-harm; and the initiation of
negotiations with China to resolve the status of Tibet.

The efforts of the Tibetan government-in-exile and international
environmental and Tibet solidarity groups to address environment and
development problems in Tibet are coming none too soon.  While the
five-point peace plan and other attempts at rapprochement with China
have elicited little response so far, reports of recent meetings between
the Dalai Lama's government and the PRC suggest that China's "bamboo
curtain" is opening a crack.

If Chinese efforts to exploit the Tibetan environment continue to
accelerate, however, the end result may be the irreversible
impoverishment of Tibet's ecological and cultural diversity, causing the
curtain to fall for the last time on yet another of the world's
irreplaceable ecosystems and peoples.

Justin Lowe is managing editor of Earth Island Journal.

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