Translating ecological migration policy: a conjunctural analysis of Tibetan pastoralist resettlement in China

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes the transmission of China’s Ecological Migration Policy from the central government down to Tibetan villages and townships for implementation. It examines the specific ways through which the policy is translated from Chinese to Tibetan and communicated through various local dialects to concerned pastoralists. In order to achieve the Ecological Migration Policy’s purported objectives of environmental conservation, livelihood improvement, and urbanization, township government officials at the grassroots level mistranslate and miscommunicate policy meanings to villagers to render an otherwise unfeasible, impractical policy implementable on the ground. Tibetan pastoralists actively engage with this resettlement project to fulfill their desires and aspirations for accessing healthcare and educational services in urban areas. However, this pursuit of legibility is induced by the state’s negligence of rural pastoralist life and elimination of alternative educational facilities in rural communities. Both negligence and elimination of educational facilities in rural areas concentrate and increase investments in education and healthcare in urban settlements. These conjunctures ultimately drive Tibetan pastoralists to “choose” their only available option, to resettle in urban townships.

KEYWORDS:

• Tibet
• pastoralism
• resettlement
• translation
• education

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Emily Yeh at the University of Colorado Boulder, Dr Charlene Makley at Reed College, Critical Asian Studies editors, and one anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments and editorial support on earlier drafts of this article. I also would like to extend my gratitude to Dr Peter D. Little at Emory University. This article was originally materialized in one of his graduate anthropology courses I took in 2017. This effort would not have come into full fruition without his support and insights in the first place. Research for this article was carried out as an independent study when I worked as a program coordinator at Shanshui Conservation, a Chinese environmental NGO headquartered in Beijing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Tsering Bum is currently a doctoral student of environmental anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. From 2012 to 2016, he worked with Tibetan pastoralist communities in China’s Qinghai Province to build community-based resource management organizations to conduct biodiversity monitoring, waste management, and human-wildlife conflict resolution. His current doctoral research interests broadly cover political ecology of environmental conservation, development, and natural resource management in Tibetan areas of Qinghai Province. For his dissertation research, he is interested in exploring the conjunctures of grassroots environmental initiatives and their interplay with state development and environmental policies.

Notes

1 Even though resettled pastoralists do not have the legal right to graze animals on what officially is public land, they still retain use rights to harvest caterpillar fungus, an endemic fungus on the Tibetan Plateau highly valuable in Tibetan and Chinese medical practices.

2 Shore and Wright 2011, 1.

3 Scott 1999; Homewood 2004; Little 2014.

4 Scott 1999.

5 Li 2007.

6 Buckley 2014.

7 Tsing 1997, 253.

8 Asad 1984, 157.

9 Mosse and Lewis 2006, 13.

10 West 2005.

11 Tsering 1994.

12 Kham is a region in Southwest China historically located between Tibet and Sichuan. It is currently divided between the Tibetan Autonmous Region and the Chinese provinces of Yunnan, Sichuan, and Qinghai. A majority of residents are Khampa people.

13 Yarchak 2005.

14 Hardin 1968.

15 Foggin 2008, 27.

16 Banks et al. 2003; Nyima 2017.

17 Li et al. 2017.

18 Stevens 1993; Stevens 1997.

19 Wang and Bai 1991.

20 Little 2014.

21 Scott 1999; Cencetti 2011.

22 Bauer 2015.

23 Homewood 2004; Little 2014; Gyal 2015; Kabzung 2015.

24 Cencetti 2013.

25 Zukosky 2007, 115.

26 Fischer 2008a; Rohlf 2016.

27 Fischer 2008a.

28 Gruschke 2008; Foggin 2008.

29 Bauer and Nyima 2010.

30 Yeh 2005.

31 Others argue the flooding was likely aggravated by China’s urbanization process, rather than by rangeland degradation upstream. See Fischer 2008b.

32 Foggin 2008.

33 Bum 2016.

34 Bauer 2015.

35 Wang et al. 2010; Du 2012.

36 Makley 2018.

37 Harwood 2014.

38 Smith 2009; Gupta 2012; Tenzin 2014.

39 A similar phenomenon has been described by Yusuke Bessho for in the Golok Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Qinghai, where Tibetan pastoralists decided to become ecological migrants to access medical benefits and schooling opportunities in urban settings. Yuseke Bessho 2015.

40 Makley 2018.

41 Rogers 2004.

42 Yeh et al. 2014.

43 Winkler 2009.

44 Winkler 2008.

45 Gruschke 2011.

46 This survey work was conducted only among resettled pastoralists with the main objective of understanding the reasons and rationales for resettlement; therefore, I do not attempt to make generalizable interpretations about other communities using this set of survey data. The primary respondents to the surveys are the heads of households. Tibetan heads of households make major family decisions regarding resettlement and other socioeconomic issues. In the case of this survey, the heads of households were mostly older males, with the exception of a few adult males and three older females.

47 Yeh and Lama 2013, 3.

48 This was particularly the case prior to villages being exempt from agricultural taxes in 2006. See Chen 2014.

49 Lipsky 1979.

50 Mueggler 2001; Makley 2007.

51 Makley 2018.

52 The name of the anonymous county at the center of Hillman’s book. See Hillman 2104, 6.

53 Hillman 2014. See also Kennedy 2007.

54 Smith 2010.

55 Fischer 2014; Fischer 2015.

56 Nyima 2012; Makley 2018.

57 Ortner 2006.