(Washington Post, USA, November 2, 1999)

A Wave of Chinese Job-Seekers Threatens to Swamp Tibet's Culture

By John Pomfret Washington Post Service

LHASA, Tibet - Among the pilgrims at the gates of the Jokhang temple, the holiest Buddhist site in the capital of Tibet, a Chinese migrant and avowed atheist named Xie Danchun was doing a brisk business. He sells white Tibetan prayer scarves, known as hada, symbols of a culture struggling under periodic assault from authorities in Beijing.

''It's a job,'' mused Mr. Xie, a 24-year-old from Sichuan province, as pilgrims prostrated themselves in the swirling incense smoke outside the 1,300-year-old shrine. ''Besides, the silk factory is in my county back home. We run it up here on my county's trucks.''

On any given day, about 100 million people are on the move across China looking for work. But perhaps nowhere is China's vast internal migration having a more profound effect on the local population than in Tibet.

The arrival here of tens of thousands of job-seekers from China's ethnic Han majority, while a minor runoff in a country of 1.3 billion people, is threatening to swamp the culture of 5 million Tibetans.

''I'm not replacing a Tibetan,'' argued Mr. Xie, who came here in pursuit of a fortune two years ago after China relaxed restrictions on travel.

Pointing to a teenage Tibetan competitor who was selling scarves of lower quality at the same price, he said, ''We're just beating them at their own game.''

The fate of Tibetan culture has taken on a new urgency in recent months since the World Bank approved a $160 million loan, over U.S. and German objections, that included millions to help move 58,000 people, including some Han Chinese, onto land claimed as traditionally Tibetan.

Opponents charge that the resettlement, designed to give farmers from an overpopulated region access to more land and water, will speed the assimilation of Tibetans, a deeply religious people whose language, world view and customs differ sharply from those of the Chinese. Proponents of the resettlement plan point out that Dulan County, the site of the project in Qinghai Province just north of Tibet, is already largely Han Chinese and that some Tibetans will be included in the resettlement of the 58,000 people.

They argue that the area is not in Tibet proper but in a region that has long included an ethnic mosaic of Tibetans, Mongols, Muslims, Turkic peoples and Han Chinese.

But critics see in the plan a pattern in which China is encouraging Han Chinese to move into restive regions that were once populated purely by minority peoples.

''The feeling we have is that the Chinese government is encouraging population settlement even more in the traditionally Tibetan regions than before,'' said John Ackerly, a director of the International Campaign for Tibet in Washington. ''This is not good news for Tibetan culture.''

China's Communist government and its imperial predecessors have long subdued troubled regions through migration. In the 1950s, hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese soldiers and officials were sent to the mostly Muslim northwest territory of Xinjiang. Today, an estimated 5 million Han Chinese live in the region and Urumqi, its capital, has become overwhelmingly a Chinese city.

In Inner Mongolia, once home to more Mongols than Han, the Han now dominate by a ratio of about 5 to 1.

Tibet, too, has received its share of planned migration. Since 1959, when a Tibetan rebellion against China's rule was repressed by the military, more than 111,000 Chinese officials have been sent to the region as agents of ''modernization,'' according to Nima Tsering, a deputy governor of Tibet.

''This is a social system that was dark and backward, a little like the Middle Ages in Europe 500 years ago,'' Mr. Tsering, a Tibetan who has allied himself with the Chinese, told a group of Western reporters recently. ''In the 1950s, while you were making satellites and modern industry, we didn't even have roads.''

He questioned why he should want to restrict Chinese >from settling in Tibet. ''I want them to come,'' he said.

While some critics of China's government have explained such policies as part of a deep-seated Chinese sense of manifest destiny, resettlement is also seen by Chinese authorities as an issue of national security.

Although 93 percent of the Chinese population is Han Chinese, ethnic minorities inhabit regions that contain a vast percentage of the country's material wealth. Minorities predominate in 60 percent of China's territory, including regions crucial to its supply of natural resources such as timber, water and petroleum. Areas dominated by the two most recalcitrant minorities - Tibetans and Muslim Uighurs - comprise 3.8 million square kilometers (1.5 million square miles), almost half of China and much of its historically vulnerable border areas.

Chinese strategists argue that the government naturally wants to fill such areas with Han Chinese presumably loyal to Beijing. A senior Chinese analyst compared the move to resettle Han Chinese in Tibet and Xinjiang to population changes in Alaska. In the 1940s, he noted, native Alaskans made up more than half the population in what would become the state with the largest area. Today, they constitute about 15 percent. ''So are we both guilty of cultural genocide?'' he asked.

A recent newcomer is Li Tiegang, 25. Last year he was demobilized from the military as part of a program to trim 500,000 men from the People's Liberation Army. Mr. Li, who had been posted to Tibet, decided to stay with 120 other men from his county, all former soldiers.

The army arranged a loan for him, he bought a car and now he is a taxi driver on the same streets that he once patrolled as a soldier. The $400 a month he earns is equivalent to what his parents made in a year in his hometown in rural Anhui Province.

''I'm sending money to them for the first time,'' he said. ''I'm working 16 hours a day but I'm finally saving something.''

Signs of Chinese life predominate in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. Since 1950, the size of the city has expanded 17 times, with the Chinese sections of town growing the most, bringing some amenities and boxy Chinese architecture. Chinese karaoke halls, noodle stalls and brothels line the streets of Tibet's cities. Even the prostitutes are mainly Han.

There are no official figures for the number of migrant Chinese in Tibet's cities but the numbers are booming. Chinese officials say that Lhasa's population remains close to 90 percent Tibetan and that in total more than 95 percent of Tibet is Tibetan. But Mr. Li, the former soldier, and tens of thousands like him are not counted by Chinese census takers.