Published by: World Tibet Network News, Monday, Jun 10, 1996

By Mure Dickie

BEIJING, June 10 (Reuter) - Beijing, under fire from human rights groups and exiled Tibetans for its policies in Tibet, said on Monday the restive Himalayan region had made tremendous progress under 40 years of Chinese rule.

Tibetans' living standards had soared to outstrip the national average in some areas, said a survey by the China Tibetology Research Centre conducted from May to November last year on 150 urban, pastoral and agricultural families.

The survey on basic family conditions, relations, family structures, lifestyles, income and expenditure, and religion was the largest and most thorough in Tibet in recent years, the Xinhua news agency said.

In terms of religion, 93.2 percent of those surveyed in the deeply Buddhist Himalayan region said they were familiar with the state policy guaranteeing freedom of religion.

With rising living standards, an increasing number of Tibetans were placing more and better religious items in their homes, the survey said.

They were free to hold religious activities anywhere at any time, it said.

The report was published amid a crackdown in Tibet on the display in temples, monasteries, offices, schools and homes of pictures of the region's exiled god-king, the Dalai Lama, and a renewed sweep on anti-Chinese separatists.

The Dalai Lama has lived in India since he fled into exile after a failed effort to throw out the Chinese in 1959, but is still deeply revered throughout Tibet.

The Tibet Daily, in its June 2 edition available in Beijing on Monday, said local officials had been reminded that the campaign against pro-independence separatists was a priority.

"The prevention and eradication of the terrorist destructive activities of hostile forces is the new task of the struggle against splittism," the newspaper said.

The degree of attention paid to this struggle by Communist Party cadres reflected their commitment to the correct political line, it said.

The newspaper published a front-page photograph of a stream of trucks filled with armed police parading 23 criminals through the streets of the capital, Lhasa, after a mass sentencing for crimes such as theft, robbery and assault.

Tibet had arrested 187 people, smashed 287 criminal cases and seized 34 guns, 3,724 rounds of ammunition and 164 kg (362 lb) of explosives since launching the nationwide "Strike Hard" crime crackdown in late April, the Procuratorial Daily said.

A Chinese court last month sentenced six Tibetans to up to five years in prison for demanding independence.

China has governed Tibet since the People's Liberation Army marched into Lhasa in 1950 and says living standards have soared under Chinese rule, despite the chaos of the radical 1966-76 Cultural Revolution when almost all its temples were destroyed.

The survey of 46 pastoral households in Amdo county showed that before the communist takeover, 56.6 percent of families lived in poverty but by 1995 all lived above the poverty line.

Ganjorlhubo was a village of slaves before the 1949 communist takeover, but by 1994 per capita output was 4,000 yuan ($480) -- well above the national average of 1,978 yuan ($238).

In the Lugu district of Lhasa, once one of the city's main slums and home to one-third of its beggars, the average per capita income reached 4,024 yuan ($485) in 1994 -- below the average urban income of 5,050 yuan ($608), the survey said.