For Rural Tibetans, the Future Is in Town

By Jill Drew
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, June 20, 2008

GEZA, China -- Her elder sister is the first to rise, bringing in wood to light the cooking fire and setting water to boil for yak butter tea. Her mother is next, grabbing clumps of freshly picked dandelion greens from a metal tub to mix with barley powder and water to feed the pigs.

Jian Hongmei pulls her blanket tight, trying for a few more minutes of sleep before acknowledging the new day, which opens as so many others have in her 19 years in this Tibetan mountain village.

But today is different. For the past month, Jian has been working in a new job at a small hotel about two hours away by bus. She's cleaning guest rooms and hustling for customers, making more money than the four adult farmers in her family put together. Today is her first visit back.

"I've lived here long enough," Jian says later, as she walks beside a brilliant-green barley field, stopping a few times to pick yellow blossoms from wild medicinal plants that she used to spend hours gathering to sell at market. "I want to see other places and do other things. Here, nothing changes."

Tibetans, traditionally nomadic herders and farmers, are increasingly being lured into a commercial world, a place where Chinese and English language skills are prerequisites for success and ethnic identity is something to be marketed to tourists. Many young Tibetans like Jian jump at the chance to escape harsh farm work on mountain plateaus, but the opportunity means leaving behind a way of life that has defined one of the most romanticized cultures in the world.

Tibetan identity is a white-hot global issue after protests in March, the most extensive uprising against Chinese rule of the Himalayan region in nearly 20 years. Tibetans marched for religious freedom, economic opportunity and cultural autonomy before Chinese police crushed the demonstrations and angry Tibetans started a deadly riot. Police arrested hundreds, closing off the monasteries at the heart of the protests from the public and banning foreign journalists from most Tibetan areas.

The international condemnation that accompanied China's crackdown faded in the aftermath of the earthquake in neighboring Sichuan province last month that killed more than 60,000 people. But attention is returning to Tibet. The Olympic torch, making its way to Beijing for the Aug. 8 start of the Summer Games, is scheduled to run through the Tibetan capital city of Lhasa this weekend.

There were no protests near Geza, a village of 42 Tibetan families in the northwestern corner of Yunnan province. Locals say relations between the Tibetans and ethnic Han Chinese are more subtle than in the Tibet Autonomous Region, on Yunnan's northern border.

Rather than suppressing Tibetan culture, locals say, officials work to profit from it. The region's economy is centered in the town where Jian now works, which was once known as Zhongdian but has been renamed Shangri-La, after the lost utopia of the 1933 James Hilton novel "Lost Horizon," to appeal to the tourist trade.

The government has mandated that all Shangri-La street signs be written in Tibetan, Chinese and English. Most new buildings along major thoroughfares must use Tibetan-style architecture. Cobblestone streets lined with local handicraft shops and Tibetan restaurants define the city's old town section. Yaks graze on open plains next to the runway at Shangri-La's airport.

Whether such development is destroying Tibetan culture or preserving it is a topic of debate. But the economic successes in Shangri-La have served to keep political and religious tensions low, unlike in Lhasa, where local Tibetans have not been fully integrated into the economy.

The government still makes its presence felt in Shangri-La. Ten truckloads of armed police recruits arrived a few days after the March 14 riot in Lhasa. Now, they train most days near a downtown park, wielding batons and plastic riot shields in a show of force. Police have erected a roadblock and require passengers to register before traveling from Shangri-La to Geza and other Tibetan villages.

Photos of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, have been hidden away, in deference to a Chinese mandate not to display images of the man the authorities call a "separatist."

In general, though, Tibetans say that they are benefiting from the tourism economy and that standards of living are rising, even if they are conflicted about the impact of tourism on their culture.

Lobsang Tenzin, an ethnic Tibetan who co-founded an adventure tour company called Khampa Caravan, once lived as a nomad, riding horses wherever his family took him. It was a hard life, he said. Now he has enough money to buy most everything he wants and voices the lament of the upwardly mobile the world over: "I've already changed my TV three times. Every three or four years I need a bigger, more expensive one."

Tourism, he said, "in one part helps and in one part destroys" the culture. "In some villages, they are very traditional, but then they get more and more tourists. Later you see everyone in blue jeans and leather jackets."

Ben Hillman, an expert in Tibetan culture at Australian National University, said it's better for tourism to be shaped by locals than controlled by mega-tourism companies and hotel chains. "If we can help local people get into the tourism industry, we can let them present their culture how they see it," Hillman said.

Hillman is co-founder of the Eastern Tibet Training Institute, a small nongovernmental organization that provides vocational training each year for about 100 rural youth, mostly poor ethnic minorities living in villages near Shangri-La. The four-month program teaches English and basic skills to help the young people get jobs with some of the town's tonier hotels and tour companies.

Illiteracy among Tibetans is among the highest in China. Jian's older sister, for example, did not attend school because her family could not afford even the marginal fees of primary school. She cannot read or write and can speak only Tibetan. She was married at 17, unhappily, and divorced. Now, she has no opportunity to leave the family farm as Jian did.

"I don't want to get married," Jian said, as she rode in a car back to Shangri-La after visiting her family. "Many people in my village have gotten divorced."

Jian attended the vocational training in Hillman's program, free to those who qualify, and landed a job at a small, funky guesthouse in Shangri-La, called the Upstream Poet Hostel. Its manager, Tian Yong, is a Chinese poet who came to Shangri-La, as many Chinese do these days, seeking something more meaningful than just making money.

"I want to stay here many years," he said, sipping tea and lounging on a bench near a potbellied stove in his hotel's lobby. He pays Jian and his two other Tibetan workers 1,500 yuan a month, almost $220, plus free room and board.

In this environment, young Tibetans are defining their own identity while also trying to attain a more secure and comfortable life.

Jian prefers her Chinese name to her Tibetan one. She eschews the traditional Tibetan garb that her mother and sister wear. She keeps her hair in a bob and her cellphone close.

But Jian also visits a Buddhist temple four times a week and says her dream is to make a pilgrimage to Lhasa, the spiritual and political center of Tibetan culture.

She loves to sing Tibetan songs. A guest at her hotel once heard her sing and promised to make contacts for her in Kunming, the provincial capital, to see if there were scholarships available for Jian to study music.

Jian said she will divide her first paycheck of $220 this way: $175 will go to her family, $30 for gifts and $15 for herself.

She loves her family and the farm but also loves her new life -- a room to herself, books and access to a computer, her first. Her mother, she said, worries and has told her to come home at the first sign of trouble.

But Jian is looking ahead and out at a wider world. She recalls her amazement the first time a guest gave her a tip -- about $1.50. At first she wouldn't accept it, money for nothing. But she finally did, and now it serves as a reminder of her next goal. Jian says, "I dream that one day maybe I would have so much money I could give someone a tip."