This book pursues both narrative and analytic approaches to better understand China’s spatial economic development and its implications for Tibet. Accordingly, this book focuses on Tibet – an autonomous region in the far west of China – as the subject of an in-depth case study, highlighting its unique geopolitical and socioeconomic features and external and boundary conditions. China’s great diversity in terms of physical geography, resource endowment, political economy, and ethnicity and religion has posed challenges to the studies of spatial and interprovincial issues. Indeed, the Chinese nation is far too huge and spatially diverse to be easily interpreted. The only feasible approach to analyzing it is, therefore, to divide it into smaller geographical elements so as to arrive at better insights into the country’s spatial mechanisms and regional characteristics. In this context, the book combines analytic and narrative approaches.

Series: Studies in Modern Tibetan Culture, Lexington Books Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University Since the central government of China started major campaigns for western development in the mid-1990s, the economies of the Tibetan areas in Western China have grown rapidly and living standards have improved. However, grievances and protests have also intensified, as dramatically evidenced by the protests that spread across most Tibetan areas in spring 2008 and by the more recent wave of self-immolation protests that started in 2011. This book offers a detailed and careful exploration of this synergy between development and conflict in Tibet from the mid-1990s onwards, when rapid economic growth has occurred in tandem with a particularly assimilationist approach of integrating Tibet into China. Fischer argues that the intensified economic integration of Tibet into regional and national development strategies on these assimilationist terms, within a context of continued political disempowerment, and through the massive channeling of subsidies through Han Chinese dominated entities based outside the Tibetan areas, has accentuated various dynamics of subordination and marginalization faced by Tibetans of all social strata. Whether or not these dynamics are intended to be discriminatory, they effectively accentuate the discriminatory, assimilationist and disempowering characteristics of development, even while producing considerable improvements in the material consumption of local Tibetans. In particular, strong cultural, linguistic and political biases intensify ethnically-exclusionary dynamics among middle and upper strata of the Tibetan labor force, which is problematic considering the rapid shift of Tibetans out of agriculture and towards the highly subsidy-dependent sectors of the economy, especially in urban areas. The combination of these disempowering dynamics with the sheer speed of dislocating and disembedding social change provides important insights into recent tensions given that it has accentuated insecurity while restricting the ability of Tibetan communities to adapt in autonomous and self-determined ways. The study represents one of the only macro-level and systemic analyses of its kind in the scholarship on Tibet, based on accessible economic analysis and extensive interdisciplinary fieldwork. It also carries much interest for those interested in China and in the interactions between development, inequality, exclusion and conflict more generally.

First published in 1989. This book considers two major aspect of China's economic reform: the 'open policy' towards the West, aimed at attracting technology and skills into the country and the emphasis on 'regionalization' which established market-orientated rather than bureaucratically-controlled patterns of economic development.

The violent protests in Lhasa in 2008 against Chinese rule were met by disbelief and anger on the part of Chinese citizens and state authorities, perplexed by Tibetans' apparent ingratitude for the generous provision of development. In Taming Tibet, Emily T. Yeh examines how Chinese development projects in Tibet served to consolidate state space and power. Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2000 and 2009, Yeh traces how the transformation of the material landscape of Tibet between the 1950s and the first decade of the twenty-first century has often been enacted through the labor of Tibetans themselves. Focusing on Lhasa, Yeh shows how attempts to foster and improve Tibetan livelihoods through the expansion of markets and the subsidized building of new houses, the control over movement and space, and the education of Tibetan desires for development have worked together at different times and how they are experienced in everyday life. The master narrative of the PRC stresses generosity: the state and Han migrants selflessly provide development to the supposedly backward Tibetans, raising the living standards of the Han's "little brothers." Arguing that development is in this context a form of "indebtedness engineering," Yeh depicts development as a hegemonic project that simultaneously recruits Tibetans to participate in their own marginalization while entrapping them in gratitude to the Chinese state. The resulting transformations of the material landscape advance the project of state territorialization. Exploring the complexity of the Tibetan response to—and negotiations with—development, Taming Tibet focuses on three key aspects of China's modernization: agrarian change, Chinese migration, and urbanization. Yeh presents a wealth of ethnographic data and suggests fresh approaches that illuminate the Tibet Question.

In the last two decades, China's western inland region has largely been left out of the nation's economic boom. While its 355-million population accounts for 28% and its land area for 71% of China's total, the region's share of the national GDP is under 20%. Since 1999, Beijing has implemented the West China Development Program to boost the region's growth. To study the major domestic issues and the global implications of this program, the University of Victoria's Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives organized and hosted a multidisciplinary international conference on March 6OCo8, 2003. This volume of papers presented at the conference offers perspectives on the issues by leading experts of diversified academic disciplines from China, Canada, the US, and other countries. Sample Chapter(s). Introduction: West China Development Issues and Challenges (3,355 KB). Contents: Goals and Objectives: Designing a Regional Development Strategy for China (D Perkins); Eco-Environmental Protection and Poverty-Alleviation in West China Development (Y Zheng & Y Qian); Western China: Human Security and National Security (R Bedeski); Coordinating Institutions and Mechanism: A New Pattern of Regional Co-operation in China: Four Economic Belts Across East to West (S Li et al.); The Political Logic of Fiscal Transfers in China (S Wang); An Introductory Environmental Macroeconomic Framework for China: Implications for West China Development (D Thampapillai et al.); Enhancing the Western China Development Strategy (WCDS): Innovative Approaches (N C Stoskopf et al.); Effectiveness and Efficiency: On the UrbanOCoRural Relationship in Western Region Development Program (Y Shi & P Du); The Western Region's Growth Potential (D Lu & E Thomson); Measuring the Impact of the OC Five Mega-ProjectsOCO (L Lin & S Liu); Education and Development: A Historical Experience of Sichuan (Y Li); Distribution of Benefits and Costs: The New Challenges Facing the Development of West China (S Liu & L Lin); Migration Scenarios and Western China Development: The Evidence from 2000 Population Census Data (S Bao & W T Woo); Gender Relations, Tourism and Ecological Effects in Lijiang, China (G Kelkar); Sources of Interregional Disparity: The Relative Contributions of Location and Preferential Policies in China's Regional Development (S Demurger et al.); Urbanization and West China Development (D Lu & W T Woo); China's Regional Disparities in 1978OCo2000 (Z Lu & S Song); and other papers. Readership: Researchers, academics, students and business consultants interested in China and its development."

From macro and micro perspectives, this book provides a panoramic view of China's sprawling western region. China's twelve western provinces are examined through several critical thematic dimensions.