Jiegu (Gyegu, Jyekundu)

I would encourage you to also check out the Yushu Earthquake Response team, a coalition of Tibetan NGOs who are frantically busy on the ground in Yushu and coordinating relief through Xining. In Xining they are also helping with the victims in local hospitals. Many of the students who have been assisting around the clock in the hospitals have been told to return to classes by their respective schools, which has further stressed the continuing tragedy. Another problem is shoes.

One need we had overlooked is shoes! Many families point out that they have received food and shelter and warm clothes but no shoes. So today our purchasing team picked up 200 pairs of shoes. They will go to Yushu tomorrow along with large water tanks which our relief centre urgently needs to store clean water.

Woman, tent and damaged stupa

Tibetan women and child

Old Tibetan couple and boy

But what is more disturbing in all of this are the reports concerning the expulsion of monks from Yushu. Yesterday I wrote

Tradition, ritual and good sense trumps any possibility of denying the monks access to the dead and the suffering. This is China being diplomatic for the much greater good. Yes, it is a potentially volatile situation – the proverbial tinderbox – but the alternative is a raging fire. No one – not the monks, not the Chinese officials, not the Tibetans or the Chinese people – wants that.

But this morning I read this from Alexa Olesen, AP – Tibetan monks ordered out of China’s quake zone:

Earthquake survivors say it was the Tibetan monks who helped first, bringing food, pitching tents and digging through rubble after disaster hit far western China a week ago, killing thousands.

Now the Buddhist monks who responded first are being pushed out of the disaster area and off of state media — apparently sidelined by Beijing’s unease with their heroism and influence.

Monasteries were given verbal orders the last two days to recall their monks. Amid hours of coverage for China’s national day of mourning on Wednesday, no monks were visible in the official proceedings.

It was a jarring omission in light of their contributions to the weeklong rescue and relief effort following the quake, which killed 2,064 people and injured more than 12,000 others.

And this from the New York Times: An Official Mourning in China for Quake Victims

In an interview on Wednesday, Woeser, an influential Tibetan blogger who is in frequent contact with people in the earthquake zone, said several monks told her that they had been ordered to leave Jiegu in recent days, although such accounts could not be immediately confirmed.

“I think the government sees them as competitors for the hearts of the people,” Ms. Woeser said.

Although she acknowledged that government relief efforts had been robust so far, she expressed concern that the lack of transparency might obscure any examination of whether the huge sums of government and donated money reached the survivors. After the Sichuan earthquake, she noted, several critics who pressed the issue of poor school construction, which may have contributed to the deaths of thousands of children, were jailed on charges of state subversion.

“A lot of money was raised with great fanfare after the Sichuan earthquake, but we don’t know how much was spent on the refugees and how much ended up embezzled,” Ms. Woeser said. “I worry the same thing might happen here.”

Perhaps I was being too optimistic, thinking that good sense and the commonweal trumps political agendas in the face of natural disaster. Though these reports are still, as yet, unconfirmed, the battle of dueling Plateau narratives has moved to the next – and potentially dangerous – level.

According to eyewitnesses in Yushu, Wen Jiabao’s presence was genuinely appreciated by the Tibetan victims in Yushu. Prior to his arrival there was apparently official chaos, with no one really knowing what to do. One of the criticisms was that the military response was 6-8 hours in coming, even though a large base was nearby. The first order of the military was to secure the base against the possibility of an insurgent attack. So, in stepped the monks who literally took matters into their own hands, taking the lead in rescue efforts, attending to the injured as well as the rapidly growing numbers of the dead. But the story radically changes after Wen departed the scene. The Tibetan story is that many of the official rescuers – not all – took a much more relaxed approach to recovery efforts. I cannot confirm this, but this is not about confirmation. This is about the narratives that will undoubtedly persist within the Tibetan community.

By excluding images of the monks in the official televised ceremonies, the CCP has spun their own one-sided narrative, which, of course, plays to a much wider and friendlier audience that watched the single official broadcast of the mourning event. I can only imagine that the Tibetans were wondering where all the monks had gone. The spinning of narratives will make an interesting future course in Approaches to Plateau History. But what is clear is that the ongoing battle for the “hearts and minds” of the people is actually a battle for the “hearts and minds” of two different peoples. If some or many of the monks were, in fact, expelled, the CCP has made a grave misstep. How that misstep will play out in the future, especially in the reconstruction phase, is not something I care to even think about now. If the accounts of expulsion are confirmed, a few days of “generosity” will be quickly forgotten as the next contentious chapter predictably unfolds.

Surely authorities are looking at the situation very closely, and very nervously. Why they even allow this to be happening is a mystery.

Actually, there is no mystery to it all. What other choice does official China have? Restricting or even limiting monks access to the disaster site would create a nightmarish situation that would, no doubt, spiral out of control on the eve of the opening of the Shanghai Expo. This is not something China can afford to even remotely consider. Tradition, ritual and good sense trumps any possibility of denying the monks access to the dead and the suffering. This is China being diplomatic for the much greater good. Yes, it is a potentially volatile situation – the proverbial tinderbox – but the alternative is a raging fire. No one – not the monks, not the Chinese officials, not the Tibetans or the Chinese people – wants that. I would assume that there is a strict policing of all troops, paramilitary personnel and anyone with an official title. The least scent of provocation cannot, will not be tolerated. We can only hope that all the monks also feel this way. There is a larger issue here, and that’s attending to those who need it most: the victims.

Yushu will continue to be a hotspot for the foreseeable future. The rebuilding of the city may end up being a highly contentious issue. Who will get the jobs? Who will rebuild the homes? Unlike many places in the Tibetan region, the Yushu area has been relatively free from internal migration, and Yushu has generally been peaceful over the last few years while so many other places in the cultural region have not. Tibetans account for more than 95% of the local population. If the major reconstruction effort is conducted by migrant workers from all over China, inevitably there will be many who will come with them, setting up shops and businesses that will certainly be non-Tibetan, and that will, no doubt, exacerbate the current tragedy. The reconstruction phase also must be handled diplomatically, for if it is not there will be problems for the whole plateau, and China, the CCP, as well as the Tibetans, cannot afford this sort of instability. We can only hope that someone is taking the long view on this, and that the view does not include using Yushu as a launch pad for further cultural dilution.

Many of those who were killed and have suffered the most are former nomads displaced by the government’s project, tuimu huancao (“converting pastures to grasslands”) – an attempt to minimize the ecological damage of climate change. It has been a highly controversial program, seen by many as furthering a socio-political agenda – shengtai yimin (ecological migration) – of removing Tibetans from their native lands and resettling them in areas where they are ghettoized in high plains projects. Often they are denied ownership of livestock and forced to live on a fixed, temporary dole. The official line has been that it allows Tibetans access to better schools, medical facilities and social opportunities, though this dispossession has caused overwhelming heartache, loss of social identity and an increase in crime as a society based on shared, though often locally contested, open spaces and seasonal migrations has literally been piled up upon itself. We have just seen the terrible cost of this resettlement. A responsible and ethnically aware reconstruction phase is critical to the future development of not only Yushu, but China as a rising power.

Related links:
Policies for an eco-plateau
Restoring the Grasslands
Nomadic people in Qinghai to settle within five years.

For more in-depth journal articles in pdf:
Green Governmentality and Pastoralism in Western China: ‘Converting Pastures to Grasslands’
Depopulating the Tibetan Grasslands

Early on Friday morning I received a phone call from a young Tibetan woman, SD, in Xining – last month I mentioned her and her sister  here – and she was clearly upset. The prior day she had tried raising money for the earthquake victims with other students at her school, and was having very little success, so she had gone to her supervising teacher and asked for leave to go to Yushu. By her account, her request covered a significant period of time and three floors as she followed him through a classroom building pleading her case. The answer was a predictable, “No.” At the same time her friend, the man who is now in Yushu who I mentioned yesterday, was in a truck heading to Yushu. She couldn’t understand why she could not have also been in the truck. When she called she was fasting for the victims of the earthquake. I am not sure how long it had been since she had eaten. I was able to help her understand that everyone couldn’t go, and that there was much she could do in Xining, since a majority of the relief supplies were originating there: trucks needed to be loaded, NGO’s needed help with phones, etc. I pointed her in some specific directions, with specific instructions to break her fast if she was going to be involved in hard, physical work. She seemed happy for the suggestions. The following day, Saturday, I received another call from her. She was volunteering in one of the Xining hospitals, still fasting, but happy to be of use.

What is not generally understood is the complications of language in this region. Xining is in Tibetan Amdo, and Yushu is in Kham, two distinctly different dialects. Although the written language is the same it is fair to assume that many of the victims from Yushu are illiterate, as so many of the Tibetans who have not gone to school are. And while this is a problem, the Tibetans have been able to get around this. My friend in Xining was getting hot water and food, as well as being able to speak with the victims who knew a bit of Chinese, though it was a Chinese understandable to Tibetans, not necessarily understood by the Chinese medical workers. For those unfamiliar with the Chinese medical system, a family is responsible for taking care of the patient: attending to hygienic needs, purchasing food, as well as feeding, getting water, changing bedding, etc. For many patients and their attending families, this is the first time they have been to a Chinese city; culture shock and disorientation are acute. Though many of the volunteer students have only come to cities in order to attend college, they are young and quick studies in urban survival skills. Their volunteer presence in the hospitals is absolutely critical at this time.

As I mentioned above, the Yushu quake victims are scattered throughout the region, in Xining, Lanzhou and Xi’an. The number of patients below does not include family members who have also traveled to be with them.

Xining (Qinghai): 655 patients
Lanzhou (Gansu): 154 patients
Xi’an (Shaanxi): 90 patients

Tsomo
Three of my female classmates are from Yushu. After the terrible earthquake they lost many relatives and friends, not to mention property. Luckily their parents are still alive. Now those three women are working busily in the hospital, day and night. They have been staying up all night to help the patients from their hometown and cannot attend classes as usual. When they come back to school from the hospital they just fall on the bed and sleep. Patients in the hospital have nothing now. I hope many warm-hearted people will stretch out their hands to help them.

Drolma
I went to the hospital to volunteer with my classmates – we spent one night there. There were many patients in the hospital. Some of the patients could not move, eat, drink, or go to the toilet by themselves. When people were awake they were nervous and when they were asleep they had nightmares. One man I helped had bruises all over his face and he couldn’t move his legs. The patients in the hospital still don’t have any clean clothes and what they are wearing has already become dirty and caked with blood.
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This from the latest update, April 19 from the Yushu Earthquake Response team, a coalition of Tibetan NGOs who are set up in Yushu and coordinating relief through Xining:

Volunteers on the ground there coordinating the arriving trucks and preparing distribution loads. Our distribution method now has two main goals.  The first is to identify which areas need the most urgent assistance, the second is to work with the camp community to identify and train local community leaders who can oversee the distribution of supplies in an orderly fashion and identify on-going needs. This immediate re-building of community structure is key to recovery.  This method was trialed this morning very successfully with orderly distribution of food and essential items to around 150 people.

Yesterday’s truck had 4 motorbikes on-board  these bikes will enable our team to get into outlying areas quickly and assess the situation in areas we still have no news from. Along with buying supplies and packing the next truck to go, our team is beginning to shift gears and think about longer term planning. There is now a refugee camp  situation with tent communities springing up on any available clear land – sanitation in the camps is fast becoming a big issue.

The procurement of 4 motorbikes, the poor man’s four-wheel drive, is huge.
To help, visit the Yushu Earthquake Response site.

photo: Karamibu’s Flickr site

I also recommend that if you care to donate, please go to Yushu Earthquake Response, which is a coalition of several Tibetan NGOs in Qinghai who are focused not only on getting relief aid to Jyekundo, but who are also trying to get much needed aid to the outlying villages where the devastation is still not known. Over the years I have worked with several of the people and organizations who are part of this coalition, and I fully support their efforts. Several of the folks involved are from Yushu, and the others have been working throughout the Qinghai/Tibetan cultural region doing grassroots community service projects for several years now. I wrote about a water project I was involved with back in 2008 when I worked with one of the NGO member’s of the coalition: Choosing Words Wisely. I can say without hesitancy that donated funds will get to where they are most needed. They have people on the ground in Yushu, which is where the photos are coming from.

If, in fact, a Tibetan can be directly fingered and held accountable by the Tibetan community for profiteering at the expense of children’s lives, any and all laws, official titles and absolving reports will be no protection at all. This is what every Tibetan already knows. An unwavering line has been crossed. This is Kham where a man is measured by the number and severity of his scars. It just goes without saying that retribution will be taken. Short of leaving the Tibetan cultural region altogether, any profiteer who survived the quake is living on borrowed time. Forget the Shambhala-ed ‘peaceful warrior’ pitch. That might work in Colorado, but Yushu is not that, nor is any other place in the Tibetan cultural region.

A very good friend who has worked with Tibetans for the last 25 years once related a story to me of how a young Tibetan man, in a monotoned voice thick with sarcasm and irony, told him, “My grandfather once said that capital punishment was unknown before the PLA came. [Pause.] Despite what he said, it was also known that before the PLA came some people were force-fed large amounts of yogurt then thrown from the roof of the tallest building.”

I assume that by “tallest building” he meant “temple.” Justice can be a very sloppy business.

As is always the case when disasters strike, many people want to contribute funds, though they aren’t sure where to donate. What is abundantly clear is that the best scammers go to work overtime when victims are most in need of help and people are anxious to donate. My only advice is to be very cautious.

According to an article in the Guardian, China earthquake: Charities weigh up how best to help,

The Disasters Emergency Committee umbrella charity group was following reports from the area but said it had not yet been contacted by the Chinese government. “An emergency response co-ordinated by the Chinese government is already under way,” it said. “The Chinese authorities have long experience of dealing with natural disasters and have not made an early call for international assistance.”

All of that said, I am in contact with a very credible group who I have worked with in the past. They have a direct pipeline to those who most need the support in the affected area. For more information, you can contact me – maybtwas-quake(at)yahoo.com – and I can provide more details.

I have written here and here about the resettlement of nomadic pastoralists on the Qinghai Tibetans Plateau, so it is a subject that I am somewhat familiar with. Ms. Yeh’s review of the program is a much more thorough and studied approach to the problem. Highly recommended.

Studies to date of those who have been resettled through ecological migration also suggest that the benefits of resettlement for improving the livelihoods of herders are overstated. Some who have voluntarily resettled have expressed regrets about doing so, saying they did not realise the extent to which everything in their new town-based lives must be purchased with cash. For many families, government compensation has been inadequate, especially as inflation drives up costs while subsidies remain the same. In one study conducted in Golok, the annual income of those resettled in towns was reportedly lower than their earlier subsistence income, while expenditures were higher; those interviewed also stated that their health conditions had declined after resettlement, because of changes in living conditions as well as diet.

Originating link.

Today Mr. Schott reports on climigration as a globally troublesome and very real issue that has already worked it’s way into the new vocabulary of how we need to resolve some extremely difficult social, biological and cultural problems. Climate change/global warming is real, despite the loutish railings of a fringe and loud minority. What has been set in motion is neither adequately recognized nor understood, which means that it has been impossible to effectively address it.

In issues a little closer to my heart and current home, I am stunned – though not surprised – how the most sensitive part of the planet is being affected by the political interpretation of very real facts. Official actions have been aggressively implemented that support a political agenda rather than the search for acceptable solutions to some very difficult problems.

As the climate of the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau radically changes, the Chinese government has “helped” with climigration by forcing the dislocation of more than one (1) million Tibetans in Qinghai, Sichuan and Gansu provinces, removing them from their traditional grasslands into fringe, more officially controllable, areas. An indigenous nomadic ethnic group is being required to move into population centers where they live on top of each other, often with rules that disallow them their customary livestock or grazing lands, ensuring a rise in crime as job unavailability exacerbates the new social instability. While the official argument is that life on the grasslands is too difficult and educational opportunities are not available, there is no concession made for tradition, religion and human dignity.

This depopulation of a vast territory for unbridled mineral exploitation, and eco-tourism “with Chinese characteristics” is having terrible human results. No one’s making friends here, though there are plenty of people making lots of money, which always seems to be the trumping point. This is a creative use of the evolving weather/climate vocabulary to further state control! Perhaps there needs to be a new word for the oppressive displacement of a large and officially troublesome indigenous population by a predominant culture and controlling government under the pretense of ‘Saving the Planet.’

‘Planet rescue’ has become quite the buzz-concept over the last two decades. Unfortunately, global popularity of a word/term is usually a measure of the relative toothlessness of what, at first, seemed like a meaningful and good weave. (To wit: “Give peace a chance” is more of a fluff-brained, moneymaking jingle than a viable, constructive solution to war, despite the number of children who have learned the words over the past three decades. It hasn’t seemed to do much at all for stopping war, or stopping those folks who learned the words from paying their taxes, which is the life support of war-making efforts.)

I am not tossing climigration into that category, since it is obviously a very real problem that requires pointed attention that leads to creative solutions. But how it is hijacked and used to support other, more official agendas will be the bigger problem, especially for, though not restricted to, authoritarian states. (The past U.S. administration’s agenda exacerbated the problem by failing to deal with these pressing issues since they were not perceived as making the wealthy wealthier.) And especially as we watch the Tibetans as they slowly disappear before our eyes, as ‘climigration’ becomes the latest weapon in the arsenal of enforcing a political will to bend and break them into being “just like us.”

How a word is ‘activated’ will eventually determine its viability and half-life. The Chinese word for climigration is shengtai yimin, literally “ecological migration.” It’s the policy to “save the grasslands.”
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Related links from The People’s Daily:

470,000 Tibetan herds people in Sichuan to move into brick houses
Nomadic people in Qinghai to settle within five years
Nomadic Tibetans in NW China’s Gansu to settle into permanent homes

On March 10, 2008  the following article appeared in the China Daily: Five-star Beijing-Tibet train to run after Games.

Luxury passenger train service from Beijing to the southwestern Tibet Autonomous Region will be launched on Sept. 1 [2008].

The tickets were gaggingly expensive – $5600 USD per person – and the projected departure schedule was brisk, to say the least – three trains leaving Beijing every 8 days, beginning on September 1, 2008.  On August 21, 2008, nearly two weeks into the Olympics, the AFP reported that

… an official at the Qinghai Tibet Railway Company, who also asked to remain anonymous, told AFP Thursday there was no timetable yet for the train’s maiden voyage.

With a schedule like that and the cost of the tickets, someone was dreaming monster dreams. For a variety of reasons, no train of this stripe has ever left the post-Olympic station. I have continued wondering about this train touted as the “world most luxurious” for some time now. By chance, while reading through a Danwei feed recently, an ad popped up for the New Oriental Express, leaving Beijing on March 30, 2009 (the tour begins on March 27, but the first three days are all-Beijing: Peking duck, King Wing Hot Spring International Hotel, and a dizzying whirl through traffic to the normal tourist venues, including the colossally empty Olympic venues.)

I had mistakenly assumed that this was the same ride as the one hailed as the “five-star train … decorated according to the standards of a five-star hotel,” the one that was scheduled prior to last year’s troubles in Lhasa. But this new train, leaving in just three weeks is not that train. This one is much less expensive and not nearly as luxurious. The train accommodations are normal soft sleeper – four people to a berthing compartment – and instead of the 40,000 RMB price tag on the 5-star ride, this one is only 25,500 RMB, with most nights, with the exception of four or five, being spent in hotels along the way.

But still I pressed on. There is a ban on foreigners in much of Qinghai and Xizang through the end of March, I was told. Yes, I knew that, but the train was not scheduled to leave Xining until April 4, heading into the heart of the Tibetan cultural region after the March ban. Still, there was a problem; the travel company could not guarantee that, as a foreigner, I would be able to get the necessary travel permits to be a part of this tour in April either, since travel permits in April are still questionable, no matter how much I wanted to experience what it is like to travel in the style “normally reserved for celebrities and government officials.”

So, it looks as if the New Oriental Express will be very oriental. Or, more specifically, totally Chinese, since the travel company cannot guarantee that they will be able to get permits for anyone with a foreign passport. Oh, well, I guess I’ll just have to wait. It will give me more time to stumble upon that bag full of money I’d need to purchase a ticket w/permits. I’m betting I probably won’t get to go. Sigh.

But a side-thought to all of this has to do with the reported investors of the original, most expensive train in the world, the one that never left the station and, as best I can tell, has not set the date for their maiden voyage. Last year it was reported to have been backed by Hong Kong’s Wing On Travel (Holdings) Limited to the tune of US $52.9 million. That’s a chunk of change. I wonder what the status of that bag full of money is? If I stumble upon that I might really see what life is like for the celebrities and officials. My nose is to the ground.