A key feature of the WDS has been the confiscation of agricultural and pastoral lands and the forced relocation of nomads to make way for mining and infrastructure projects.

The numbers of nomads being forcibly relocated away from their ancestral lands are vast: according to official Chinese media reports for just the “Three River Areas” in Qinghai province, 28,000 people (6,156 households) have been forcibly resettled since the “ecological migration policies” were launched in 2003. In 2004 the government announced it planned to move a further 43,600 out of the same area. And last year an announcement in August that 73,700 nomads were to be relocated from Gannan prefecture in the TAR in to permanent brick houses was followed by an announcement in the autumn that 470,000 nomads were going to be moved off their lands in Sichuan province, again into permanent homes. In total, official state media has announced the resettlement, or intention to resettle, some 900,000 nomads. That huge figure represents over 15% of the total Tibetan population being forced from their ancestral lands in a stroke.

Nomadic Pastoralism: a highly evolved, sustainable culture

For more than 4000 years nomads have grazed herds of yaks and mountain sheep over the vast grasslands of Tibet.

The herds are intrinsically tied up with both the identity of the nomads and their very survival in the harsh, high-altitude environment of the Tibetan Plateau: the animals provide not only meat and milk, but their skins are dried and used to insulate tents.

Dung is also dried and used to heat the tents and provide fuel for cooking. And wool and fur from the animals are used to clothe the nomads.

 

The nomads have forged an intuitive understanding of how to best utilise their herds and to live in harmony with the dizzyingly high-altitude environment. In the short summer months they move their herds over vast distances, grazing their yaks on rich grasslands; and in the long winter months they travel similarly long distances to sell their animals in market to raise money for medicine and to pay for their children’s education. The nomads have long recognised that it is only by practising seasonal migration through traditionally unfenced grassland areas that habitation of the Plateau could be made sustainable, with fragile soils being allowed to recover from one year to the next.

But after more than 4000 years of sensitive stewardship of the fragile, high-altitude environment of the Tibetan Plateau, the nomads’ unique culture is being threatened with destruction as increasingly rapacious Chinese policies seek to drive the nomads from their homelands for political and economic reasons.