Perversities of Extreme Dependence and Unequal Growth in the TAR

This first in a series of independent analyses by Andrew Martin Fischer, commissioned by Tibet Watch, a research-based organisation established in London in 2006, examines the rapid growth that has been generated in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) through the extremely heavy government spending and investment strategies of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). His analysis, based on official government statistics and supplemented with observations from the ground, reveals that the majority of Tibetans are increasingly marginalised from rapid growth. This is due to extreme and inefficient dependence on government sources of finance from outside the province (mostly from Beijing), together with the fact that such finance continues to be targeted at urban areas and sectors where Tibetans have the hardest time competing with Chinese migrants. Instead, the opportunities created largely advantage workers and entrepreneurs with Chinesefluency, Chinese work cultures, and connections to government or business networks in China. This combination in turn exacerbates inequality and the exclusionary dynamics of growth, given that the majority of Tibetans have more and more difficulty accessing the state or private networks that control the dominant sources of wealth in the economy. Therefore, the most urgent problem within these developments is what the author calls ‘ethnically exclusionary growth’.