By Scott Ezell
January 28, 2023

The eastern Tibetan plateau, once largely untouched by industrial development, has been overtaken by dams, mining, and security forces.

In 2004, I traveled a thousand miles in the eastern Tibetan plateau by local bus, hitchhiking, and finally on a second-hand motorcycle, which I rode over 17,000-foot passes so remote I felt like the last man on earth.

While Chinese “modernization” projects focused on the TAR, other ethnically Tibetan areas remained a raw, wild region of vast plains, golden barley fields beneath incomprehensibly blue skies, nomadic yak herders, and fortress-like Tibetan houses perched on mountain ridges.

But over the next 15 years, as I returned to to the eastern Tibetan plateau I saw destructive dam and mining projects multiply exponentially, displacing autonomous Tibetan communities into resettlement zones. Armored vehicles appeared in towns, and platoons of People’s Liberation Army soldiers patrolled Buddhist temples with assault rifles

Pristine natural landscapes were transformed into construction zones crowded with lorries, backhoes, and gravel crushers, and the high thin air of the roof of the world became heavy with dust and diesel exhaust. Traditional villages were expanded into small cities as thousands of displaced Tibetans were relocated from their earthen homes and ancestral grazing lands to live in pre-fab concrete shells.

By 2019, everything had changed when I returned to document the completed dams and their effects on local communities and ecosystems. I drove a rented motorcycle up and down the river for three days, photographing these geometric leviathans looming hundreds of feet above the landscape, like aliens from a robot world. Mountains had been raked apart for stone to crush into gravel.

But in 2019, Cizong had been turned into a resettlement zone where thousands of displaced Tibetans were concentrated in a ghetto of barracks-like buildings, hundreds of feet long and divided into apartments. The grape fields were gone, paved over, and built upon. There was no land for the new residents to plant gardens or keep animals, just a dense grid of buildings divided by narrow lanes piled with rubble.

When I returned to Weideng, the town where I’d rented the motorcycle, a SWAT team was waiting for me. I was questioned in the police precinct, but since I was shooting with a film camera they couldn’t see that I’d been trying to capture the destructiveness of the industrial projects metastasizing around us. The police expelled me from the area “for my own safety,” claiming that this was a dangerous area full of alcoholic minority people who were prone to aggression against outsiders.

These anecdotes of personal experience are part of a broad pattern of the Chinese state imposing ethnic, cultural, and economic hegemony on Tibet and other minority areas. These policies continue today, and Tibetan writers, activists, and monks, as well as ordinary citizens remain at risk of being imprisoned, tortured, and killed, within a national context of black jails.

China’s policies in Tibet take place within a larger global system predicated on exploiting the cheapest sources of labor and materials, without taking into account the costs or consequences of disenfranchising Indigenous peoples and ravaging their lands. Because every major state and corporate entity today is based on this system of exploitation, top-down approaches to ecological or humanitarian issues are often ineffective, if not outright boondoggles, maintaining the status quo they purport to address.

As one of the more publicized Indigenous territories under threat in the world, Tibet serves as a conspicuous example of the effects of state violence against a living set of human and natural relationships.

full.https://thediplomat.com/2023/01/nomads- ... n-plateau/