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Journal of theInternational Association

of Tibetan Studies

Issue 4 — December 2008

ISSN 1550-6363

An online journal published by the Tibetan and Himalayan Library (THL)

www.jiats.org

http://www.jiats.org

Editors-in-Chief: José I. Cabezón and David GermanoGuest Editors: Ken Bauer, Geoff Childs, Andrew Fischer, and Daniel Winkler

Book Review Editor: Bryan J. CuevasManaging Editor: Steven Weinberger

Assistant Editors: Alison Melnick, William McGrath, and Arnoud SekreveTechnical Director: Nathaniel Grove

Contents

Articles

• Demographics, Development, and the Environment in Tibetan Areas (8 pages)– Kenneth Bauer and Geoff Childs

• Tibetan Fertility Transitions: Comparisons with Europe, China, and India (21 pages)– Geoff Childs

• Conflict between Nomadic Herders and Brown Bears in the Byang thang Regionof Tibet (42 pages)

– Dawa Tsering and John D. Farrington

• Subsistence and Rural Livelihood Strategies in Tibet under Rapid Economic andSocial Transition (49 pages)

– Andrew M. Fischer

• Biodiversity Conservation and Pastoralism on the Northwest Tibetan Plateau (Byangthang): Coexistence or Conflict? (21 pages)

– Joseph L. Fox, Ciren Yangzong, Kelsang Dhondup, Tsechoe Dorji and CamilleRichard

• Nomads without Pastures? Globalization, Regionalization, and Livelihood Securityof Nomads and Former Nomads in Northern Khams (40 pages)

– Andreas Gruschke

• Political Space and Socio-Economic Organization in the Lower Spiti Valley (EarlyNineteenth to Late Twentieth Century) (34 pages)

– Christian Jahoda

• South Indian Tibetans: Development Dynamics in the Early Stages of the TibetanRefugee Settlement Lugs zung bsam grub gling, Bylakuppe (31 pages)

– Jan Magnusson, Subramanya Nagarajarao and Geoff Childs

• Temporary Migrants in Lha sa in 2005 (42 pages)– Ma Rong and Tanzen Lhundup

• Exclusiveness and Openness: A Study of Matrimonial Strategies in the Dga’ ldanpho brang Aristocracy (1880-1959) (27 pages)

– Alice Travers

ii

• The Mushrooming Fungi Market in Tibet Exemplified by Cordyceps sinensis andTricholoma matsutake (47 pages)

– Daniel Winkler

• Interpreting Urbanization in Tibet: Administrative Scales and Discourses ofModernization (44 pages)

– Emily T. Yeh and Mark Henderson

Text Translation, Critical Edition, and Analysis

• The Sweet Sage and The Four Yogas: A Lost Mahāyoga Treatise fromDunhuang (67 pages)

– Sam van Schaik

A Note from the Field

• Population, Pasture Pressure, and School Education: Case Studies from Nag chu,TAR, PRC (21 pages)

– Beimatsho

Book Reviews

• Review of A History of Modern Tibet, Volume 2: The Calm before the Storm,1951-55, by Melvyn C. Goldstein (10 pages)

– Matthew Akester

• Review of Rulers on the Celestial Plain: Ecclesiastic and Secular Hegemony inMedieval Tibet. A Study of Tshal Gung-thang, by Per K. Sørensen and GuntramHazod, with Tsering Gyalbo (7 pages)

– Bryan J. Cuevas

Abstracts

Contributors to this Issue

iii

Interpreting Urbanization in Tibet:-

Administrative Scales and Discourses of Modernization1

Emily T. YehUniversity of Colorado at Boulder

Mark HendersonMills College

Abstract: Urbanization in Tibet is contentious but poorly understood. Wereexamine data on urban growth in Lha sa in light of ongoing conversations aboutthe urban scale in China. Historically, a city/countryside dichotomy was not akey mode of organizing Tibetan conceptual and material landscapes. Thusurbanization is not just a technical matter of increased density of buildings andpeople, but also the imposition of a new grid of legibility and ordering of space.With the valorization of urban status as a measure of development, rural townshipshave been promoted to the administrative rank of urban towns, their populationsand land areas boosting Lha sa’s urban totals by 30 percent in 2000. Meanwhile,Han in-migrants have concentrated in the city center, dominating urbanoccupations. Though Lha sa remains small compared with other provincial-levelcapitals, the extreme concentration of urban population in this one Tibetan citycorroborates other evidence of uneven development. Emerging patterns ofsocio-spatial life in Lha sa suggest a process of deterritorialization andreterritorialization toward a westward-expanding Han China.

IntroductionUrbanization in Tibet is a contentious issue, but one that is poorly understood. Onthe one hand, Chinese government officials suggest that “the only way out forTibet [i.e., the only way out of its current impoverished condition] is urbanization,”and that urbanization will dramatically improve quality of life. Some scholars

1 We thank two anonymous reviewers of this journal, as well as Geoff Childs, for their comments,and G. William Skinner, UC Davis and Shuming Bao, China Data Center for assistance with censusdata.

Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 4 (December 2008): 1-44.http://www.thlib.org?tid=T5563.1550-6363/2008/4/T5563.© 2008 by Emily T. Yeh, Mark Henderson, Tibetan and Himalayan Library, and International Association of TibetanStudies.Distributed under the THL Digital Text License.

http://www.thlib.org?tid=T5563

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recommend that urbanization in Tibet be accelerated both as a tool for economicdevelopment that will close the gap between Tibet and the prosperous easternregions, and because it is in fact “the inevitable outcome of the world economicdevelopment, and an unavoidable stage.”2 As Xu Mingyang, then-deputy Partysecretary and vice-chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR)3 put it,“Urbanization, or building cities, is a global trend, and the regional governmentviews it as an effective way to develop its economy and to narrow its gap with theprosperous coastal areas.”4He announced that from 2000 to 2010, the TAR wouldaim to raise its urbanization rate from 9.8 to 22 percent. Publicity surrounding theurbanization drive has focused on the expansion of the TAR’s capital city, Lha sa,on the establishment of other urban centers, and on the construction of a systemof small towns.5

Others, however, do not share this enthusiasm for urbanization in Tibet. “China’spolicies geared towards increasing the urbanization of Tibet, its ongoing railwayconstruction linking Lha sa to the major cities in China...are clear evidence thatChina treats the development of Tibet as a means to increase its control of Tibetand to exploit its vast resources,” according to Prime Minister of the Tibetangovernment-in-exile Samdhong Rinpoche (Zam gtong rin po che).6 The basicproblem with Chinese government investment in urbanization, according to thesearguments, is not with the urban form itself but rather with the fact that urbanizationis essentially a process of “developing cities to encourage Chinese migrants frominner China to settle in Tibet.”7

Both urbanization and in-migration to the city of Lha sa have accelerated since1980, when the population was reported to be 110,000. A city planning documentfrom that year envisioned a population of two hundred thousand by 2000, with anurban area of forty-two square kilometers.8 In fact those figures were exceeded,according to Lha sa vice-mayor Li Changan: the municipal population reached470,000 (230,000 in urban areas, excluding temporary migrants) and the area ofthe city was said to be fifty-three square kilometers at the turn of the millennium.9

2 Li Tao, “Tibetan Rural Urbanization and the Desakota Model,” Perspectives 6, no. 1 (2005): 18.3 In this paper, for convenience, we use “Tibet” interchangeably with the “Tibet Autonomous Region”

(TAR).4 Anonymous, “Tibet to Build Over 100 Towns to Accelerate Urbanization,” Xinhua News Agency,

April 21, 2000.5 “Upgrading the Urbanization Level of Tibet,” China Internet Information Centre, 2002; Anonymous,

“China’s Western Development Includes Tibet Urbanization,” Xinhua News Agency, April 28, 2000.6 Anonymous, “Chinese Authorities Raze Homes in Historic Center of Lhasa,” Agence France Presse,

May 3, 2002.7 Lobsang Sangay, “China in Tibet: Forty Years of Liberation or Occupation?” Harvard Asia

Quarterly, Summer, 1999.8 Scott Leckie, “Social Engineering, Occupying Powers and Evictions: The Case of Lhasa, Tibet,”

Environment and Urbanization 6, no. 1 (1994); Tibet Information Network, “LhasaMunicipal PlanningMaps” (originally published on Tibet Information Network, http://www.tibetinfo.org/reports/lhasamaps,2001, accessed February 18, 2003; site now discontinued, article currently unavailable).9 China Internet Information Centre, “Future Urban Development in Lhasa,” June 4, 2001.

2Yeh & Henderson: Interpreting Urbanization in Tibet

http://www.tibetinfo.org/reports/lhasamaps

Further plans announced in 2001 called for increasing Lha sa’s area to seventysquare kilometers by 2005 and 272 square kilometers by 2015.10 A 2002 reportstated that “in line with a national program to foster rapid urbanization…the TibetAutonomous Region plans to establish four urban centers…the urban populationof Tibet will reach 780,000 from the present 440,000 by the year 2010.”11 Specificinitiatives for the expansion of Lha sa include a 12.5-square-kilometer industrialdevelopment zone and a suburb around the terminus of the new Qinghai-Tibetrailroad, the first to link the TAR to any other province in China. Officials are saidto have expected the population of Lha sa to double when regular train servicebegan.12 With the much-trumpeted opening of the railway on July 1, 2006, claimsand counter-claims about urbanization and migration have become even moreheated.

However, official plans for urbanization had already caused considerable alarmlong before the completion of the railroad. A 2001 report about the railroad by theTibetan government-in-exile states:

The “TAR” authorities already predict expansion of Lhasa City from the current53 sq km to 272 sq km in the next 15 years. This indicates Beijing’s plan to relocatea large number of forced immigrants from China. China currently has 150 millionsurplus rural laborers, of which 11.34million are in Sichuan Province, neighboringTibet.13

Although the number of Han Chinese migrants into the Tibet AutonomousRegion is indeed significant and likely to grow, there is little evidence to date of“forced” migration or involuntary resettlement; rather, since the late 1980s, Hanfarmers have moved to the TAR because of surplus labor and a relative lack ofincome opportunities at home. In the TAR they profit from their structuraladvantages over local Tibetan residents, such as Chinese language skills, higherlevels of education, and access to market networks.14 Beyond the question ofmigration, however, the figures for planned urban area, growth rates, and urbanpopulation (Table 1) must also be carefully examined, especially because they arenow so frequently cited in debates about the future social, cultural, and economictrajectory of Tibet.15

10 China Internet Information Centre, “Future Urban Development,” 2001.11 China Internet Information Centre, “Upgrading the Urbanization Level of Tibet,” 2002.12 Robert Barnett, Lhasa: Streets with Memories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006),

xxix.13 Environment and Development Desk, “China’s Railway Project: Where Will it Take Tibet?”

(Dharamsala: Central Tibetan Administration, 2001).14 Andrew Fischer, State Growth and Social Exclusion in Tibet: Challenges of Recent Economic

Growth (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2005); Emily T. Yeh, “Taming the Tibetan Landscape: ChineseDevelopment and the Transformation of Agriculture” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley,2003).15 See for example: International Campaign for Tibet, Crossing the Line: China’s Railway to Lhasa,

Tibet (Washington, D.C., n.d.).

3Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 4 (December 2008)

Urbanization is central not only to the arguments of politicians and activists,but also in recent academic work about development in Tibet. Scholars writingfrom a broad spectrum of positions agree that current development patterns in theTAR are characterized by urban bias. The ratio of urban to rural incomes in theTAR is the highest of any provincial-level unit in the PRC, and has been increasingsharply since the mid-1990s.16 Salaries for cadres have been raised significantlysince the early 1990s; as Robert Barnett17 remarks about the creation of a newTibetan middle class, “some smart planner in the Party worked out that wealthypeople don’t take part in demonstrations and tripled all the salaries.” Because statejobs account for such a large proportion of urban workers – in 2001 about 88percent of average TAR urban incomes came from the income of workers instate-owned units18 – this has meant a significant growth of urban salary levels ingeneral. In 2003, average urban salary in the TAR was the second highest in thecountry, and almost twice the national average. At the same time, the real purchasingpower of the average rural income in the TAR was lower in 2001 than in the early1990s.19Using per capita consumption rather than per capita income would conveyan even larger difference in living standards between urban and rural Tibet.20

Scholars interpret these disparities in different ways. Sautman and Eng21 statethat, “an extreme form of ‘urban bias’ skews development in Tibet, stratifyingsociety across the ethnic divide and disparately benefiting the Han populationmainly because it is urban.” However, they argue that development “is neither for‘the Chinese’ nor for ‘the Tibetans’” as urban development benefits both the Hanand the new Tibetan middle class.22 Thus, charges that development benefits onlythe state or the Han are, they conclude, unfounded. Andrew Fischer also notes theimportance of the urban-rural divide, but highlights the fact that there is also a verypoor, urban, Tibetan underclass. He argues that development does not adequatelybenefit Tibetans, and that a “much more proactive, affirmative, and preferentialpolicy” is needed in light of Tibetans’ “inevitable urbanization.”23

While carefully unpacking statistics about populations and income, anddisagreeing about the underlying intent of state urban development policies, analysesto date have not, for the most part, carefully analyzed official pronouncements andstatistics about urbanization. For example, Sautman and Eng wrote in 2001 that,“development in Tibet during the period 2001-2005 will add 200,000 positions tourban employment. While some positions will go to urban Tibetans and some to

16 Fischer, State Growth and Social Exclusion in Tibet, 118.17 Barnett, Lhasa, 116.18 Fischer, State Growth and Social Exclusion in Tibet, 113.19 Fischer, State Growth and Social Exclusion in Tibet, 90.20 Barry Sautman and Irene Eng, “Tibet: Development for Whom?,” China Information 15, no. 2

(2001): 38.21 Sautman and Eng, “Tibet: Development for Whom?,” 21.22 Sautman and Eng, “Tibet: Development for Whom?,” 24, 72.23 Fischer, State Growth and Social Exclusion in Tibet, 155, 159.


non-Tibetan migrants, about 60,000 people will be attracted from the TARcountryside.”24 Thus, they suggest, current urbanization trends will bring benefitsto Tibetans. Fischer, on the other hand, argues specifically for a Tibetanization ofdevelopment policy, but also states that, “the Chinese government has not beencausing an urbanisation that would not otherwise have taken place.”25

The contentiousness of urbanization in the TAR necessitates that officialpronouncements be subject to the same scrutiny as figures about income andmigration. The striking and growing urban-rural gap noted by economists andpolitical scientists also suggests the need for a more explicit examination of “theurban” as a scalar category of administration as well as of how it is experienced.In this article, we re-evaluate pronouncements about Tibet’s urbanization, whichhave been deployed by government officials, scholars, and activists, using historicalmaps, satellite imagery, and census data. We argue that these statistics must bothbe analyzed in their own right as well as in relation to the cultural politics of theurban. This entails an examination of urbanization not just as a technical projectof increasing the density and number of buildings and people, but also as a projectthat refigures and reconsolidates bureaucratic power while inscribing teleologicalassumptions of development.

Through this analysis, we seek not only to develop a clearer understanding ofthe process of urbanization in the TAR, but also to place Lha sa within ongoingconversations about the urban scale in the PRC, a move we see as necessary forfurthering analyses of the socio-spatial characteristics of life in contemporary Tibet.Geographers in particular have attended to urban restructuring and scale relationsin China, arguing that the analytical prisms of scale and administrative level areas important to understanding China’s urban and regional development as theperspectives of decentralization, marketization, and globalization.26However, workto date has focused on the major cities of eastern China.27 Here, by bringingquestions of scale and administrative hierarchy to bear on Lha sa’s urbanization,we add a perspective not often found in Tibetan Studies; at the same time, the

24 Sautman and Eng, “Tibet: Development for Whom?,” 52.25 Fischer, State Growth and Social Exclusion in Tibet, 5.26 Laurence J. C. Ma, “Urban Administrative Restructuring, Changing Scale Relations and Local

Economic Development in China,” Political Geography 24 (2005), 495.27 Carolyn Cartier, “Transnational Urbanism in the Reform-era Chinese City Landscapes from

Shenzhen,” Urban Studies 39, no. 9 (2002); Carolyn Cartier, “Symbolic City/Regions and GenderedIdentity Formation in South China,” Provincial China 8, no. 1 (2003); Carolyn Cartier, “City-space:Scale Relations and China’s Spatial Administrative Hierarchy,” in Restructuring the Chinese City:Changing Society, Economy and Space, ed. Laurence J. C. Ma and Fulong Wu (London: Routledge,2005), 21-38; Jae Ho Chung and Tao-chiu Lam, “China’s ‘City System’ in Flux: Explaining Post-MaoAdministrative Changes,” The China Quarterly 180 (2004); George Lin, “Changing Discourse in ChinaGeography: A Narrative Evaluation,” Environment and Planning A 34, no. 10 (2002); Laurence J. C.Ma, “Urban Transformation in China, 1949-2000: A Review and Research Agenda,” Environment andPlanning A 34 (2002); Ma, “Urban Administrative Restructuring, Changing Scale Relations and LocalEconomic Development in China”; Clifton W. Pannell, China’s Continuing Urban Transition,”Environment and Planning 34 (2002); Jianfa Shen, “Space, Scale, and the State: Reorganizing UrbanSpace in China,” inRestructuring the Chinese City: Changing Society, Economy and Space, ed. LaurenceJ. C. Ma and Fulong Wu (New York: Routledge, 2005), 39-58.


discussion of the township/town scale and the examination of urbanization in theTAR as a politically sensitive, ethnic minority region of the west, also add to theongoing discussion in geography about cities in China.

Table 1. Official Statistics and Plans for Lha sa28

Urban AreaPopulationYear

3 km²30,0001950

25 km²110,0001980

42 km²200,0002000 (as planned, 1980)

53 km²Prefectural: 470,000-

Urban: 230,0002000 (reported)

70 km²Urban: 300,0002005 (as planned, 2000)

272 km²–2015 (as planned, 2000)

A summary of official claims and plans about Lha sa’s population and urban area over time.

Cultural Histories of the UrbanSince 1980, the Chinese government has increasingly staked its claim to legitimacyin Tibet on its efforts to promote economic development there. The means andmethods of urban development being applied to Lha sa are largely modeled onthose applied in the predominantly Han provinces of “China Proper” (neidi). Tounderstand the full implications of urbanization, then, we need to consider the roleof “the city” in both Chinese and Tibetan cultural history before turning tourbanization under the PRC.

Lha sa is said to have been founded by King Srong btsan sgam po, thirty-thirdin a divine lineage, who unified Tibet and moved his capital to Lha sa in the seventhcentury. In the initial years after the construction of the Jo khang Temple, theimportance of the building of which was recognized by Princess Wencheng, theappellation “Lha sa” appears to have referred only to the Jo khang Temple itself;moreover, during the time between King Srong btsan sgam po’s reign and the fallof the monarchy in the mid-ninth century, Lha sa does not appear to have been theseat of government.29 The Jo khang and Rwa mo che Temples made Lha sa animportant pilgrimage site, but only after the Fifth Dalai Lama (tā la’i bla ma) roseto power as sovereign of Tibet in 1642 did Lha sa become a true seat of governmentadministration and a political center.30

28 Sources: All China Marketing Research Co., Zhongguo 2000 Xianji Renkou Pucha Ziliao (AnnArbor, MI: University of Michigan China Data Center, 2003); Tibet Autonomous Region Bureau ofStatistics, Xizang Tongji Nianjian 2004 (Beijing: Zhongguo Tongji Chubanshe, 2004).29 Anne-Marie Blondeau and Yonten Gyatso, “Lhasa, Legend and History,” in Lhasa in the

Seventeenth Century: The Capital of the Dalai Lamas, ed. Francoise Pommaret (Boston: Brill, 2003),15-38.30 Blondeau and Gyatso, “Lhasa, Legend and History.”


Detailed information about the lay population of Lha sa up until the twentiethcentury is scarce. We do know, though, that while the number of temples andmonasteries in Lha sa increased over time, neither its population nor physical extentgrew considerably. Indeed in 1904, British members of the invading Younghusbandexpedition estimated a population of thirty thousand, including twenty thousandmonks.31 Estimates of Lha sa’s population in 1950 are also usually placed at aroundthirty thousand, although others suggest that the total population was fifty to sixtythousand, including twenty thousand lay residents and thirty to forty thousandmonks.32 At that time the city was delimited primarily by three nested circuits forritual circumambulation: one inside the Jo khang (nang skor), the Bar skor, andthe 7.5-kilometer outer path encircling the old city and the Po ta la Palace (glingskor).33 Lha sa consisted primarily of the densely-packed clusters of alleyways andside streets branching off from the Bar skor path, only three square kilometers inarea. The Po ta la Palace and the village of Zhol below it were considered separatefrom the city. Despite its miniscule size in comparison with other cities of the day,Lha sa was the largest and basically the only urban lay settlement in the Tibetancultural world. Its residents’ views of its expansiveness are suggested by the saying:“Lha sa is already large, and in addition to that is Rwa mo che.”34 This sayingsuggests that Lha sa, however defined, was large by traditional Tibetan standards.

Although market towns existed along trade routes, the urban sector constitutedan extraordinarily small portion of the Tibetan population, and no other settlementapproached Lha sa’s population by the middle of the twentieth century. Li Taostates for example that before the 1950s, “there were only several town-scaledsettling [sic] centers such as Lha sa, Rikaze, Chengdu, Zedang, Yadong, Pali, Naqu,and Sajia. The biggest of them, Lha sa, had a population of only 30,000 and wasless than 3 square kilometers. Rikaze had a population of 9,000. The populationof the other towns ranged from 1,000 to 4,000.”35

In addition to noting the small population and physical extent of these varioussettlements, however, we also call attention to the urban as a category of thought,and to the discursively significant epistemological question of whether the residentsof those settlements considered themselves to be living in a “town” or “city.” TheTibetan term commonly translated as “city” today, grong khyer, is old and has along history of use. However, it was used primarily in the abstract and fortranslations of Sanskrit texts; it is classically defined with a rather Christallerian

31 Blondeau and Gyatso, “Lhasa, Legend and History,” 26.32 Knud Larsen and Amund Sinding-Larsen, The Lhasa Atlas: Traditional Tibetan Architecture and

Townscape (Boston: Shambala, 2001); Ma Rong, “Han and Tibetan Residential Patterns in Lhasa,”The China Quarterly 128 (1991), 814-36; Liu Rui, ed., Zhongguo Renkou: Xizang Fen Ce [China’sPopulation: Tibet Volume] (Beijing: Zhongguo Caizheng Jingji Chubanshe, 1988).33 André Alexander, John Harrison, and Pimpim de Azevedo, eds., Lhasa Old City, Vol II: A Clear

Lamp Illuminating the Significance and Origin of Historical Buildings andMonuments in Lhasa BarkorStreet (Berlin: Tibet Heritage Fund, 1999).34 lha sa rgya che ba’i sgang la ra mo che snon ’bel rgyab/.35 Li Tao, “Tibetan Rural Urbanization and the Desakota Model,” 18-19.


logic36 as a place with “all of the eighteen crafts such as blacksmithing.”37 It doesnot, however, appear to have been used regularly as a designator of Lha sa or otheractual Tibetan settlements; the appellation Lha sa grong khyer is associated morestrongly with the PRC administrative category of Lha sa Municipality (Shi) thanwith historical Lha sa as a pilgrimage site or cultural, religious, and political center.

Indeed, in Dung dkar rin po che’s comprehensive encyclopedia of places andnames in Tibetan cultural history, the term grong khyer appears in a number ofentries, but none refer to places in Tibet. Instead, he discusses grong khyer khokhom, one of “three capitals” in Nepal; grong khyer na la da, the birthplace of oneof the Śākyamuni Buddha’s main disciples, ’Phags pa shā ri’i bu; grong khyergnas bcas, the city of Ayodhya; grong khyer pa ṭha na, the city of Patna in India;and so on.38 Neither grong khyer lha sa nor lha sa grong khyer appear as entries,and the entry on “Lha sa” does not highlight its status as an urban populationcenter.39

Tibetan has a number of terms that share the root grong, all of which indicatea place of settlement. Some terms can be used to refer to both city and country.For example, grong khul can be translated as either “village area” or “urban area,”grong skor is “going around a town or village,” grong khyim is either “a householdin the city” or “a household in the village,” grong sne is “the edge of atown/city/village,” and even grong tsho, the usual word for village, can refer toboth village and town.40 The malleability of the term grong khyer as “settlement”rather than specifically “densely populated and large settlement,” can also be seenin texts such as The Mirror Illuminating the Royal Genealogies (Rgyal rabs gsalba’i me long), in which the bodhisattva-ape pleas to Avalokiteśvara wonderinghow he will feed his offspring, saying, da lta yi dags grong khyer lta bur ’dug,41literally, “Now [the country of Tibet] resembles a town[/city] of hungry ghosts.”42It is clear that grong khyer refers here not to an actual city but to a more generalrealm. More generally, the fluidity of the various grong–terms reflects aconceptualization of a spectrum of settlement sizes and population rather than a

36 German geographer Walter Christaller was the originator of central place theory, which rankssettlements in a hierarchy by the type and number of services they provide to their surroundinghinterlands.37 Zhang Yisun, ed., Bod rgya tshig mdzod chen mo (Beijing: Mi rigs par khang, 2003), 411.38 Dung dkar blo bzang ’phrin las, Dung dkar tshig mdzod chen mo (Beijing: Krung go’i bod rig pa

dpe skrun khang, 2002), 573.39 Dung dkar blo bzang ’phrin las, Dung dkar tshig mdzod chen mo, 2167-68.40 Melvyn Goldstein, T. N. Shelling, and J. T. Surkhang, eds., The New Tibetan-English Dictionary

of Modern Tibetan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 205.41 Sa skya bla ma dam pa bsod nams rgyal mtshan, Rgyal rabs gsal ba’i me long: A History of Tibet

During the Period of the Royal Lha Dynasty (Dolanji, Himachal Pradesh: Tibetan Bonpo MonasticCentre, 1973), 114.42 Per K. Sørensen, The Mirror Illuminating the Royal Genealogies: An Annotated Translation of

the XIVth Century Tibetan Chronicle: “rGyal rabs gsal ba’i me long” (Wiesbaden: HarrassowitzVerlag, 1994), 131. According to a popular Tibetan legend, which first appeared in post-tenth-centuryBuddhist works, Tibetans are descended from the union of an ape and an ogress, who are often said tobe emanations of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara and the goddess Tārā, respectively.


strictly binary opposition between the rural and the urban, or between the city andthe countryside.43

This spectrum contrasts significantly with English, where “country” and “city”have distinct etymologies and meanings. “City” is derived from civitas, orcommunity, in turn derived from civis, citizen, in the sense of a national. “Country”on the other hand, came from contra, and had the original sense of “land spreadout over against the observer.”44 The widespread use of “country” as opposed to“city” began in the sixteenth century, when the latter was regularly used to referto London; over time “city” began to imply not only a distinctive order of settlementbut also a whole different way of life.45 Opposing sets of meanings were mappedonto country and city, with country associated with a “natural” way of life, ofpeace, innocence and purity, but also of backwardness, ignorance and limitation.The city, by contrast, became associated with learning and communication; it wasalso a place of noise, ambition, worldliness and corruption, and of adulthood andthe future. In the English literary tradition, “people have often said ‘the city’ whenthey meant capitalism or bureaucracy or centralized power, while ‘the country,’as we have seen, has at timesmeant everything from independence to deprivation.”46In this tradition, then, the dichotomous categories of city and country each workto imply the absence of the qualities of the other. Each is the constitutive outsideof the other.

This mapping of opposing meanings onto city and country as fundamentallydifferent modes of life is quite different from Tibetan uses of the terms grongkhyer, grong rdal, and grong tsho, which do not (at least until after incorporationinto the PRC) appear to spatialize certain, often binary, moral qualities. In particular,grong khyer is used as a neutral descriptor of settlement, as in the Tibetan originstory in which “all the plains were transformed into fields, many towns werebuilt,”47 and does not come to stand in for qualities such as those of corruption,decay, civilization, or learning. Indeed, much of what is interpreted as “urban” insecondary descriptions of Tibetan history refers specifically to large monasteries.Gaubatz writes that aside from Lha sa and Gzhis ka rtse, the largest and densest“urban-like” settlements in Tibet were monasteries.48 Li writes that “religion playsan important role during the formation of Tibetan towns and cities, though its

43 It might be asked why grong is not contrasted here against pastoralist spaces. In fact grong canbe used to terms that refer to pastoralist places (’brog), as well as to farming areas (zhing). The difficultyin imagining a single term that captures the opposite of grong (a place with humans and dwellings) isprecisely the point here: that it is not a structuring dichotomy.44 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 307.45 RaymondWilliams,Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (NewYork: Oxford University

Press, 1976), 55-57.46 Williams, The Country and the City, 291.47 “de nas thang thams ced la zhing byas/ grong khyer mang po rtsigs,” Sa skya bla ma dam pa bsod

nams rgyal mtshan, Rgyal rabs gsal ba’i me long, 117; Sørensen, Mirror Illuminating the RoyalGenealogies, 133.48 Piper Gaubatz, Beyond the Great Wall: Urban Form and Transformation on the Chinese Frontiers

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 154.


influence differs in different historical eras…urbanization in Tibet has been uniquelyinfluenced by religion.”49 However, the strongest meanings in this dyad ofmonastery/city were attached to the monastery rather than the city. The qualitiesof learning and civilization, associated in English tradition with cities, were inTibet associated specifically with monasteries and other religious institutions -rather than with the urban as a particular social form. Lay/monastic was a far moreimportant categorization of social life and structure than village/city.50

Unique and different, of course, from both the English and Tibetan culturaltraditions, the Chinese historical conceptualization of city and country neverthelessresembles the former more in its dichotomous view of rural and urban. Thecontemporary term for “city” (chengshi) combines the characters for defensivewalls (cheng) and market (shi), two ubiquitous features of Han urban form, whilethe terms for village or countryside (cun, nong cun, xiang xia) are unrelated. Thecharacter for market, shi, also came to mean “city” beginning in the 1920s, and iswidely, but very loosely used today.51 Many have seen the city wall in imperialtimes as emblematic of sharp distinctions between “urban” and “rural,” as well asbetween “civilized” and “barbaric.” Chang52 stresses the importance of cities,arguing that “Chinese civilization was identified with the growth and spread ofwalled urban centers right up to the end of the imperial era. Walled cities…wereperhaps the major landmarks of traditional China.”53 Naughton54 argues that thatcompared to the West, China up through 1949 had only limited urbanization anda comparative lack of urban autonomy. Nevertheless, cities were administrativecenters for establishing imperial control, with each walled city “foremost a visiblemanifestation of imperial authority and power…each inextricably linked to otherwalled urban units higher and lower in the administrative hierarchy.”55

49 Li Tao, “Tibetan Rural Urbanization and the Desakota Model,” 20.50 While zhing/’brog is also a binary of sorts, it is not conceptually dichotomous in the same way as

city/country or lay/monastic both given the widespread existence of semi-nomadic farmers (sa ma’brog) as well as the relative weakness of a hierarchical mapping of qualities such as purity, respect,morality and civilization in zhing/’brog as compared to the lay versus the monastic.51 Ma, “Urban Administrative Restructuring, Changing Scale Relations and Local Economic

Development in China,” 482; John Fitzgerald, “The Province in History,” in Rethinking China’sProvinces, ed. John Fitzgerald (New York: Routledge, 2002), 26.52 Sen-Dou Chang, “The Morphology of Walled Capitals,” in The City in Late Imperial China, ed.

G. William Skinner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), 99.53 See also Ronald Knapp, China’s Walled Cities (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2000); and

the discussions in G. William Skinner’s edited volume The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1977), particularly chapters by Wright and Chang, as well as a dissentingview from Mote.54 Barry Naughton, “Cities in the Chinese Economic System: Changing Roles and Conditions in

Autonomy,” in Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Communityin Post-Mao China, ed. Deborah Davis, Richard Kraus, B. Barry Naughton, and Elizabeth Perry(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 61-89.55 Knapp, China’s Walled Cities, 7; also Gaubatz, Beyond the Great Wall.


As was the case in England, by late imperial China, cities were seen as centersof vice and corruption while rural life was seen to foster virtue.56 Chineseintellectuals in the early twentieth century debated urbanism, with some yearningfor a return to China’s past glory that they identified with a rural ideal – a themeechoed in the English literary tradition. Others welcomed Westernized cities assymbols of modernity and progress, or saw revitalizing urban-rural ties as the keyto modernization.57 Though quite different, these positions all accepted a conceptualurban-rural dichotomy.

This brief discussion of the presence of a city/country or rural/urban binary inimperial Chinese cultural history and its absence in Tibetan categories of thoughtand practice before PRC incorporation, suggests that urbanization in Tibet mustbe interpreted not only as a technical matter of construction and increased densityof people and buildings, but also as the laying down of a new grid of legibility andterritorial ordering of space. Insofar as subjects are seen as being produced by(rather than existing autonomously prior to) discourse, the creation of administrativescales of city and village together with the dichotomous moral ordering of thosescales, as discursive practices of the state, must also significantly shape the practiceand experience of everyday life, again beyond the merely technical aspects ofurbanization.

Valorizing the Urban Scale across ChinaThe debates that Chinese intellectuals were having at the turn of the twentiethcentury played out in a different form several decades later in the “two-line struggle”within the Mao-era Chinese Communist Party, with leaders such as Liu Shaoqiand Deng Xiaoping associated with a urban-led development strategy while MaoZedong, who saw cities as centers of corruption, espoused an anti-urban bias. Theanti-urbanization approach prevailed until economic reform. Throughout theMaoistperiod, state industrialization strategy was one of maintaining low prices foragricultural and mining products and high prices for manufactured goods, whichwere located almost exclusively in urban areas. Surplus from agricultural productionwas transferred to the manufacturing sector; the state in turn required industriesto hand over their profits, making cities economic resources, or “cash cows” to beexploited by the state.58 While the government was dependent on a fiscal systemreliant on industries located in cities, it also neglected urban infrastructure, leadingto physical and economic stagnation in cities. Furthermore, the imposition of thehousehold registration (hukou) system prevented any substantial rural-urbanmigration for more than three decades, dramatically slowing the rate of urbanization.Rural towns and villages were by and large not allowed to develop industries or

56 Arthur F. Wright, “The Cosmology of the Chinese City,” in The City in Late Imperial China, ed.G. William Skinner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), 33-74.57 Susan Mann, “Urbanization and Historical Change in China,”Modern China 10, no. 1 (1984).58 Naughton, “Cities in the Chinese Economic System.”


expand their built-up areas until the reform period was well underway.59 This keptthe level of urbanization across China below 20 percent before 1978.60

Only since after the beginning of economic reform has urbanization beenwholeheartedly embraced. Geographers have noted two strategies of urbanizationthat have emerged: state-planned growth of industrial cities through central planningand investment, sometimes called “urbanization from above”; and second,“urbanization from below,” “a spontaneous, self-generating, and town-basedurbanization.”61 The latter has been particularly accelerated since 2000, after whichpeasants who migrate to county-level cities have been allowed to acquire urbanhousehold status and enjoy the same benefits as local residents.62 Recent analyseshave also suggested that a “distinct dual-track pattern of urbanization,” acombination of urbanization from above and urbanization from below of thenumerous towns scattered across China, will become increasingly apparent asChina’s economic transformation continues.63

The general valorization of the urban scale, and the equation of cities withdevelopment and economic modernization, is an important feature of post-reformChina.64 This mapping of economic development onto the urban scale emerges outof the meeting of the socialist legacy in which “city = industry” and “village =agriculture” with the new economic imperatives of globalization.65 While thesocialist legacy remains important, new political-economic imperatives have alsoproduced an ideological shift in which cities “have emerged as the centers whereindustrial miracles and ‘actions’ occur, pointing towards a future utopia, departingfrom Mao’s ideological ambivalence, and are represented in the media as anembodiment of modernity.”66 As embodiments of progress and modernity, citiesare now privileged by the state through policies that promote city-led economicdevelopment and give preferential treatment to designated urban jurisdictions.Cities at higher administrative ranks (Figure 1) have greater decision-making

59 John Coulter and Paul Ivory, “The Rural-Urban Dichotomy in China: A Case Study of theMid-Yellow River Region Using Remote Sensing Data,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 7(1982), 37-53; Naughton, “Cities in the Chinese Economic System”;Mark Henderson, “Spatial Contextsof Urbanization and Land Conservation in China” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2004).60 Kam Wing Chan, Cities with Invisible Walls: Reinterpreting Urbanization in Post-1949 China

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Pannell, China’s Continuing Urban Transition.”61 Lin, “Changing Discourse in China Geography,” 1821; Laurence J. C. Ma and Lin Chuseng,

“Development of Towns in China: ACase Study of Guangdong Province,”Population andDevelopmentReview 19 (1993), 583-606; Walter Stöhr, “Development from Below: The Bottom-up andPeriphery-inward Development Paradigm” in Development from Above or Below? The Dialectics ofRegional Planning in Developing Countries, eds. Walter B. Stöhr and D. R. F. Taylor (New York:Wiley, 1981), 39-72.62 Ma, “Urban Transformation in China,” 1552.63 Lin, “Changing Discourse in China Geography,” 1821.64 Ma, “Urban Transformation in China”; Cartier, “Transnational Urbanism in the Reform-era Chinese

City”; Cartier, “Symbolic City/Regions and Gendered Identity Formation in South China.”65 Ma, “Urban Administrative Restructuring.”66 Uradyn Bulag, “FromYeke-juu League to OrdosMunicipality: Settler Colonialism andAlter/Native

Urbanization in Inner Mongolia,” Provincial China 7, no. 2 (2002), 62.


powers. Many cities have been given increased economic planning authority overtheir surrounding rural areas, and county-level cities can retain an extra 2 percentof tax revenues compared with ordinary or “rural” counties.67 Thus, administrativerank has become a “special type of scale,” a particular type of scale as level, orrank.68

Figure 1: Urban and Rural in the PRC Field Administration Hierarchy

This points to an important third form of urbanization in contemporary China.In addition to the two paths of “urbanization from above” and “urbanization frombelow,” discussed above, the valorization of the city has led to the scaling up ofthe administrative status of cities, counties, townships, and towns. Such

67 Shen, “Space, Scale, and the State,” 49-50.68 Ma, “Urban Administrative Restructuring,” 477.


“administrative urbanization” is one of the five dimensions identified by urbanplanning scholar John Friedmann,69 distinct from economic, physical, sociocultural,or political urbanization. The three most prevalent forms of urban spacereorganization in China recently have been, first, “abolishing county andestablishing city” (chexian sheshi, also known as “entire county becoming city”or “changing county to city”); second, designating “city-led counties” (shi daixian) in which adjacent counties are placed under a city’s jurisdiction; and third,the redesignation of suburban counties of cities as urban wards or districts (qu).70When a county is abolished and a city established, all of the residents of the newlyformed administrative unit are considered city residents, but they are not necessarily“urban” in other aspects of their lives. As Chung and Lam note, “China’s complex‘city system’…refers increasingly to the administrative designation rather than tothe ‘urban’ traits of a locale.”71 Thus, careful interpretation of data on occupationsand household registration status is required to disentangle the evidence for theseother aspects of urbanization.

The household registration system of the PRC classifies citizens as agricultural(nongye) or non-agricultural (fei nongye), a legacy of theMaoist era that continuesto be tallied by the census, not necessarily related to present-day occupation. Someofficial statistics conflate non-agricultural registration with urban status. Thisdistinction between the administrative unit to which a person belongs and whethera person’s household registration is agricultural or non-agricultural contributes tothe complexity of deciphering urbanization statistics. Here, it is the status of theadministrative unit as a whole, rather than the shift from agricultural tonon-agricultural household registration, that we identify as administrativeurbanization.

In addition to the emphasis on formation of cities (shi; grong khyer), urbantowns (zhen; grong rdal) are also valued over their rural counterparts. Althoughrural townships (xiang) and urban towns are technically on the same rank in thenational administrative hierarchy (Figure 1), the valorization of the urban and whatMa72 calls “scale as level” means that the conversion from township to town, likethe conversion from county to city, is actually a shift to a more prestigious, orhigher, scale. Towns are not necessarily any larger than townships (as would bethe case if scale were understood only as size). However, the urban scalesignificantly affects political and economic relations with other places.73 Over thecourse of the 1990s, the number of designated urban towns across China increased

69 John Friedmann, China’s Urban Transition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).70 Ma, “Urban Administrative Restructuring”; Ma, “Urban Transformation in China.”71 Chung and Lam, “China’s ‘City System’ in Flux,” 946.72 Ma, “Urban Administrative Restructuring.”73 Ma, “Urban Administrative Restructuring,” 481.


from twelve thousand to twenty thousand through the promotion or consolidationof thousands of rural townships. 74

The period targeted by the Eleventh Five Year Plan (2006-2010) is, accordingto official reports, characterized by the acceleration of the “four new-izations,” ofwhich urbanization features prominently. This, in turn, is supposed to “releasetremendous vigor” for the rapid development of China’s economy.75 The urbanscale is thus being increasingly emphasized as “the primary site of contemporarypolitical/economic/cultural interest.”76 This imperative has created a tendency toartificially inflate growth in both urban population and land area. Perhaps the mostegregious example of this resulted from the elevation of Chongqing (formerly partof Sichuan province) and its surrounding counties to the status of a provincial-levelmunicipality in 1996. The new municipality encompasses two other major citiesand a total population of fifteen million. On the basis of that population statistic,the newmunicipal administration then claimed to have become the world’s largestport city77 – despite the fact that the area’s population had not changed with thecreation of the municipality.

Though an extreme case, the Chongqing example indicates why thereorganization of space into higher status, urban units has become so prevalentacross China. Scaling up is a way to make a place more attractive to investors, andto eliminate land use conflicts between cities and adjacent counties, thus enablingurban areas to more easily access land and water supplies, spurring faster growth.78Other putative benefits include better city planning, coordinated rural-urbandevelopment and integration, and easier decentralization of urban industries.79From 1983 to 1999, roughly 380 counties became cities, accounting for about 90percent of the total number of newly established cities.80 Figure 1, which highlightsrural and urban designations in the PRC’s administrative hierarchy, further clarifiesthese changes. At each rank, the number of standard, rural units has been in decline.At the rate that prefectures are being converted to municipalities, there would beno more ordinary prefectures anywhere in the PRC by 2011. Whether this trendwill continue to bring promotion to urban status to former prefectures remains tobe seen, particularly in the sparsely populated west.

74 Kam Wing Chan and Hu Ying, “Urbanization in China in the 1990s: New Definitions, DifferentSeries and Revised Trends,” The China Review 3, no. 2 (2003), 49-71.75 “New Thoughts, Ideas, and Moves of the 11th Five-Year Plan.” Renmin Ribao, October 11 2005.76 Cartier, “Symbolic City/Regions and Gendered Identity Formation in South China,” 62.77 Asim Khan, “The World’s Largest Dam is Being Built in China,” Green Times (1997),

http://web.archive.org/web/20030511113000/dolphin.upenn.edu/~pennenv/greentimes/spring97/dam.html (accessed February 27, 2008).78 Ma, “Urban Transformation in China.”79 Ma, “Urban Administrative Restructuring.”80 Ma, “Urban Transformation in China,” 1560.


http://web.archive.org/web/20030511113000/dolphin.upenn.edu/~pennenv/greentimes/spring97/dam.html


Urbanization as Modernization in TibetHow does the national trend of urbanization and administrative scaling-up playout in the TAR? The equation of the urban with progress and modernization infusesdescriptions of Lha sa’s urbanization plans. The official Xinhua news servicereported under the headline “Urbanization Arrives in Tibet,” “Half a century agothere [were] no cities in Tibet, and Lha sa was regarded as a small town.”81Assessing the expansion of Lha sa’s urbanized area from three square kilometersto fifty-three square kilometers, described above, the vice-mayor of Lha sa, LiChang-an concluded: “Though Lha sa is not big enough yet…great changes havetaken place.”82Because they have comparatively smaller populations to begin with,rapid, significant, and real (as opposed to administrative) urbanization in ethnicminority regions is heavily dependent upon Han in-migration. This, combined withtheir political sensitivity, makes the ideological importance of urbanization inminority regions even more pronounced than in predominantly Han areas. Bulagargues in the case of Inner Mongolia that municipalization (the conversion ofcounties to municipalities or cities), which is often accompanied by place namechanges in line with capitalist imperatives, is “both a shortcut to modernity and ameans to overcome ethnic autonomy.”83

The discourse of urbanization as modernization, and the staking of statelegitimacy on the provision of modernization, infuse the following segment fromthe widely distributed DVD, Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the PeacefulLiberation of Tibet produced by CCTV:

With economic growth, the living standards of Tibetans have improved…Intoday’s Tibet a greater variety of food and clothes is available. Houses are nicerand communication is easier. Tibetans call the present era the age of bliss andhappiness, long dreamt of by their ancestors…

Shortly after the peaceful liberation, Lha sa only covered an area of 3 squarekilometers and had almost no modern facilities. After several major expansions,Lha sa now has an urban area of more than 50 square kilometers. Modern cityfunctions have been enhanced and the living standards of its residents haveimproved…

Lha sa is a symbol of Tibet’s great changes. The urbanization process in the wholeregion has been accelerated. Now within the jurisdiction of Tibet there are twocities, 71 county capitals, and 112 towns. The total township area is 147 squarekilometers with an urban population of 420,000. Massive changes have takenplace not only in ancient towns like Lha sa, Rikaze, Zedang, Changdu, and Jiangzebut also in newly built towns like Bayi, Ningzhi, Shiquanhe, Ali, Nachu, Lang

81 Anonymous, “Urbanization Arrives in Tibet,” Xinhua News Agency, November 16, 2001.82 China Internet Information Centre, “Future Urban Development,” 2001.83 Bulag, “From Yeke-juu League to Ordos Municipality,” 198.


xian and Zhamu Port. These towns are like glittering pearls, scattered on the snowcapped plateau.84

Urbanization is thus associated positively not only with economic growth butalso with the “peaceful liberation,” and the gratitude that Tibetans are said to feeltowards the state for lifting them out of a pre-1951 condition officially describedas barbaric, cruel, and economically stagnant.

In this hegemonic discourse, urbanization is further associated positively withacquisition of the Chinese language, and the adoption of Han dietary and clothingpreferences by Tibetans. This celebratory view ofurbanization-as-Chinese-modernization is also produced in some scholarly accounts,such as the following description of the process of the “rural urbanization” in Stodlung bde chen (Duilong deqing) County, near Lha sa:

…in the process of rural urbanization, significant changes took place…livingstandards and quality of life were immeasurably enhanced, and the gap betweentown and country was increasingly narrowed….recreational activities have becomemuch richer in form and content. This included watching TV and videos…andplaying mahjong….The backward and confining nature of their past life and ruralself-sufficiency had completely disappeared.85

The erosion of rural self-sufficiency, and the increasing prevalence of mahjong,TV, and video games are discursively constructed as both necessary and welcomeharbingers of a brighter future. Similarly, Li86 describes traditional Tibet as beingin a state of “lacking [of] urbanization motivation.” Only since economic reformin the 1980s has the influence of urban Lha sa made villagers in Stod lung bdechen County “keen on urbanization.”87 In particular, in this view, the influence ofthe urban has led to the “formation and spread of modern ideas,” including arationalization and commodification of religion (“religion became morerational…when calling in the monks and nuns to recite scriptures at funerals orfestivals, they will pay for it as a commodity”), and a more general, positiverationalization of social life: “suburban farmers are more modern and urbanizedin their sense of social participation, punctuality, and market savvy.”88

While it is in-situ or “rural urbanization” that is described above in relation tomodernization, the movement and settlement of nomadic herders to towns, asanother form of urbanization, is also frequently praised. According to one official

84 Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet, DVD (CCTV International,China Intercontinental Communication Center, and Tibet International Cultural Film and TelevisionPrograms Company, 2001).85 Gelek and Li Tao, “Rural Urbanization in China’s Tibetan Region: Duilongdeqing County as a

Typical Example,” in Farewell to Peasant China: Rural Urbanization and Social Change in the LateTwentieth Century, ed. Gregory Guldin (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 191-2, 201.86 Li, “Tibetan Rural Urbanization and the Desakota Model,” 20.87 Li, “Tibetan Rural Urbanization and the Desakota Model,” 22.88 Li, “Tibetan Rural Urbanization and the Desakota Model,” 23-24.


source, “more and more Tibetan farmers and herdsmen have moved into towns asTibet’s economy has grown and their living standards have improved in recentyears.”89 A 2003 report of the People’s Congress of Lhasa Shi (Prefectural-levelMunicipality) also called for the relocation and migration of rural Tibetan farmersto urban centers in Lha sa Prefecture (Lasa Shi): “More rural workers should besent out to the urban centres so that the rate of migration of workers is enhanced.”90The report further stated that farmers and nomads will “be encouraged to settle intowns and cities” where they should “find jobs or engage in business.”91 Here, thediscourse of urbanization as modernization intersects with the state discourse ofsedentarization as modernization. The recent “returning pastures to grasslands”program calls for the ecological improvement of the grasslands through large-scaleenclosure and the resettlement of herders to towns, where they are to sell theirherds and adopt urbanmodes of existence.92 Thus, unruly Tibetan nomadic herderscan be doubly “modernized” through their sedentarization in urban places.

The process of administrative urbanization that has swept across China isoccurring in the TAR as well, but with its own particular characteristics. With onlytwo designated cities (shi) in the entire TAR, Lha sa and Gzhis ka rtse, and witheven these being only “small cities” within China’s larger hierarchy of cities,93 thefocus has been on a lower scale of urbanization – the promotion of rural townshipsto urban towns. There were no urban towns at all in the TAR until 1987, when amajor reorganization of the spatial administration of the region began. The easiestway for rural townships to meet the population requirements for urban town statusis to merge with neighboring rural townships. Thus, in 1988, the total number oftownship-level units was reduced from over two thousand down to 865, with eightand then (a year later) thirty of these designated as urban towns. These numbersfluctuated moderately until 1999, when the number of urban towns was tripled toninety-seven (114 the following year) and the number of rural townships furtherreduced to around six hundred; further consolidation occurred in 2003 (see Table2). In other words, PRC officials’ frequent assertion that the TAR now has morethan one hundred towns is a rather recent and, thus far, wholly administrativeconstruction. Indeed, Li notes that many of these “so-called towns are often nomore than a street with several buildings.”94

89 Anonymous, “Urbanisation of Tibet Gathers Pace: Official,” Agence France Presse, February 1,2002.90 Tibet Information Network, “Lhasa Prefecture Encourages Rural Migration for ‘Building a

Middle-class Society,’” in Tibet 2003 - A Yearbook (London: Tibet Information Network, 2004), 69-70.91 Tibet Information Network, “Lhasa Prefecture Encourages Rural Migration for ‘Building a

Middle-class Society,’” 69-70.92 Emily T. Yeh, “Green Governmentality and Pastoralism in Western China: ‘Converting Pastures

to Grasslands,’” Nomadic Peoples 9, nos. 1-2 (2005).93 Li, “Tibetan Rural Urbanization and the Desakota Model,” 18.94 Li, “Tibetan Rural Urbanization and the Desakota Model,” 18.


Table 2. Administrative Restructuring across the TAR95

200320011999199819901987

766666City Street Offices(jiedao)

1401159734318Urban Towns (zhen)

5436046238808682,069Rural Townships(xiang)

6907357269209052,083Total

Consolidation of rural townships and increase in urban towns across the TAR results from the promotion from ruralto urban at the same administrative rank. The rate of township consolidation in the TAR over this period exceedstwice that of the rest of the PRC.

The plans announced in 2000, to “build 100 small towns along its majorhighways to accelerate the region’s urbanization,”96 appear to refer to the 115designated urban towns formed mostly by merging rural townships. The creationof these urban towns in the TAR parallels the re-designation of leagues tomunicipalities in Inner Mongolia, described by anthropologist Uradyn Bulag. Inboth cases, the urban scale promotion declares not so much the presence of urbanconditions but rather “an intention or a ‘desire for urbanization’”:

It is a desire for more jobs, more capital flow, and of course more prosperity. Andthe old system, including the nationality form and content of autonomy, isconsidered a hindrance…Municipality is to be hailed to exorcise the hauntedfailure of modernization in minority regions. Municipalization is therefore moreof a narration of future than of past and present...not quite a celebration ofachievement, but a yearning for a utopian moment.97

However, in contrast to other areas of the country, from Chongqing to InnerMongolia, where local officials and citizens themselves are interested in promotionto urban status as a way of attracting investment, in the TAR the impetus, at leastat the township level, seems very much to come from above. The change cuts backon administrative costs, but more importantly, administrative reshuffling providesa new opportunity to reshuffle leaders and post Han cadres as town-level leaders;some two hundred and eighty Han officials were sent to be leaders of ruraltownships and urban towns for the first time in 2003.98 Given that the township isthe lowest level of official government within the Chinese administrative hierarchy,together with the fact that leaders have historically been Tibetan, and the state’s

95 Source: Tibet Autonomous Region Bureau of Statistics, Xizang Tongji Nianjian 2004 (Beijing:Zhongguo Tongji Chubanshe, 2004).96 Anonymous, “China’sWestern Development Includes Tibet Urbanization,” Xinhua News Agency,

April 28, 2000.97 Bulag, “From Yeke-juu League to Ordos Municipality,” 225.98 Kate Saunders, “Impact of Urbanization in Rural Areas of Tibet Autonomous Region,” International

Campaign for Tibet. October 2, 2003; Human Rights Watch, “Fewer Tibetans on Lhasa’s Key RulingBodies,” November 7, 2006.


obsession with “stability” and trust (or what might be viewed from the centralgovernment’s perspective as an ethnic and political principal-agent problem99),that administrative level is seen as the “weak link” in government and Party control.In this way, the administrative urbanization of Tibetan space contributes to theproject of weakening ethnic autonomy. Friedmann100 suggests that urbanizationacross China has allowed new structures of power to emerge, and has forceddecentralization of decision-making. In Tibet, however, it appears instead to be astrategy for consolidating, rather than decentralizing, political control.

Whereas the urbanization of small towns across much of China is the result of“urbanization from below” or “spontaneous and self-generating” movement, theurbanization of small towns in the TAR appears to be more of a combination ofadministrative urbanization and urbanization from above. This includes both theemphasis on administrative reclassification and programs such as “returning pasturesto grasslands” and Lha sa Municipality’s reported plans to relocate rural farmersto urban centers.101 These different forms of urbanization work together to “civilize”Tibetan space, as part of the Han center’s broader “civilizing project”102 on itsTibetan periphery.

As discussed above, this process is not limited to, or even mostly about, thetechnical aspects of urbanization such as increased population density and anenlarged built-up area (as we will see below, “actual” urbanization has laggedbehind administrative urbanization). Instead, what is at stake here is thereconfiguration and consolidation of bureaucratic power that administrativepromotions can enable within the current political-economic system, and thecreation of the urban/rural dichotomy itself as a defining characteristic ofsocio-spatial conceptualization and practice. Thus, it bears repeating that we donot dispute on “factual” grounds analyses such as that of Li,103 who finds that notonly is China’s rate of urbanization still lower than the world average (a legacy ofthe socialist industrialization strategy and household registration system), but thatTibet’s rate is some 20 percent lower than China’s (more on this below), and thatin this sense Tibet can be seen as being “behind” other parts of China. Rather, wedraw attention to the teleological assumptions about monolithic paths ofdevelopment embedded in such analyses of being “behind,” as well as the

99 This term is used in political science and economics to discuss difficulties that arise when, forexample, the central government (the principal) must implement its policies through the actions of alocal official (the agent) who may have independent and conflicting interests. Various monitoring andincentive strategies may be employed to align the agent’s interests with those of the principal, or thecentral government may seek to overcome the perceived problem by employing officials with fewerpersonal or ethnic ties to the local community.100 Friedmann, China’s Urban Transition.101 Tibet Information Network, “Lhasa Prefecture Encourages Rural Migration for ‘Building a

Middle-Class Society.’”102 Stevan Harrell, “Introduction: Civilizing Projects and the Reaction to Them,” in Cultural

Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers, ed. Stevan Harrell (Seattle: University of Washington Press,1995).103 Li, “Tibetan Rural Urbanization and the Desakota Model.”


naturalization of the urban/rural dichotomy as a dominant mode of socio-spatialorganization.

Deciphering Lha sa’s UrbanizationWith this interpretive framework as well as the larger national and regional contextsof urbanization in mind, we return now to a more technical re-evaluation of Lhasa’s urbanization statistics, summarized in Table 1. As should be clear from theabove discussion, this requires careful consideration of how both “urban,” and“Lha sa” are defined in different sources. “Lha sa” is often used colloquially (andmost restrictively) to refer only to the built-up area – the parts that match everydayexpectations of what a city looks like. Although this is what both ordinary residentsand outside observers often think of when they say “Lha sa,” this conceptualizationof Lha sa does not correspond to any official administrative classification. Instead,the same name “Lha sa” refers to two different official administrative scales. First,Lha sa Shi is a prefectural-level municipality that covers an area of almostthirty-thousand square kilometers and encompasses six counties and one so-calledurban district. That district is called Lha sa chengguan qu or “the Lha sametropolitan district,” frequently translated as “region of city” in statisticalyearbooks.104However, it includes not only the built-up area under the jurisdictionof city street offices and city neighborhood committees (jiedao banshichu andjuwei hui; see Figure 1)105 but also four rural townships (xiang).

Across the TAR, administrative urbanization has been significant since 1987(Table 2), and this practice has affected definitions of the urban in Lha sa. WithinLha sa Municipality, the total number of township-level units has been reducedfrom ninety-seven in 1990 to sixty-four in 2003 as rural townships have beenmerged or promoted to urban towns. At the time of the 1990 census, three of thecounty seats were not even classified as urban towns, but as of 2000 every countyhad at least one urban town, for a total of nine in the prefectural-level municipality.These promotions mean that the populations of those towns may now be countedtoward the “urban” total for the prefectural municipality.

Examining the breakdown of populations in urban and rural jurisdictionsaccording to the 2000 census (Table 3), we can see that the government’s statementthat “Lha sa’s urban population in 2000 is 230,000,” is not a generous roundingup of the population of the metropolitan district (223,001). Rather, it refers to thetotal population living under the six city street offices and nine urban towns acrossthe entire prefecture of Lha sa (231,836). In this logic, town residents are urban,but the 51,282 residents of rural townships within the metropolitan district are not.Comparing these figures with those for 1990, we find that fully 30 percent of thereported “urban” growth in the prefecture was simply amatter of the reclassification

104 Chengguan qu means, literally, “city gate district.”105 A city street office (jiedao banshichu) is a subdivision of a urban ward (qu), equivalent in the

administrative hierarchy to a town (zhen) or rural township (xiang), which are subdivisions of counties(xian).


of existing township populations, mostly in 1999. This also focuses our attentionon where the most rapid growth is occurring: in the Lha sa metropolitan district.

Table 3. Population Reported by County in Lha sa Municipality, 2000106

Statistical YearbookCensusSource

Non-AgriculturalRegistration

City/TownPopulation


City/TownPopulation

TotalPopulation

124,478141,360133,603171,719223,001Lha saMetropolitanDistrict

2,9607,1152,2548,11150,895Linzhou (Lhungrub) xian

2,9268,3662,0238,53039,169Dangxiong(’Dam gzhung)xian

305,6651,1906,08227,375Nimu (Snyemo) xian

1,9985,7101,5647,40629,690Qushui (Chushur) xian

2,89515,3833,83617,19740,543Duilongdeqing(Stod lung bdechen) xian

676,2981,4647,38224,906Dazi (Stak rtse)xian

674,4341,5265,40938,920Mozhu gongka(Mal gro gungdkar) xian

135,421194,331147,460231,836474,499TOTAL

Comparison of census and Tibet Statistical Yearbook population numbers. The reported “urban population” is a sumof the total population living under the six city streets offices and nine urban towns across Lha sa Municipality (Shi),rather than the total population of the Lha sa metropolitan district (Chengguan qu). Statistical Yearbooks report thenumber of individuals as registered at public security offices, whereas the 2000 census aimed also to count unregisteredindividuals.

This definition of urban-by-jurisdiction in the census finds a parallel in the TibetStatistical Yearbooks, which provide annual data on the “population of cities andtowns.” But the two sources are not comparable, as the Yearbooks tabulate adifferent population than does the census, particularly regarding the “floatingpopulation” – that is, the migrants who maintain household registrations back attheir place of origin. The Yearbook is concerned with the registered population atyear-end, and thus the Yearbook will not include unregistered individuals presentin Lha sa, and will include registered Lha sa residents who are not actually present

106 Sources: All China Marketing Research Co., Zhongguo 2000 Xianji Renkou Pucha Ziliao (AnnArbor, MI: University of Michigan China Data Center, 2003); Tibet Autonomous Region Bureau ofStatistics, Xizang Tongji Nianjian 2004 (Beijing: Zhongguo Tongji Chubanshe, 2004).


in Lha sa. The 2000 census did aim to tally unregistered individuals present in Lhasa if they had been away from their place of residence for more than six months.Even so, because much of the Han migration to Lha sa is seasonal – for example,construction work, dominated by migrants, ceases between October and Marchbecause of inclement weather– the November timing of the 2000 census wouldhave underestimated the “floating population” which spends at least part of theyear there. To add to the confusion, the 1990 census followed a definition that iscloser to the one used in the Yearbooks than the one used in the 2000 census, andexcluded much of the “floating population.”

All of these factors lead to many minor discrepancies and some major onesrequiring explanation. In particular, as noted above, under the household registrationsystem, Chinese citizens hold either agricultural or non-agricultural registrations.Although these inherited appellations may have no relevance to the individual’scurrent occupation or place of residence, the census and the Tibet StatisticalYearbooks continue to tabulate the number of persons with each type of registration.The reporting of the “non-agricultural population” in this context should not betaken as the equivalent of the “urban population,” and here we substitute the term“non-agricultural registration” for clarity. (Note also that the military presence isreported in neither the census nor in the Yearbooks).

Table 4. Household Registration in Lha sa Municipality, 2000107

Change from 1990Household Registration, 2000

AgriculturalRegistration

(%)

Non-Registration(%)

Total(%)

AgriculturalRegistration


Total

130.334.660.8586,395133,603219,998Lha saMetropolitanDistrict

7.214.47.5048,3622,25450,616Linzhou(Lhun grub)

20.7-30.316.2936,9752,02338,998Dangxiong(’Damgzhung)

2.342.03.5725,9811,19027,171Nimu (Snyemo)

8.92.18.5228,0571,56429,621Qushui (Chushur)

10.5-51.6-1.4936,6083,83640,444Duilongdeqing(Stod lung bdechen)

8.8-25.35.9623,4311,46424,895Dazi (Stakrtse)

107 Source: All China Marketing Research Co., Zhongguo 2000 Xianji Renkou Pucha Ziliao (AnnArbor, MI: University of Michigan China Data Center, 2003).


5.522.06.0637,3841,52638,910Mozhugongka(Mal gro gungdkar)

27.025.426.49323,193147,460470,653TOTAL

Nonetheless, examining the differences between the different sources can helpin deciphering Lha sa’s reported growth. Among the changes between the twocensuses (Table 4), the 130 percent increase in persons with agricultural registrationin the metropolitan district stands out. This can be accounted for largely by theinclusion in the latter census of the floating population. Many Chinese migrantsin Lha sa have agricultural household registrations in their province of origin.Indeed, the 2000 census tallies over one hundred and five thousand individuals inthe metropolitan district alone who are registered elsewhere; nearly all of them areHan andmost hold agricultural registrations. In three other counties, sharp decreasesin nonagricultural populations (though minor in absolute terms) may reflectout-migration or administrative recategorization.

Table 5. Labor Force in Lha sa Municipality, 2000108

DependencyRatio (%)

Unemployed(Estimate)

ServicesIndustryAgriculture

25.0368,83672,11625,25312,032Lha sa MetropolitanDistrict

59.273,9821,04229529,916Linzhou (Lhun grub)

69.294,3803,5371,56816,758Dangxiong (’Damgzhung)

52.302,6651,12627413,937Nimu (Snye mo)

47.293,6211,35887416,484Qushui (Chu shur)

48.523,0971,72665323,074Duilongdeqing (Stodlung bde chen)

53.822,1941,57911614,516Dazi (Stak rtse)

66.903,4741,57935820,326Mozhu gongka (Malgro gung dkar)

40.2292,24984,06329,389147,042TOTAL

The census differentiates three major categories within the labor force, along with adults not employed outside thehome, and dependents (children and seniors). The unemployed population is estimated from the census 9.5 percentsample; other figures are 100 percent counts.

Setting aside the definitions imposed by administrative jurisdictions or theincreasingly irrelevant household registration labels, a better approach toapprehending the size and growth of “urban” Lha sa is to examine data onoccupations. Note that agricultural registration in Table 4 far exceeds the agricultural



labor force in Table 5. Not only is registration status a poor indicator of currentoccupations, but in particular, many recent migrants with agricultural registrationshave found work in other sectors. Instead, we may consider the urban populationto be made up of individuals in the nonagricultural labor force and a proportionalshare of the unemployed (as classified by the census, including full-time studentsand homemakers), along with their dependents (children and seniors in the samehousehold). From this definition we estimate the total urban population of Lha saPrefecture (Lasa Shi) as 228,201 in 2000, of which 198,340 were in the Lha sametropolitan district.

Table 6. Population and Ethnicity by Township Type in Lha sa Municipality,2000109

Tibetan PopulationHan PopulationTotal Population

104,20362,226171,719City Street Offices (jiedao)

56,6143,08360,117Urban Towns (zhen)

226,30715,275242,663Rural Townships (xiang)

387,12480,584474,499TOTAL

According to official census statistics, the Han population is concentrated in the city street offices of the Lha sametropolitan district.

Figure 2a: Non-Agricultural Labor Force in Lha sa Municipality, 2000



Figure 2b: Non-Tibetan Population in Lha sa Municipality, 2000

A sectoral breakdown of the labor force highlights the concentration of urbanfunctions within the Lha sa metropolitan district (Table 5, above; Figure 2a, above,left) as well as the disproportionate participation of the ethnic Han in certainprofessions and occupational levels, particularly the more typically urban andhigh-status ones. Han are concentrated in the metropolitan district, and in particularthe city street offices (jiedao), where theymade up over one third of the populationeven in the winter of 2000 (Table 6, above; Figure 2b, above, right). In the laborforce, Han dominate the fields of construction, mining, and trade, and also accountfor over 40 percent of the labor force in real estate, banking, andmost other servicesectors. They fill over half of all managerial positions and official governmentposts and are disproportionately represented in other urban occupations (Table 7).Even in agriculture, the Han presence approaches 30 percent of the prefecturallabor force. The sex ratios of the Han population in Lha saMunicipality still suggesta large number of sojourning males (150 per every one hundred Han females,though this is down from 195 in 1990). Among Tibetans there is a small deficit ofmales (ninety-six to every one hundred Tibetan females), though hardly the“countryside denuded of adult males” described elsewhere by Sautman and Eng.110For comparison, in the TAR as a whole, the 2000 population census reports sexratios of 164:100 for Han and 99:100 for Tibetans.111

110 Sautman and Eng, “Tibet: Development for Whom?,” 51.111 All China Marketing Research Co., Zhongguo 2000 Xianji Renkou Pucha Ziliao (Ann Arbor,

MI: University of Michigan China Data Center, 2003).


Table 7. Ethnic Representation (percent) in Occupational Classes, Lha saMunicipality, 2000112

Han (%)Tibetan (%)Occupational Sector

51.345.2Managerial/Government Officials

49.544.1Sales and Services

47.750.6Production & Transportation

39.046.3Other Occupations

35.562.3Clerical & Related Workers

34.463.9Professional/Technical

28.770.6Agricultural

Han make up only 20 percent of the population of the prefectural-level municipality, but dominate high-statusoccupations.

Thus far, we have examined the population figures to find that while the influxof Han migrants is indeed significant, the reclassification of rural townships intourban towns accounts for nearly one-third of the reported growth in urbanpopulation. That amount is considerably greater than the national average cited byFriedmann,113who finds that 20 percent of the increase in urban population comesfrom the reclassification of non-urban places to urban status. With this practicecontinuing apace (see Table 2), a substantial proportion of theseventy-thousand-person increase in Lha sa’s urban population projected between2000 and 2005 might be accounted for in this way. The importance ofreclassification also suggests that we should be skeptical in accepting the claimthat two hundred thousand positions were added to urban employment between2000-2005, or that of these, sixty thousand jobs were taken by rural Tibetanmigrants to urban areas: many if not most of these could also be the result ofreclassification.114

112 Source: All China Marketing Research Co., Zhongguo 2000 Xianji Renkou Pucha Ziliao (AnnArbor, MI: University of Michigan China Data Center, 2003).113 Friedmann, China’s Urban Transition, 36.114 Sautman and Eng, “Tibet: Development for Whom?,” 52.


Lha sa’s Built-up Area

Figure 3: Urban Expansion of Lha sa, 1960-2000.-

Above: KH-7 reconnaissance photo, January 1966. White lines show extent of built-up areasymbolized on a Chinese topographic map, circa 1960.-

Below: Landsat 7 image of Lha sa, December 2000. White lines delimit the contiguous built-uparea.

The other aspect of urbanization that figures prominently in official plans is thegrowth of the urbanized, or built-up, area (see Table 1). Chinese topographic mapsheets115 and a declassified KH-7 spy satellite image from the 1960s (Figure 3,right, above) show about seventeen square kilometers of built-up area within themetropolitan district. A Soviet topographic map based on 1978-83 surveys116 showsan increase to forty square kilometers, though the Soviet criteria for delimitingurban areas are not documented and may differ. The official figure of twenty-fivesquare kilometers in 1980, cited earlier, seems reasonable if not conservative.Official sources probably would not have counted the built-up areas around theJuly 1st and August 1st State Farms, for example, while those are depicted withthe same symbols as the urban city center area on the topographic maps. However,

115 People’s Liberation Army, China 1:100,000 Topographic Series [MAP] (Beijing: Zhongguorenmin jiefangjun zong canmou bu cehui ju, n.d).116 VTU GSh (Voenno-topograficheskoe upravlenie General’nogo shtaba), “Lha sa.” Soviet Global

Topographic Map Series (1:200,000), H-46-XX [MAP] (Moscow: Military-Topographic Directorateof the General Staff, 1986).


our estimate of the Lha sa built-up area delimited visually on 2000 Landsat (Figure3, right, below) and 2005 Carterra images suggests an area of forty-five squarekilometers. Thus, our estimate of 2005 built-up area falls short of the officiallyreported area for the year 2000, let alone the planned expansion to seventy squarekilometers (the figure stated in 2000 as the 2005 target). Even more curious is thestated target of an expansion to 272 square kilometers by 2015. While seventysquare kilometers is physically feasible, 272 square kilometers is not. In a build-outanalysis evaluating the suitability of terrain for urban construction,117we estimatedthat even if urban land uses expand to fill the entire valley floor within the currentboundaries of the metropolitan district, the total area would be at most one hundredand fifty square kilometers. Projects like the new railroad terminus and economicdevelopment zone currently underway are much smaller, on the order of five totwelve square kilometers.

This suggests that at least since 2000, the reported area of urban Lha sa includednot only the built-up area of the city, but also the nine urban towns in the othercounties of the prefectural-level Lha saMunicipality. If the four townships currentlypart of the Lha sa metropolitan district were to be reclassified as towns, thereportable urban area would rise to one hundred and fifty square kilometers. Thus,looking toward 2015, we can indeed expect the railroad, new migrants, andcontinued investment in infrastructure to expand the built-up area of the city, butwe should also particularly expect the continued scalar promotion of rural townshipsto urban towns in Lha sa Municipality.

Placing Lha sa Among Chinese CitiesLha sa has long been the largest (and for a long time, the only) city in a culturallyTibetan area, but its growth in the past few decades is clearly unprecedented. Lhasa’s urbanization, administrative and otherwise, is an imposition of a new form onthe landscape, which was historically not significantly organized along theurban/rural dichotomy. Nevertheless, a hegemonic discourse of urbanization asmodernization continues to code the current city of Lha sa as being “too small” –still too underdeveloped and insufficiently urbanized. Chinese migrants often havethe same assessment, complaining that “Lha sa is like one of our little county seatsat home in China Proper!” Consider the observations of one vegetable farmer fromMianyang in Sichuan province, who arrived in Lha sa in 1997 after ten years ofworking in various jobs in eastern cities. Comparing his experience in Ningbo, acoastal city in Zhejiang province with Lha sa, he stated:

There, one town (zhen) is much larger than all of Lha sa city. Just one town! Onetown [we lived in] had more than 300 factories, four conglomerates, seven oreight foreign joint ventures. That town was really big!…. The conditions wereexcellent, not like those in Lha sa.

117 Jeff Lacy,Manual of Build-Out Analysis (North Amherst, MA: Center for Rural Massachusetts,1992).


A logarithmic rank-size graph of China’s urban populations (Figure 4) showsLha sa in the range of prefectural or county-level seats, well below the size andrank of its administrative peers across the PRC. Such comparisons inform statediscourses of Lha sa as underdeveloped and under-urbanized. Li concurs, notingthat “all cities in Tibet are ‘small cities.’ Tibet is the only province (region) thatdoes not have any other three [sic] levels of big cities.”118 These analyses suggestthat the migrants who see Lha sa as being similar in size and population to “acounty seat at home” are, in a quantitative sense, correct.

Figure 4: Rank-size Graph of Urban Settlements in the PRC, 1990

This logarithmic rank-population size graph shows Lha sa as being far belowits administrative peers (capitals of provincial-level units).

However, ranking Lha sa against other provincial capitals is not a veryreasonable comparison to make when its historical and socio-cultural trajectory istaken into consideration. In fact, a regional view of Lha sa within the frameworkof the state-defined Tibet Autonomous Region, can also suggest that it is, ifanything, already too big. A calculation of Lha sa’s primacy value, the ratio of its

118 Li, “Tibetan Rural Urbanization and the Desakota Model,” 18.


urban population to that of the second largest city in the TAR (Gzhis ka rtse), yieldsa value of 5.8 (using 1990 statistics), the fifth highest for all provincial-level unitsin the PRC. If the same calculation is made with the “infrastructural population”– that is the population that contributes most to a city’s urban services (i.e.,excluding unskilled laborers, see Skinner et al.119) – then the value becomes 9.8,the highest for all of China. Though early work by urban geographers and regionalscientists on urban population primacy has been critiqued for its inability to explainthe processes of urban growth,120 highly unbalanced distributions of infrastructuralpopulations have been implicated in cases of arrested or exploitative colonialdevelopment.121 The extreme concentration of the TAR’s urban population in theone city of Lha sa corroborates other evidence of uneven development in the TARand suggests that the current approach to development is unbalanced. Indeed, theurban versus rural disparities in incomes and living standards discussed by Sautmanand Eng122 and Fischer123 can be understood as disparities between Lha sa and therest of the TAR.

If Lha sa is simultaneously “too large” in the context of the TAR, yet “too small”in comparison with other provincial-level capitals of the PRC, it may be mostinstructive to view the city as an outpost of an emerging, colonizing network of awestern China regional economy with its hub at Chengdu. In terms of a regionalsystems analysis, Lha sa’s population relative to the rest of western China wouldrank it among the third-order cities of the system, below Chengdu and Mianyang(in Sichuan) but on par with Golmud (in Qinghai). An examination of transportationand migration links supports this supposition: Chengdu continues to be the maintransfer point for flights to Lha sa, and Sichuan province also sends more migrantsto the TAR than all other provinces combined.124 For many years, Chengdu hasalso been the main place of retirement for Han government cadres who werestationed in the TAR. There are multiple branches of the TAR government inChengdu, with apartment complexes and retirement recreation areas dedicatedespecially for use by these cadres. More surprisingly, Chengdu has also in recentyears become a favored spot for retirement among wealthy, ethnically Tibetancadres. As the number of wealthy Tibetan cadres has increased, more are takingto spending their winters in Chengdu and summers in Lha sa. This has earned them

119 G. William Skinner, Mark Henderson, and Jianhua Yuan, “China’s Fertility Transition ThroughRegional Space: Using GIS and Census Data for a Spatial Analysis of Historical Demography,” SocialScience History 24, no. 3 (2000): 613-52.120 Carole Smith, “Class Relations and Urbanization in Guatemala: Toward an Alternative Theory

of Urban Primacy,” inUrbanization in theWorld-Economy, ed.Michael Timberlake (Orlando: AcademicPress, Inc., 1998), 85-117; Carolyn Cartier, “Origins and evolution of a geographical idea,” ModernChina 28, no. 1 (2002), 79-142.121 Carole Smith, “Theories and Measures of Urban Primacy: A Critique,” in Urbanization in the

World-Economy, ed. Michael Timberlake (Orlando: Academic Press, Inc., 1985).122 Sautman and Eng, “Tibet: Development for Whom?”123 Fischer, State Growth and Social Exclusion in Tibet.124 State Statistical Bureau, Zhongguo Renkou Tongji Nianjian (Beijing: Zhongguo Zhanwang

Chubanshe, 1997), 223-4.


the appellation “summer grass winter worm” (dbyar rtsa dgun ’bu),125 a term otherTibetans use to refer to their new habits of wintering away from Tibet. Rather thanenticing them to stay in Lha sa, all of the new amenities of urbanization haveinstead been accompanied by a shift toward having one home completely off ofthe Tibetan plateau. Even as Lha sa grows increasingly out of proportion to therest of the TAR, so too is Lha sa being made increasingly dependent on andsubordinated within a wider regional economic system.

ConclusionsThe valorization of the urban scale, the conjuring of the urban throughadministrative reclassification, the reorientation of certain privileged Lha saresidents toward Chengdu even as Lha sa becomes more urbanized and thus“modern” – all suggest a process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, arestructuring of the socialist territorial administration, as well as an ongoing erasureof pre-1950s Tibetan territorial identities and orientations. Many Tibetan residentsof Lha sa are ambivalent about these processes: they complain that their city haslost its Tibetan character while also appreciating new consumer items and improvedcommunications and transportation technologies. This ambivalence is oftenexpressed in sarcastic comments and black humor, as well as through idioms thatconnect their experience of urbanization with other aspects of state development.126The examination of long-time residents’ experiences of urbanization, as well asthe analysis of Lha sa’s place among Chinese cities presented above, both suggestthat Lha sa’s “urbanization” makes more sense in terms of a westward-expandingHan China than in terms of Tibet as a cultural region.

In this paper, we have tried to bring Lha sa into the geographic discussion aboutchanging scale relations in China, while also shedding some light on the debateamong Tibet scholars and activists about the urbanization of Lha sa. Our analysisof frequently cited statistics about Lha sa’s urbanization suggest that the purportedexpansion from fifty-three square kilometers to 272 square kilometers in the nextten years is not actually possible in the way it is usually understood – as a physicalexpansion of the built-up city area in the Lha sa Valley. Instead, at least some ofthe projected and reported expansion is likely to be an artifact of the scaling up ofadministrative status across the prefectural-level municipality.

This does not, however, downplay the importance of the urbanization of theTibetan landscape. Current patterns of development in Lha sa are likely to prove

125 The Tibetan name for a lucrative medicinal fungus (Cordyceps sinensis) found on the Tibetanplateau. See Daniel Winkler, “The Mushrooming Fungi Market in Tibet Exemplified by Cordycepssinensis and Tricholoma matsutake,” Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no.4 (December 2008), http://www.thlib.org?tid=T5571, and AndrewM. Fischer, “Subsistence and RuralLivelihood Strategies in Tibet under Rapid Economic and Social Transition,” Journal of the InternationalAssociation of Tibetan Studies, no. 4 (December 2008), http://www.thlib.org?tid=T5569, this volume,on the economic importance of Dbyar rtsa dgun ’bu in contemporary Tibet.126 Emily T. Yeh, “Tropes of Indolence and the Cultural Politics of Development in Lhasa, Tibet,”

Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97, no. 3 (2007): 593-612.




not only unbalanced but also socially and environmentally unsustainable.Furthermore, our historical analysis suggests that the large urban area, the sharpurban-rural divide, and the valorization of the urban as a spatial category constitutesa significant break from a traditional Tibetan organization of the landscape alonga continuum of settlement sizes. Recent contributions to a theoretically-informedChina geography suggest the importance of analyzing how landscape meaningsare produced within certain discursive formations, and particularly “the ways inwhich states and elites inscribe political and economic ideologies in thelandscape.”127 In making this argument, we also argue, along with Ma128 that therole of the state in China’s urban transformationmust continue to be foregrounded.Indeed, this is particularly true on the non-Han periphery where the urban scale isinfused with additional layers of significance, particularly as a strategy of statecontrol. Building on this, we argue for continued scrutiny of the multifacetedphenomenon of urbanization in Tibet both because of the effects of in-migrationand in light of the imposition of the urban administrative category as a hegemonicdiscursive practice that re-organizes and re-orders space and society, far beyondthe technical aspects of buildings and numbers of people. Finally, the rush towardadministrative urbanization, as an effort to conjure urban spaces into existence,belies the claim that the current urbanization of Tibet is either natural or inevitable.

PostscriptSince 2005, when this paper was written, Lha sa has experienced a new phase ofaccelerated building construction, marked first by the celebration of the 40thanniversary of the TAR and then by the launching of the new socialist countrysideproject in 2006. Lha sa’s dramatic development plans now appear to entail anadministrative expansion beyond the boundaries of the metropolitan district, toswallow neighboring Stod lung bde chen county in a new frenzy of an imbricatedform of administrative/material urban growth.

127 Cartier, “Transnational Urbanism in the Reform-era Chinese City,” 1516.128 Ma, “Urban Transformation in China, 1949-2000.”


GlossaryNote: these glossary entries are organized in Tibetan alphabetical order. All entrieslist the following information in this order: THL Extended Wylie transliterationof the term, THL Phonetic rendering of the term, the English translation, theSanskrit equivalent, the Chinese equivalent, other equivalents such as Mongolianor Latin, associated dates, and the type of term.

Ka

TypeDatesOtherEnglishPhoneticsWylie

PublisherTrunggö BörikpaPetrünkhang

krung go’i bod rig padpe skrun khang

Ga


Termdronggrong

Termgoing around atown OR village

drongkorgrong skor

Termvillage area orurban area (seediscussion in essay)

drongkhülgrong khul

Terma household in thecity or a householdin the village

drongkhyimgrong khyim

Termsettlement; city (canbe an administrativedesignation)

drongkhyergrong khyer

PlaceDrongkhyerKhokhomgrong khyer kho khom

PlaceDrongkhyer Naladagrong khyer na la da

PlaceAyodhyaDrongkhyer Nechégrong khyer gnas bcas

PlacePatnaDrongkhyer Patanagrong khyer pa ṭha na

PlaceCity of LhasaDrongkhyer Lhasagrong khyer lha sa

Termurban town(administrativedesignation)

drongdelgrong rdal

Termedge oftown/city/village

drongnégrong sne

Termvillage or towndrongtsogrong tsho

Termoutercircumambulationpath

lingkorgling skor

TextThe MirrorIlluminating theRoyal Genealogies

Gyelrap SelwéMelong

rgyal rabs gsal ba’ime long

Cha


PlaceChi. QushuiChushurchu shur

Ja


BuildingJokhangjo khang


http://www.thlib.org/reference/transliteration/#essay=/thl/ewts/

http://www.thlib.org/reference/transliteration/#essay=/thl/phonetics/

Nya


PlaceChi. NimuNyemosnye mo

Ta


PersonDalai LamaTālé Lamatā la’i bla ma

PlaceChi. DaziTaktséstak rtse

PlaceChi. Duilongdeqing

Tölung Dechenstod lung bde chen

Da


PersonDungkar LozangTrinlé

dung dkar blo bzang’phrin las

TextDungkar TsikdzöChenmo

dung dkar tshigmdzod chen mo

PersonDungkar Rinpochédung dkar rin po che

PlaceChi. DangxiongDamzhung’dam gzhung

Na


Terminnercircumambulationpath

nangkornang skor

Pa


BuildingPotalapo ta la

Pha


PersonPakpa Shari Bu’phags pa shā ri’i bu

Ba


Placebarkorbar skor

TextBögya TsikdzöChenmo

bod rgya tshig mdzodchen mo

ScientificName

Lat. Cordycepssinensis

summer grasswinter worm

yartsa günbudbyar rtsa dgun ’bu

Term(having to do with)nomads

drok’brog

Ma


PlaceChi.Mozhu gongkaMeldro Gungkarmal gro gung dkar

PublisherMirik Parkhangmi rigs par khang

Tsha


PersonTsering Gyeltsentshe ring rgyal mtshan


Zha


Termfield (related tocrop agriculture)

zhingzhing

PlaceZhölzhol

PlaceZhikatségzhis ka rtse

Za


PersonSamdhongRinpoche

Zamtong Rinpochézam gtong rin po che

Ra


BuildingRamochérwa mo che

Sa


PersonSakya Lama DampaSönam Gyeltsen

sa skya bla ma dampa bsod nams rgyalmtshan

Termsemi-nomad, bothfarming andpastoralism

samadroksa ma ’brog

PersonSongtsen Gamposrong btsan sgam po

Ha


PlaceLhasalha sa

PlaceCity of LhasaLhasa Drongkhyerlha sa grong khyer

PlaceChi. LinzhouLhündruplhun grub

Sanskrit

TypeDatesSanskritEnglishPhoneticsWylie

Buddhist deityAvalokiteśvara

Termbodhisattva

Buddhist deityŚākyamuni Buddha

Chinese

TypeDatesChineseEnglishPhoneticsWylie

PlaceAli

PlaceBayi

PlaceBeijing

PlaceChangdu

Termchengdefensive wall

PlaceChengdu

Termchengguan qumetropolitandistrict

Termchengshicity

Termchexian sheshiabolishing countyand establishingcity


PlaceChongqing

Termcunvillage

PersonDeng Xiaoping

Termfei nongyenon-agricultural

Termhukouhouseholdregistration

PlaceJiangze

Termjiedao banshichucity street office

Termjuwei hui(city) neighborhoodcommittee

PlaceLang xian

PersonLi Changan

PersonLi Chang-an

PlaceLingzhi

PersonLiu Rui

PersonLiu Shaoqi

PersonMao

PersonMao Zedong

PlaceMianyang

PlaceNaqu

TermneidiChina Proper

PlaceNingbo

PlaceNingzhi

Termnong cunrural area

Termnongyeagricultural

PlacePali

PlaceQinghai

Termqudistrict OR urbanward

NewspaperRenmin RibaoPeople’s Daily

PlaceRikaze

PlaceSajia

Termshicity, municipality;in the case ofLhasa, aprefectural-levelmunicipality

Termshimarket

Termshi dai xiancity-led county

PlaceShiquanhe

PlaceSichuan

PersonWencheng

Termxiancounty

Termxiangtownship(administrativedesignation)


Termxiang xiacountryside, village

OrganizationXinhua

Text2004Xizang TongjiNianjian 2004

Tibet StatisticalYearbook 2004

PersonXu Mingyang

PlaceYadong

PlaceZedang

PlaceZhamu

PersonZhang Yisun

PlaceZhejiang

Termzhenurban town

PublisherZhongguoCaizhengJingji Chunbanshe

China Economyand Finance Press

Text1997Zhongguo RenkouTongji Nianjian

China PopulationStatistics Yearbook

Text1988Zhongguo Renkou:Xizang Fen Ce

China’sPopulation: TibetVolume

PublisherZhongguo RenminJiefang Jun Zong

China People’sLiberation ArmyGeneral StaffHeadquartersBureau of Surveyand MappingDivision

Canmou Bu CehuiJu

PublisherZhongguo TongjiChubanshe

China StatisticsPress

Text2003Zhongguo 2000Xianji RenkouPucha Ziliao

China 2000 CountyPopulation Census

PublisherZhongguoZhanwangChubanshe

China StateStasitical BureauPress


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