Tibetan monks peacefully demonstrated in Lhasa, the capital of Chinese-occupied Tibet, on Mar. 10 to mark the 49th anniversary of Tibetan Uprising Day. After a hard crackdown by Chinese authorities, the non-violent calls for Tibetan freedoms spiralled out of control days later into the riots that spilled onto the streets of Lhasa.

The aggressive protests were completely out of character for the residents of the southwestern Chinese territory, who for decades have adhered to the non-violent preachings of the Dalai Lama, leader of Tibet's government in exile. But those within the Tibetan community are saying that it was only a matter of time before the situation erupted in Lhasa.

Tibetans walk along a road in eastern Tibet, where urbanization is taking off and leaving Tibetan culture behind. Typical of state-sponsored development in the area, the road sign is in Manadrin and not the native language. Photo courtesy of International Campaign for Tibet

“Young people are just getting fed up,” said Thubten Samdup, founder of the Canada Tibet Committee, which advocates for the restoration of human rights and local culture in the Tibetan Autonomous Region.  “It's a new generation of young Tibetans who have watched their parents go through all of this frustration, and they're slowly watching their country die in front of their eyes. When they see monks and nuns getting beaten up, they just cant take it anymore, so they're out in the streets protesting.”

In fact, it is this young generation of Tibetans that has seen the greatest changes to its homeland over the course of the past 20 years, with the Chinese government's implementation of development projects in the autonomous region.

The migration of ethnic Han Chinese people into Tibet has steadily increased since the late 1980s. Han Chinese account for more than 90 per cent of China's population. You won't see the effects of migration in the rural regions of Tibet, where the majority of ethnic Tibetans live and work, but it's quite a different story in the cities.

Ronald Schwartz, a Memorial University sociology professor specializing in the development of Tibet, said that Tibetans have become minorities in their own homes.

“If you take Lhasa, for instance, the population may be as much as two-thirds Han Chinese,” he said. “Basically what you have is a Tibetan quarter in the centre of the city with an expanding ring around that centre that are basically Chinese suburbs. They just keep getting bigger and bigger, and the buildings get higher and higher.”

It has been a dramatic increase over a fairly short period of time. Schwartz estimated that as recently as 10 years ago, Han migrants made up only one-third of Lhasa's permanent residents. Looking back another decade, there were almost none. Other Tibetan centres, such as Shigatse and Chamdo, have seen their outlying regions develop in the same manner as Lhasa's.

“It's very dramatic. Anybody who goes to Lhasa is struck by this. You would think you're in a Chinese city until you got to the centre, or outside the city where the farmers are,” said Schwartz. “The Han migrants in Tibet are basically coming in and taking any economic opportunities that exist in those areas.”

The new Tibetan economy

In the process, this has meant fewer opportunities and further marginalization for Tibetans. Development in the region has taken off with a number of projects subsidized by the Chinese central government. Virtually no commercial Tibetan economy existed until the influx of money began connecting the region with the rest of China by rebuilding infrastructure and property.

But the boom in Tibet has come at the price of a diluted native population and culture. The development projects that have been put in place are contracted to Chinese enterprises, that in turn bring with them a host of Han workers west to Tibetan cities while hiring few locals. The large number of Chinese coming to work in Tibet spawned small-scale businesses to serve other Han migrants.

“As the central core of Lhasa has shrunk and redevelopment has been forced on that core, historic buildings are being knocked down and new structures built,” said Schwartz. “Those structures tend to be occupied by Chinese merchants, who now are even moving into things like the tourist trade. The increasing number of tourists are Chinese as well, so there's a synergistic logic to the whole thing.”

Schwartz noted that many of the Han businesses that were targeted in the Mar. 14 riots were located in Lhasa's Tibetan core. It was an expression of frustration over not only the economic disparity that is growing between Han and Tibetan, but also a linguistic gap that fuels the situation.

With the Han population now the majority in cities, the Tibetan dialect is becoming marginalized in favour of Mandarin. Most Tibetans speak poor or no Mandarin, which makes them ineligible for most jobs that have been created as a part of development projects or other businesses catering to Han migrants.

Meanwhile, a couple of Canadian companies have aided in this process directly. Bombardier  and Nortel Networks were both key players in building the Qingzang railway, which opened in 2006. The railway connects Lhasa all the way to Xining, a near-2,000 kilometre train trip away {almost 2,000 kilometres away} in China's Qinghai province.

More than 100,000 workers were employed in the railway's construction, over 90 per cent of whom were Han Chinese. The transportation link directly into the Tibetan capital has also made the trek much more simple and attractive for migrants.

“The train has brought hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese into Tibet,” said Samdup. “That has definitely created an animosity, because all of the good jobs on the government development projects are going to Chinese. But, what we're seeing today is nothing new. This has been ongoing for a number of years. Tibetans have very silently suffered under oppressive policy, so the migration hasn't helped the sentiment of Tibetans.”

The Olympic spotlight

Several western advocacy groups have called for the end of Tibetan oppression for years. But with the Beijing Olympics just months away, protests in Tibet and abroad have once again made China's political stance and its human rights record there a hot topic for the media and the international community.

The April anti-China demonstrations along Olympic torch relay routes in Europe were an  embarrassment for a country that made a moral engagement to improve its policies towards Tibet and other human rights issues upon the selection of its bid to host the Games seven years ago. International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge called the situation a “crisis.”

Samdup said that there is plenty of sympathy among Western states for the Tibetan people, but it will take much more than civilian demonstrations for anything to change.

“China could have avoided all of this if they had sat down with the Dalai Lama and negotiated, but that never happened,” he said. “But why should they? There's been no pressure on the Chinese government from the world community for a very long time. It takes people sacrificing their lives and all of a sudden other governments are paying attention. It's unfortunate.”

Some countries have seriously considered at least a boycott of the opening ceremonies. Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier called upon the Chinese government to allow for peaceful protests to continue and to open dialogue with the Dalai Lama, but Samdup said the Canadian government hasn't come to Tibet's defence in practice.

“We haven't seen any pressure because everybody wants to do business with China,” he said. “Trade and economic interest has taken precedence over human rights. So our government has its own justification, saying it's better policy to engage with China.”

Schwartz said the nature of Tibet's new subsidy economy is one where if Beijing chose to scrap its development projects there, a good portion of the Han migrants would probably leave in search of work elsewhere. There's been no sign of that happening so far, but Tibet will continue to dwell in the spotlight, at least until the Olympic closing ceremonies on Aug. 24. That's exactly where it will need to stay if any leverage can be put on the Chinese government to ease Tibetan oppression.

“They started out because of the significance of March 10,” Schwartz said of the Tibetan demonstrators, “but I'm sure the Olympics figured in there somewhere. They were certainly aware of them, and the fact that right now the whole world is watching.”