Infrastructure projects in Tibet have often drawn controversy for failing to balance development, human rights, and environmental protection. As CDT has covered this year, state-sponsored hydropower projects have forcibly displaced local communities and led to violent reprisals against protesters. A series of recent reports expand on this topic to highlight the social and environmental perils of these projects. Last week, the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) published a report titled, “Chinese Hydropower: Damning Tibet’s Culture, Community, and Environment.” The report includes an interactive map showing the location of 193 hydropower dams constructed or proposed in Tibet since 2000, along with their areas of impact and proximity to locations of cultural importance, protected areas, and land cover. The report reveals that these dam projects are causing “irreparable damage” to Tibetan communities, downstream countries, and the environment:
If completed, 1.2 million residents living nearby dam projects could be dislocated from their homes, communities, and livelihoods. Religious and sacred sites serving communities will also be destroyed.
Almost 80 per cent of dams studied are large or mega dams (\>100MW), which carry the most significant risk to the Tibetan civilization, environmental sustainability, and the climate. However, over half the dams (60%) are either in proposal or preparation stage, presenting opportunities to change course.
A truly sustainable pathway for the energy plan must account for the climate, social, environment, and geopolitical costs of hydropower and change course. No plan is sustainable without the consent, participation and co-management of local communities.
Tibetans, who remain among the most politically marginalized in China, should not bear the highest cost to power China’s industrial centers. Any long-term solution must involve a political solution where Tibetan people enjoy the right to freely decide how their natural resources are used. This begins with the PRC entering into a meaningful dialogue with representatives of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. [Source]
Speaking to French newspaper Libération about the report, ICT researcher and advocacy officer Tenzin Palmo stated, “We wanted to show what was happening in this inaccessible border area in the west of the country, but also to reveal the projects of the Chinese authorities who are trying by all means to hide information, to harass civil society, all while engaging in a greenwashing operation around these dams.” Other groups have provided related evidence. Last month, Turquoise Roof and Tibet Watch published a report titled, “The risks of China’s dangerous dam-building in Tibet: the impacts of China’s move upstream on the Machu/Yellow River,” which highlighted the threat of geological disasters and environmental problems:
For the first time, China’s construction of hydropower dams is reaching upstream to the sources of Asia’s great wild rivers in Tibet, with at least three major new dams on the upper Machu (Chinese: Huang He) river. Chinese scientists have warned of the risks of heavy infrastructure construction in a seismically unstable region where river systems are increasingly unpredictable due to climate change.
[…] While China can point to its solar and hydro projects in Tibet to signal a green transition, the smart grid is currently orientated to fossil fuels, which may reveal a slower, less substantial shift than these projects imply. Although hydroelectric power is technically renewable, the large-scale hydropower projects underway in Tibet have complex environmental and social impacts, including ecosystem disruption and displacement of communities.
The first major dam to be built upriver on the Machu, the Yangkhil (Yangqu) hydropower station, has devastated an entire community. Accounts and images from eyewitnesses in this report documents how Tibetans have been compelled to dismantle their own homes and an important monastery has been emptied and destroyed. China removed the monastery from a protected heritage list before beginning demolition to make way for a dam that Chinese engineers boast is constructed by AI-driven robots. [Source]
In the Made in China Journal last month, James Leibold wrote about the Tibet-Aid Project, which he describes as a CCP initiative that pairs Tibet’s administrative units with inland government actors in order to extend Beijing’s settler-colonial enterprise and fortify Han dominance in the region. Among the Tibet-Aid cadres championed in CCP propaganda are Han engineers committed to transforming Tibet’s physical landscape through “civilizing” infrastructure projects. Leibold argued, “By unleashing a new legion of Han officials and settlers on to the Tibetan Plateau, Xi seeks to complete the discursive, demographic, and cultural integration of Tibet into a new Han empire.” In this excerpt, he describes how Han migration and infrastructure-building erode local Tibetan sovereignty:
Most of the Han people living and working in Tibet today are descendants of former Tibet-Aid cadres. In a recent survey of 300-plus Han retirees who had worked in Tibet, 49 per cent had a parent who had previously worked in Tibet, with one-quarter of those born in Tibet (Zhou and Du 2023: 83). They are called ‘second’ or ‘third-generation Tibetans’ (藏二代 or 藏三代) in Chinese and now make up the backbone of the party-state’s governing and economic apparatuses in the region. According to officials, they are the ‘strongest source of strength’ for forging what Xi Jinping has called the ‘collective consciousness’ (共同体意识) of the Han-centric nation/race (Thondup and Tsring 2023). By claiming Tibetan identity, albeit an altered one, Han migrants are engaging in a common settler-colonial strategy—what Lorenzo Veracini (2010: 46) calls the discursive erasure of ‘indigenous specific alterity’.
Han colonists live a highly fluid existence in the TAR and their roots are impermanent. Due to health concerns, they split their time between apartments in lower-elevation cities, chiefly in Sichuan, and their posts on the plateau. China’s mega-infrastructure building in the TAR—roads, airports, railways, power and telecommunication lines, etcetera—serves as conduits for Han mobility, allowing colonial subjects to move more comfortably and smoothly through ‘harsh’ Tibetan spaces while imprinting the landscape with Han norms that ultimately efface Tibetan sovereignty. The 1,629-kilometre Chengdu-to-Lhasa high-speed railway is of ‘immense strategic value’, a 2018 blog post asserts, as it will not only facilitate military logistics, but also allow the vibrant economy and Han-dominated population of the Sichuan Basin to ‘more easily spread and radiate into the Tibet region’ when it is completed in 2030 (Sohu 2018). [Source]
Similar dynamics are playing out in other borderland regions, such as Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. In an article for Atmos, Nithin Coca and Patrick Wack described how state-affiliated energy companies have built massive solar plants in Xinjiang that greenwash rights abuses against local Uyghur communities. Uyghur activists argue that these projects are part of longstanding efforts to Sinicize the region and exploit its resources while further colonizing their homeland through Han migration. This also plays out in the realm of Tibetan language politics, as the Chinese government has imposed Sinicization policies to force Tibetans to use Mandarin instead of their local languages. For more on this topic, see CDT’s recent interview with Gerald Roche about the erasure of Tibet’s minority languages, which face unique challenges in the face of both Mandarin and Standard Tibetan. Other interviews can be found in CDT’s series on Tibet.
