In her aptly titled Exile from the Grasslands, Jarmila Ptáčková sets out to document how China's western regions development strategies in the late reform era have played out in Tibetan pastoralist areas. She shows how state actors at different administrative levels have employed various policy projects over the last two decades that frame interventions in terms of environmental protection and poverty alleviation, with the broader aim of loosening Tibetan ties to land and subsistence-based livelihoods and integrating Tibetan communities into the national market-based economy. This has had the effect of sedentarizing Tibetan pastoralists – moving them from their pastures to settlements in urban centres at a scale and speed unparalleled in the history of the Tibetan region. Yet, as Ptáčková demonstrates, Tibetan actors meet these state initiatives with strategies of their own that attempt to mitigate the risks inherent in giving up ways of life based on ancestral lands for unknown futures tied to wage-based labour in the cities. The author believes that the shift from rural to urban livelihoods is inevitable, perhaps occurring within the next one or more generations if allowed to unfold without state intervention. However, she argues that while the accelerated time frame demanded by state policy planning produces dramatic quantitative results in the short run, mass sedentarization implemented on such a rapid timeline may lead to further economic marginalization of Tibetan communities and erosion of Tibetan identity that exacerbates political instability in the long run.
Ptáčková's point of departure is the “Great Opening of the West” development strategy (Xibu da kaifa), which was launched in 1999 with the goal of balancing the uneven economic development between China's booming coastal regions and its underdeveloped interior. As a national development framework in the broadest of terms, it encompasses diverse and often overlapping policy initiatives, ranging from infrastructure and telecommunications building, to economic development, to ecological protection. As Ptáčková rightly recognizes, development goals and projects developed at the top levels are ultimately shaped by how state actors at lower administrative levels interpret and implement them, leading to diverse local outcomes. Thus, she zooms in on the case of Tsekhok (Zeku) county, located in Qinghai province, to ask what development stemming from the “Great Opening of the West” looks like for Tibetan pastoralists in eastern Tibet who traditionally follow a transhumant form of pastoralism.
She bases the bulk of her analysis on a close study of primary policy documents, largely in Chinese, issued from the central levels in Beijing, provincial bureaus and county-level governments, spanning the period from the mid-1990s to 2018. She supplements this with ethnographic fieldwork to understand how development policy and plans translate to implementation on the ground and are experienced by Tibetan pastoralists themselves. Specifically, she spent 24 months spread out over nearly annual visits between 2005 to 2017 to interview local government officials and Tibetan pastoralists affected by sedentarization projects in Tsekhok county and surrounding areas in Qinghai, Sichuan and Gansu.
Over the course of the first four chapters, Ptáčková follows how these development strategies and goals issued in Beijing percolate through the various administrative levels, to take form in ways that are materially visible to government administrators measuring their outputs and to Tibetan pastoralists staking their claims to limited government resources that promise to improve their lives. Her fifth chapter takes a deeper dive, providing several case studies of individual settlements at the village level in Tsekhok county. These case studies reveal the varied ways in which settlement housing projects were implemented in different townships, how ecological conditions of local grasslands affected pastoralists’ aspirations for and experiences of settlement life, and how differential access to settlement housing on top of existing inequities has exacerbated economic disparities even within a single community.
She finds that a common theme running through many of the major development projects – from the ecological protection initiatives leading up to the establishment of the national-level Sanjiangyuan National Park to the Targeted Poverty Alleviation of more recent years – are policy instruments that take various direct and indirect steps towards the large-scale sedentarization of Tibetan pastoralists. However, a decade into her fieldwork, she identifies major failures of these development projects, such as shoddily built settlement infrastructure and, most importantly, a lack of alternative economic livelihoods in the settlements, which has led to an overdependence on state subsidies and a widening economic gap among Tibetan pastoralists.
While Ptáčková's fieldwork and study spans the period from 2007 to 2017, her secondary sources could include more recent works by Duojie Zhaxi, Gongbuzeren, Huatse Gyal, Charlene Makley, Emilia Sułek, Tsering Bum, Ute Wallenbock and Stuart Wright, to name but a few. These works largely reinforce her findings and provide rich ethnographic detail on aspects of pastoral life intertwined with sedentarization, such as the caterpillar fungus economy, education and school consolidation, state–local relations, community-based rangeland management and more. Nevertheless, Exile from the Grasslands encompasses the years leading up to and following the plateau-wide protests of 2008 and thus documents the shift in policy emphasis from ecological protection and infrastructure development to an intensified focus on sedentarization. In particular, her interviews bring to a wider readership many commonly expressed experiences of Tibetan pastoralists affected by sedentarization.
In a refreshingly clear fashion, the author untangles and traces the often-overlapping paths of policies from the top levels of the central government to the local levels of implementation. In this regard, Exile from the Grasslands will be a welcome addition for introducing undergraduate and graduate students to development policy in Tibetan areas of China. While previous work on development policy in Tibetan pastoralist areas have focused more narrowly on regional- or provincial-level impacts of policy, Ptáčková frames her study squarely in the context of China's national development strategy. In doing so, she contributes a study that will be of broader interest to students and scholars of reform-era development in lesser-studied regions of China.
