The Disempowered Development of Tibet in China by Fischer Andrew Martin

Author:Fischer, Andrew Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780739134399
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

However, after the late 1990s, the pattern of the TAR diverged from the other three western provinces shown here, which continued to experience a rising rural share for several years (up to the mid-2000s in the case of Gansu). The rural share of the TAR started to fall from 82 percent in 2000 to 70 percent in 2010. This was over half of the almost 21 percent drop in the primary employment share over these same years. Notably, this corroborates with the above-mentioned survey results of Goldstein et al. (2008, 522), in which about half of the respondents who were “going for income” (i.e., labor migration) were doing so by migrating to urban areas, whereas about half migrated to other rural areas. As a result, the TAR ended this period with a much smaller rural labor force than in Sichuan or Gansu, converging with Qinghai and in tandem with the national trend.

In contrast, the rural share of employment in the other western provinces fell later and by much less. The rural share in Qinghai, the next most similar province to the TAR in terms of population and topography, fell by less than 5 percent between 2000 and 2010, albeit it started this period with a much lower rural employment share than most other western provinces, almost on par with the national average. The primary sector share in Qinghai fell almost 19 percent. If these data are accurate, three-quarters of the shift of labor out of the primary sector in Qinghai was absorbed by other types of rural employment. Similarly, there was only a 6 percent drop in the rural share of Sichuan despite the 17 percent drop in the primary share, resulting in a surprisingly rural province (at almost 80 percent of total employment in 2010) despite the sharp reduction in primary share to 43 percent, which was close to the national average and probably reflects strong rural off-farm employment generation over these years. Thus, while the Sichuan labor force was apparently less urbanized than that of the TAR, it was also much less agrarian. In Gansu, the rural share fell by only 1.3 percent alongside a decline in the primary share of almost 9 percent. Nationally, trends between these two shares were broadly correspondent over this period, with the rural share falling 13.5 percent while the primary share fell 13.3 percent, implying that, by the end of the decade, almost all the labor that shifted out of agriculture shifted out of the rural areas altogether (in an aggregate sense). Among the western cases shown here, the TAR exceptionally shows the strongest shedding of primary sector employment outside of the rural areas altogether, coming closest to the national aggregate trend, albeit under very different economic conditions.

Inversely, if the urban employment share can be taken as a rough proxy of the rate of urbanization,11 it also suggests that the TAR population—and Tibetans in the TAR more specifically (given that the rural areas are almost entirely Tibetan)—has been experiencing some of the most rapid urbanization over this period in comparison to other western provinces.

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