The Tibet-Aid Project and Settler Colonialism in China’s Borderlands
This year marks 30 years since China launched its ambitious Tibet-Aid Project (援藏计划), a vast and ongoing party-state effort to reshape the region. Unveiled at the 1994 Tibet Work Forum, the scheme pairs Tibet’s administrative units with inland provinces, cities, and state-owned enterprises, injecting Han Chinese expertise, resources, and capital into the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). The goal, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tell us, is to drive rapid development while ensuring long-term stability (Yang 2024). But the project is also a key element of Beijing’s settler-colonial enterprise, aimed at fortifying Han dominance at the expense of indigenous minorities such as the Tibetans.
Under President Xi Jinping, the CCP has greatly expanded the scope of Tibet-Aid. Xi has repeatedly praised the ‘old Tibet spirit’ (老西藏精神), in which successive generations of Han colonists sacrifice their personal comfort to plant roots on the harsh plateau and struggle hard (Xinhua 2015). This recalls the heroic efforts of the 18th Army Group of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), who marched into Tibet during the 1950s to assert Han control over the region. Yet, this mission is incomplete. The TAR is one of the only parts of the People’s Republic of China where the Han still represent a significant minority of the population (the other being southern Xinjiang).
Amid the propaganda for the thirtieth anniversary celebrations, a Han saviour complex emerges, reminiscent of settler-colonial projects throughout history. Tibetans, like Indigenous Australians or Native Americans, are portrayed as indolent residents of a resource-rich land who lack the ability to unlock its potential. That task falls to the more capable Han people. And this ‘Han man’s burden’ is one of not only mettle and self-sacrifice but also hardship, illness, and even death. Yang Miaoyan (2020) notes that Han officials involved in aiding Tibet often struggle with balancing altruism and self-interest.
In this essay, I briefly examine the flawed hero complex driving the Tibet-Aid Project and argue that, despite its limitations, Xi Jinping remains resolute in completing what Emily Yeh (2013) labelled the ‘taming of Tibet’. 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.
The Hazards of Aiding Tibet
Following the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping sought to unlock the entrepreneurial potential of the Chinese people by reducing the CCP’s involvement in their daily lives. In Tibet and other frontier regions, the party initially reiterated its promise of autonomy, even withdrawing Han officials and settlers for a time (Li 2019). However, the resurgence of unrest and the twin shocks of the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising and 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union prompted a strategic pivot. At the Third Tibet Work Forum in 1994, then premier Li Peng claimed Tibet’s capacity for self-development was limited, necessitating prolonged state intervention (News of the Communist Party of China n.d.).
Through ‘counterpart assistance’ and the ‘regular rotation’ of Han officials, the party aimed not only to suppress separatist sentiments linked to the exiled Dalai Lama but also to drive ‘leap-frog development’. In June 1995, the first ‘batch’ of 622 Han cadres began their assignments in the TAR, assuming key roles as county party secretaries, heads of industry, and school principals (Jin 2010: 170–78). The goal, according to an internal speech on the spirit of the Third Forum, was a ‘permanent contingent of [Han] cadres in Tibet’ (Barnett 1996). However, the term of service for ‘Tibet-Aid cadres’ (援藏干部) was capped at three years due to low enthusiasm, as it was generally regarded as an unwelcome, and potentially perilous, assignment—for instance, Barnett (1996: n.70) mentions the firing of one Han vice-mayor, who refused to serve in Tibet.
In CCP propaganda, Tibet-Aid cadres are celebrated as a new generation of ‘constructors’ (建设者)—a noble class of pioneers, colonists, and engineers committed to transforming the physical and human ‘wasteland’ while securing the nation’s borders and bringing ‘civilisation’ to the borderlands (Cliff 2016b: 27–49). Only the strongest of constructors can endure the unique and challenging geography of the Tibetan Plateau. Take, for example, 35-year-old Guangzhou resident Xu Xiaozhu (许晓珠), who volunteered for the Tibet-Aid Project in 2004 and was assigned deputy party secretary of remote Mêdog County (墨脱县) on the highly securitised border with India (CCTV 2007).
At the time, Mêdog was a poverty-stricken county cut off from the rest of China, with only a single dirt track running through some of the world’s steepest canyons in the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo River. In charge of transportation, Mr Xu was said to have
climbed over snow-capped mountains, through dense forests, up cliffs, over cliffs, through areas infested with leeches and poisonous snakes. Braving the dangers of avalanches and landslides, he ignored the effects of altitude sickness such as oxygen deficiency, dizziness, and insomnia. (CCTV 2007)
His mission: convince his superiors in Lhasa, Guangdong, and Beijing to construct a bitumen highway connecting Mêdog with the rest of China. As a selfless servant of the party and the nation, Xu endured his longing for his wife and children at home, including his daughter born with cerebral palsy. The much-celebrated 100-kilometre Bomê to Mêdog Highway was eventually completed in 2013, with Xu receiving the National May First Labour Medal and other rewards for his valiant service.
As part of the thirtieth anniversary celebrations, Xu Xiaozhu triumphantly returned to Mêdog this year, navigating the ‘heavenly highway’ in an off-road vehicle. He completed the journey to the county seat in just four and a half hours—an impressive feat compared with the arduous five-day trek he braved on foot at the start of his service. State media claimed that thanks to the dedicated efforts of generations of Tibet-Aid cadres, the ‘long-suffering’ natives of Mêdog have finally entered the ‘fast lane of development’. They now enjoy improved infrastructure, including new roads, schools, medical facilities, communication towers, and livelihood projects, such as tea plantations and orchards (Fu 2024).
Despite the official narrative, Tibet-Aid cadres are widely resented among Tibetans, especially when compared with earlier generations of Han officials who tried to learn the local languages and integrate into Tibetan society (Yeh 2013: 102; Zhao 2021: 949–52; Wang 2004). The model worker Kang Fansen (孔繁森), known as the ‘people’s servant’ (人民服务员), is the benchmark; celebrated in films, books, and museums, he dedicated nearly a decade to construction in Tibet during the 1970s and 1980s before tragically dying in a traffic accident while on duty (The Paper 2024c). In comparison, most Tibetans deride the new wave of Tibet-Aid cadres, labelling them ‘eat-Tibet cadres’ (吃藏干部) or ‘migratory birds’ (候鸟), for prioritising personal welfare, vanity projects, and career advancement over the provision of genuine assistance (Yang 2019: 103).
The CCP celebrates figures like Kang Fansen and Xu Xiaozhu as symbols of national sacrifice because most Han people view Tibet as backwards, dangerous, and corrupt, and thus unsuitable for Han settlement. Although nearly 40 million Han tourists flocked to the region in 2023 (Xinhua 2023a), drawn by thrills and mysticism, the tourism industry’s exoticised portrayal of the region lures Han, yet ultimately dissuades them from putting down roots in its harsh environment. In their analysis of Han sojourners in Tibet, Qian and Zhu (2016: 419) argue they navigate ‘the restless transformation of Tibet in profoundly ambiguous and contradictory ways’.
Chinese social media frequently emphasises the physical discomforts and health risks associated with extended time on the plateau. Han colonists face a range of health issues, including high blood pressure, gout, diarrhoea, depression, chronic insomnia, and poor diet. They also experience noticeable changes in their physical appearance—what is called ‘plateau redness’ (高原红), due to exposure to the dry air and strong ultraviolet rays at high altitudes (Xinhua 2019; Whitefield-Madrano 2016).
There are frequent WeChat posts about the heartbreaking death of Tibet-Aid cadres due to traffic accidents, altitude sickness, or overwork. In the mid-2010s, Tibet-Aid worker Zhang Yingxiu (张英秀) was told to expect several deaths in her group of Anhui teachers and wrote about her fear of ‘not surviving but rather ending up sleeping for eternity at the foot of Mount Gongbori’ as she counted down the days to her return home (Zhang 2016). Others fail to adapt socially. Feeling lonely, bored, and afraid, one young Han teacher working in a remote Tibetan village remarked: ‘I do not feel I belong here and I really feel that I have no gains by taking this job’ (Wang 2018: 44).
While state media seeks to inspire Han settlers to sacrifice themselves for the nation, social media posts amplify anxieties about the pitfalls of working in Tibet. One irrigation cadre remarked in 2019 that, ‘due to their physiological structure, Han Chinese comrades cannot adapt to life at high altitudes’ (China Water Resources 2019). Living conditions present significant challenges, but the notoriously corrupt local politics can also ensnare outsiders. Take the tragic fate of Luo Huaibin (罗怀斌), a 54-year-old Tibet-Aid cadre, who was found dead in a guesthouse in Lakang Township (拉康镇) nearly 2,500 kilometres from his home in Changsha, Hunan, in 2020 (NetEase 2024).
Authorities attributed Luo’s death to a heart attack—a common fate for Han cadres in Tibet. However, his widow, Zhou Meiru (周美如), alleged foul play on social media, citing the bruises on his face and body as evidence of a ‘well-planned conspiracy’ to murder him. She claims that, after Luo accused his boss, Yang Ning (杨宁), of corruption, Yang orchestrated his death. Four years on, Luo’s body remains uncremated in a Lhasa funeral parlour while his widow fights for justice (The Paper 2024b).
Amid the thirtieth anniversary celebrations, Luo Huaibin’s work unit posthumously recognised him as an ‘outstanding CCP member’ and granted his widow compensation. Yet, they also dismissed allegations of foul play, claiming the investigation was ‘standard, open, and transparent’ while cautioning against the spreading of rumours that could disrupt social harmony and stability (State Forestry and Grassland Administration Central South Institute 2024). Such incidents complicate the party’s efforts to attract Han talent to serve in Tibet, let alone migrate there.
Doubling Down on Tibet-Aid
In response to these concerns, Xi Jinping has not only appealed to patriotism but also increased the incentive structures for those aiding Tibet. On a 2021 visit to Lhasa to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of its ‘peaceful liberation’, he praised the ‘noble spirit’ of Tibet-Aid by claiming ‘there is no shortage of spirit’ on the plateau ‘despite the lack of oxygen’ (Cui 2024). To help uplift this spirit, he instructed government officials to formulate a new range of ‘special wage and welfare benefits’ for cadres and workers in the TAR to ‘support them and solve their worries’.
Alongside generous salaries (double, if not more than elsewhere), relocation and housing subsidies, a monthly high-altitude allowance, special food rations, paid family leave, and other benefits, aid cadres are promised rapid promotion after their term of service (these benefits are complex, with details varying depending on the dispatching and receiving work units; see Yang 2019: 107, 2020: 627; Tsai and Wang 2024: 44). Children of Tibet-Aid cadres, as well as individuals investing RMB3 million in the region, can also sit the ultra-competitive university entrance exam in the TAR, which increases their chances of gaining admission to top universities due to the region’s lower entry requirements and preferential treatment for exam-takers. To sweeten the deal, the TAR Government is building a 3,000-student high school in Chengdu for the children of Tibet-Aid cadres, where they can study in comfort before sitting the exam in Lhasa (RFA 2024).
The lure of these benefits (as well as the coercive powers of the party) has contributed to the substantial expansion of the Tibet-Aid project under Xi Jinping. The number of officials being sent each rotation has quadrupled in recent years, with 2,114 sent as part of the tenth batch in 2024 (Yang 2024: 136). Nearly three-quarters of the more than 12,000 cadres dispatched since 1994 occurred under Xi’s direction (Sohu 2024). These officials are taking on more significant administrative roles, with some choosing to follow Xi’s advice to put down roots in Tibet, even if only temporarily. For example, Wang Qiang (王强), the new Mayor of Lhasa, originally came to the city as the leader of Beijing’s Tibet-Aid team in 2019 and decided to stay after the end of his three years of service. He is now promoting outside investment in the city through a new round of preferential incentives, including a low personal tax rate, exemptions from corporate income tax, and fast-tracked approvals (The Paper 2024a).
Under President Xi, the CCP has also pioneered new forms of Tibet-Aid and Han talent recruitment. Since 2015, more than 4,000 Han teachers and doctors from across China have been sent to Tibetan schools and hospitals, with these ‘group-style’ (组团式) assignments typically spending from one to three years mentoring local staff (Chen and Fan 2024). Other secondments are even shorter, with ‘small group’ (小组团) aid offering ‘short, fast, and effective’ assistance since 2019, which is more precisely tailored to regional needs, such as short training courses, exhibitions, and research projects (Yu 2024). In 2018, the Ministry of Education initiated the ‘ten-thousand teachers program’ (援藏援疆万名教师支教计划), aiming to train local teachers in Tibet, Qinghai, and Xinjiang by dispatching leading Han teachers and administrators to the region.
It is hoped some of these educators will remain on the frontier, like Wu Zhenzhu (吴珍珠), who volunteered for the Guangdong aid team in 2013 and was assigned deputy party secretary of the Education Department in Nyingchi City. Six years later, she volunteered again, this time bringing her husband and two young children to Nyingchi. In a recent media profile, Wu is quoted as saying: ‘Nyingchi needs me, and I need Nyingchi even more.’ The article pointed out that for Ms Wu, ‘supporting Tibet is not only about giving but also about gaining’—both as a ‘model individual’ awardee and through opportunities for her family to benefit from preferential policies and upward social mobility (Yangcheng Evening News 2021).
Over the past two decades the TAR Government has also sought to recruit thousands of Han students from the interior. Pathways include the ‘College Student Volunteer Service Program for the Western Regions’ (大学生志愿服务西部计划), which assigns university students to grassroots and remote locations for one to three years after graduation; and the ‘Tibet-Directed Student Program’ (西藏定向生), which provides up to 500 students with a free education at top-tier universities in exchange for five years of service in the TAR on graduation. These opportunities appeal to students from poorer, inland provinces such as Sichuan, Yunnan, Qinghai, and Henan, and, according to government statistics, nearly 60 per cent remain in the TAR after their mandatory service, becoming a key part of a new ‘native’ Han cadre force (Dingxiang Xizang 2021; Brown 2023: 73–76). A recent article placed the total number of volunteers in the TAR at 11,751 over the past 20 years (Xinhua 2023b). In 2023, as part of the twentieth anniversary of the Volunteer Service Program, 1,230 students were recruited, and 7,229 (62 per cent) have volunteered since 2015 (Tianyuan Shengxue 2024; Xinhua 2023b), suggesting a similar ramping up of this program in recent years.
‘Second and Third Generation [Han] Tibetans’
Xi Jinping has repeatedly urged settlers to ‘put down roots in Tibet’ (扎根西藏) (China Youth Daily 2022). While he does not explicitly mention the Han, the very notion of root-making suggests non-indigenous migration. The Tibetans are already rooted in their homeland. Chinese state media, especially in this anniversary year, frequently profiles Han who have decided to make Tibet their home in service of the motherland and themselves.
Zhang Yinbo (张银波) is one of these pioneers. He volunteered in 2014 to escape a difficult family situation after graduating from Baoshan College in Yunnan. He first taught English in a remote township school in Gyaca County (加查县) before passing the TAR civil service exam and taking up a job with the Lhokha City Government. Deciding to ‘put down roots’ in Tibet and ‘devote his life’ to the region, he declared in a recent media interview: ‘Tibet, I’m your child … [I]f you come to Tibet, you must become a Tibetan’ (Tibet Business Daily 2024). Han settlers like Zhang Yinbo are better placed (in terms of networks, capital, language, and cultural skills) to exploit what Tom Cliff (2016a) calls the ‘lucrative chaos’ of aid-dependent frontier regions like Xinjiang and Tibet, ultimately dispossessing the very minorities they are supposedly there to aid.
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).
On the ‘Second-Generation Tibetan’ (藏二代) WeChat channel, Han colonists are posting photos of themselves in front of the Potala Palace with short tales about their deep and emotive connections to the TAR. They are a unique cohort of constructors, according to one WeChat blogger (Yuanshi Wuyu 2023). They exhibit a close-knit ‘compound culture’ and ‘strong sense of identity and ownership of Tibet’. They also know how to navigate the messy politics of Tibet and have grown wealthy thanks to their high government wages and side business hustles. ‘They have a complex relationship with Tibet, one of both repulsion and yearning’, and their children, who have a difficult upbring in the mainland separated from their parents, are inevitably drawn to work in Tibet.
Take for example, Yang Guoying (杨国英), whose father worked at the Lhasa Aircraft Maintenance Factory from 1960. With her elder sister already working in Chamdo, Ms Yang left her mother and younger sister in the countryside and joined her father in Lhasa in 1974. She began work at the Yangbajing Geothermal Power Plant in 1977 and married her husband, a battalion commander in the PLA, in 1981. She worked in Lhasa until her husband was transferred to Chongqing in 1988, but frequently returns to Tibet for a visit (Second-Generation Tibetan 2023).
The Final Frontier
There are no reliable figures for the number of Han living and working in the TAR. The 2020 National Census put the number at 443,370 or 12.2 per cent of the total TAR population. This represents an 81 per cent increase since 2010 and a nearly 500 per cent increase since 1990 (Fischer 2021; Sun and Li 1995: 37). While this figure includes some temporary migrants (anyone who was resident for more than six months), it does not include the chiefly Han soldiers stationed in the TAR as part of the PLA and the People’s Armed Police. It is also worth noting, as Andrew Fischer (2021) does in his analysis of the census, that data collection occurred in November 2020 in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic and the data does not include temporary business migrants and tourists, who typically travel to the TAR during the warmer summer months.
The growth of the Han population in the TAR is driven by increased inbound migration, with the highest growth rates occurring in Lhasa, Ngari, and Nyingchi. In 2020, the Han accounted for 40 per cent of Lhasa’s population, with nearly 250,000 ‘permanent’ residents (Lhasa City Bureau of Statistics 2021). While not my focus here, the flow of Han settlers into the TAR is being accompanied by a range of schemes aimed at dislocating Tibetans from their homeland, chiefly for work and education. The Tibetan population living permanently outside the Tibetan Plateau doubled during the previous decade (2010–20), with the largest increases in Jiangsu (12,573), Guangdong (11,347), and Beijing (8,698) (my own analysis of Figure 1.4 of the 2010 and 2020 National Census data).
To the Chinese Government, these two-way population flows are examples of ‘inter-ethnic contact, exchange, and melding’ (各民族交往交流交融) and central to its effort to forge a ‘collective consciousness’ (Qiushi 2024). Yet, as Peter Hessler (1999) first observed several decades ago, the meat-grinder of ‘national fusion’ (民族融合) leaves much bitterness and sadness in its wake: Tibetans dispossessed of their homeland and culture and resentful Han colonists who would rather be somewhere else.
China’s efforts to colonise the Tibetan Plateau stretch back to the first century BCE, when the Han Dynasty established agricultural colonies in the region (Rohlf 2016: 7). In the modern era, figures from Sun Yat-sen (1922), the ‘father of the nation’, to Pan Yue (2002), the current director of the National Ethnic Affairs Commission, have advocated following the example of the United States, Australia, and other settler-colonial countries in populating and developing frontier areas. Advances in technology may soon help the Communist Party complete the job. Railways, roads, and planes can easily ferry Han colonists on to the plateau, but medical breakthroughs may soon address the challenges posed by altitude sickness and oxygen deprivation.
In 2010, researchers at Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) identified the EPAS1 gene mutation, which allows the Tibetan physiology to cope with high-altitude living. They also found that 9 per cent of Han Chinese also carry the mutation (Liu 2018; Yi et al. 2010; Huerta-Sanchez et al. 2014). Gene-editing technologies like Crispr-Cas9 could make it technically possible to alter the genomes of Han settlers who lack the mutation, with one Chinese scientist, controversially, proving the effectiveness of this technology and sparking global condemnation in 2018 (McCurry 2024). Meanwhile, BGI Shenzhen (2014) and the PLA Air Force General Hospital (2021) have patented tests to screen Han individuals for the EPAS1 gene. Once confined to the realm of science fiction, these developments are quickly becoming reality. As Darren Byler (2021: 22–23) illustrates for Xinjiang, new technologies are turning China’s borderlands into high-tech colonies of control. Tibet could well be next.
The author would like to thank Ivan Franceschini, Gerald Roche, and Devendra Kumar for their comments and suggestions on a previous draft of this essay.
Featured Image: Tibet, Gunther Hagleitner, flickr.com
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