Exile from the Grasslands

Reconstructing lifeways on the Tibetan Plateau Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748207 At the beginning of the new millennium, the Chinese government launched the Great Opening of the West, a development strategy targeted at remote areas inhabited mainly by indigenous ethnic groups. Intended to modernize infrastructure and halt environmental degradation, its tactics in western China have resulted in the displacement of pastoral Tibetans to urban residence and sedentary livelihoods, causing massive social and economic shifts and uncertainty and eventually leading to signs of discontent in ethnically Tibetan regions. Based on more than a decade of fieldwork, Exile from the Grasslands documents the viewpoints of both the people affectedTibetan pastoralists in Qinghai Provinceand the Chinese officials charged with relocating and settling them in newly constructed housing projects. As Chinas international influence expands, the welfare of its ethnic minorities and its handling of environmental issues are receiving close media scrutiny. Jarmila Ptkovas study documents a politically and ecologically significant process that is happeningunlike events in Lhasa or Xinjianglargely outside the view of the wider world.