CityReads│How to Interpret Tibet's Urbanization?
Tibet's urbanization is not just as a technical project of increasing the density and number of buildings and people, but also as a project that refigures and reconsolidates bureaucratic power while inscribing teleological assumptions of development.
Yeh, Emily T. and Mark Henderson.2008. “Interpreting urbanization in Tibet: Administrative scales and discourses of modernization.” Journal of theInternational Association of Tibetan Studies (JIATS) no. 4, THL# T5563,44pp.
Source: http://www.thlib.org/collections/texts/jiats/#!jiats=/04/yeh/b1/
CoverPicture：http://www.tibet3.com/news/content/attachement/jpg/site2/20110120/0013d44ea4730ea1e5de33.jpg
Urbanization in Tibet is contentious but poorly understood. We re-evaluate pronouncements about Tibet’s urbanization, using historical maps, satellite imagery, and census data. We argue that these statistics must both be analyzed in their own right as well as in relation to the cultural politics of the urban. This entails an examination of urbanization not just as a technical project of increasing the density and number of buildings and people, but also as a project that refigures and reconsolidates bureaucratic power while inscribing teleological assumptions of development. Through this analysis, we seek not only to develop a clearer understanding of the process of urbanization in the TAR, but also to place Lhasa within ongoing conversations about the urban scale in the PRC.
ICultural Histories of the Urban
To understand the full implications of urbanization, then, we need to consider the role of “the city” in both Chinese and Tibetan cultural history before turning to urbanization under the PRC.
Lhasa is said to have been founded by King Songtsen Gampo, who unified Tibet and moved his capital to Lhasa in the seventh century. Only after the Fifth Dalai Lama rose to power as sovereign of Tibet in 1642 did Lhasa become a true seat of government administration and a political center.
Detailed information about the lay population of Lhasa up until the twentieth century is scarce. While the number of temples and monasteries in Lhasa increased over time, neither its population nor physical extent grew considerably. Indeed in 1904, Younghusband estimated a population of thirty thousand, including twenty thousand monks. Estimates of Lhasa’s population in 1950 was fifty to sixty thousand, including twenty thousand lay residents and thirty to forty thousand monks. The city was delimited by three nested circuits for ritual circumambulation: one inside the Jokhang (nangkor), the barkor, and the 7.5-kilometer outer path encircling the old city and the Potala Palace (lingkor). Despite its miniscule size in comparison with other cities of the day, Lhasa was the largest and basically the only urban lay settlement in the Tibetan cultural world.
Although market towns existed along trade routes, the urban sector constituted an extraordinarily small portion of the Tibetan population, and no other settlement approached Lhasa’s population by the middle of the twentieth century.
In addition to noting the small population and physical extent of these various settlements, we call attention to the urban as a category of thought, and to the epistemological question of whether the residents of those settlements considered themselves to be living in a “town” or “city.” The Tibetan term commonly translated as “city” today, drongkhyer, is old and has a long history of use. However, it was used primarily in the abstract and for translations of Sanskrit texts. The appellation Lhasa Drongkhyer is associated more strongly with the PRC administrative category of Lhasa ṃunicipality than with historical Lhasa as a pilgrimage site or cultural, religious, and political center.
Tibetan has a number of terms that share the root drong, all of which indicate a place of settlement. Some terms can be used to refer to both city and country. The fluidity of the various drong–terms reflects a conceptualization of a spectrum of settlement sizes and population rather than a strictly binary opposition between the rural and the urban, or between the city and the countryside.
The opposing meanings onto city and country as different modes of life in English is quite different from Tibetan uses, which do not appear to spatialize binary, moral qualities. In particular, drongkhyer is used as a neutral descriptor of settlement and does not come to stand in for qualities such as those of corruption, decay, civilization, or learning. Much of what is interpreted as “urban” in secondary descriptions of Tibetan history refers to large monasteries. Religion plays an important role during the formation of Tibetan towns and cities. However, the strongest meanings in this dyad of monastery/city were attached to the monastery rather than the city. The qualities of learning and civilization, associated in English tradition with cities, were in Tibet associated with monasteries and other religious institutions - rather than with the urban as a particular social form. Lay/monastic was a far more important categorization of social life and structure than village/city.
The Chinese historical conceptualization of city and country resembles the English more in its dichotomous view of rural and urban. The contemporary term for “city” combines the characters for defensive walls and market, two ubiquitous features of Han urban form. Many have seen the city wall in imperial times as emblematic of sharp distinctions between “urban” and “rural”. Cities were administrative centers for establishing imperial control. By late imperial China, cities were seen as centers of vice and corruption while rural life was seen to foster virtue. Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century debated urbanism, with some yearning for a return to China’s past glory that they identified with a rural. Others welcomed Westernized cities as symbols of modernity and progress, or saw revitalizing urban-rural ties as the key to modernization.
This discussion of the presence of a city/country or rural/urban binary in imperial Chinese cultural history and its absence in Tibetan categories of thought and practice before PRC incorporation, suggests that urbanization in Tibet must be interpreted not only as a technical matter of construction and increased density of people and buildings, but also as the laying down of a new grid of legibility and territorial ordering of space.
IIUrbanization as Modernization in Tibet
The process of administrative urbanization that has swept across China is occurring in the TAR as well, but with its own particular characteristics. With only two designated cities in the entire TAR, Lhasa and Zhikatsé, the focus has been on a lower scale of urbanization – the promotion of rural townships to urban towns. There were no urban towns at all in the TAR until 1987, when a major reorganization of the spatial administration of the region began. In 1988, the total number of township-level units was reduced from over two thousand down to 865. The number of urban towns was tripled to ninety-seven in 1999 and the number of rural townships further reduced to around six hundred. PRC officials’ assertion that the TAR now has more than one hundred towns is a rather recent and wholly administrative construction. “Actual” urbanization has lagged behind administrative urbanization
Whereas the urbanization of small towns across much of China is the result of “urbanization from below” or “spontaneous and self-generating” movement, the urbanization of small towns in the TAR appears to be more of a combination of administrative urbanization and urbanization from above. This includes both the emphasis on administrative reclassification and programs such as “returning pastures to grasslands” and Lhasa ṃunicipality’s reported plans to relocate rural farmers to urban centers.
Administrative restructuring across the TAR
IIIDeciphering Lhasa's Urbanization
Across the TAR, administrative urbanization has been significant since 1987, and this practice has affected definitions of the urban in Lhasa. Within Lhasa Municipality, the total number of township-level units has been reduced from ninety-seven in 1990 to sixty-four in 2003 as rural townships have been merged or promoted to urban towns. At the time of the 1990 census, three of the county seats were not even classified as urban towns, but as of 2000 every county had at least one urban town. These promotions mean that the populations of those towns may now be counted toward the “urban” total for the prefectural municipality.
The government’s statement that “Lhasa’s urban population in 2000 is 230,000,” it refers to the total population living under the six city street offices and nine urban towns across the entire prefecture of Lhasa (231,836). Town residents are urban, but the 51,282 residents of rural townships within the metropolitan district are not. Comparing these figures with those for 1990, we find that fully 30 percent of the reported “urban” growth in the prefecture was a matter of the reclassification of existing township populations.
Among the changes between the two censuses, the 130 percent increase in persons with agricultural registration in the metropolitan district stands out. This can be accounted for largely by the inclusion in the latter census of the floating population. Many Chinese migrants in Lhasa have agricultural household registrations in their province of origin. Indeed, the 2000 census tallies over one hundred and five thousand individuals in the metropolitan district alone who are registered elsewhere; nearly all of them are Han and most hold agricultural registrations.
A better approach to apprehending the size and growth of “urban” Lhasa is to examine data on occupations. We may consider the urban population to be made up of individuals in the nonagricultural labor force and a proportional share of the unemployed, along with their dependents. From this definition we estimate the total urban population of Lhasa Prefecture as 228,201 in 2000, of which 198,340 were in the Lhasa metropolitan district.
A sectoral breakdown of the labor force highlights the concentration of urban functions within the Lhasa metropolitan district as well as the disproportionate participation of the ethnic Han in certain professions and occupational levels, particularly the more urban and high-status ones. Han are concentrated in the metropolitan district, and in particular the city street offices (jiedao), where they made up over one third of the population even in the winter of 2000 . In the labor force, Han dominate the fields of construction, mining, and trade, and also account for over 40 percent of the labor force in real estate, banking, and most other service sectors. They fill over half of all managerial positions and official government posts and are disproportionately represented in other urban occupations. The sex ratios of the Han population in Lhasa ṃunicipality still suggest a large number of sojourning males (150 per every one hundred Han females). Among Tibetans there is a small deficit of males (ninety-six to every one hundred Tibetan females).For comparison, in the TAR as a whole, the 2000 population census reports sex ratios of 164:100 for Han and 99:100 for Tibetans.
We have examined the population figures to find that while the influx of Han migrants is indeed significant, the reclassification of rural townships into urban towns accounts for nearly one-third of the reported growth in urban population, greater than the national average.
IVLhasa's Built-up Area
Chinese topographic map sheets and a declassified KH-7 spy satellite image from the 1960s show about seventeen square kilometers of built-up area within the metropolitan district. The official figure of twenty-five square kilometers in 1980, seems reasonable if not conservative. However, our estimate of the Lhasa built-up area delimited visually on 2000 Landsat and 2005 Carterra images suggests an area of forty-five square kilometers. Thus, our estimate of 2005 built-up area falls short of the officially reported area for the year 2000, let alone the planned expansion to seventy square kilometers.
VPlacing Lhasa among Chinese Cities
Lhasa’s urbanization is an imposition of a new form on the landscape, which was historically not significantly organized along the urban/rural dichotomy. Nevertheless, a hegemonic discourse of urbanization as modernization continues to code the current city of Lhasa as being “too small”. A logarithmic rank-size graph of China’s urban populations shows Lhasa in the range of prefectural or county-level seats, well below the size and rank of its administrative peers across the PRC.
However, ranking Lhasa against other provincial capitals is not a reasonable comparison to make. A regional view of Lhasa within the framework of the state-defined Tibet Autonomous Region, can also suggest that it is, if anything, already too big. A calculation of Lhasa’s primacy value, the ratio of its urban population to that of the second largest city in the TAR (Zhikatsé), yields a value of 5.8 (using 1990 statistics). The extreme concentration of the TAR’s urban population in the one city of Lhasa suggests uneven development and suggests that the current approach to development is unbalanced.
If Lhasa is simultaneously “too large” in the context of the TAR, yet “too small” in comparison with other provincial-level capitals of the PRC, it may be most instructive to view the city as an outpost of an emerging, colonizing network of a western China regional economy with its hub at Chengdu. In terms of a regional systems analysis, Lhasa’s population relative to the rest of western China would rank it among the third-order cities of the system, below Chengdu and Mianyang (in Sichuan) but on par with Golmud.
VIConclusion
Many Tibetan residents of Lhasa are ambivalent about these processes: they complain that their city has lost its Tibetan character while also appreciating new consumer items and improved communications and transportation technologies. The examination of long-time residents’ experiences of urbanization, as well as the analysis of Lhasa’ s place among Chinese cities presented above, both suggest that Lhasa’ s “urbanization” makes more sense in terms of a westward-expanding Han China than in terms of Tibet as a cultural region.
Our historical analysis suggests that the large urban area, the sharp urban-rural divide, and the valorization of the urban as a spatial category constitutes a significant break from a traditional Tibetan organization of the landscape along a continuum of settlement size.We argue for continued scrutiny of the multifaceted phenomenon of urbanization in Tibet both because of the effects of in-migration and in light of the imposition of the urban administrative category as a hegemonic discursive practice that re-organizes and re-orders space and society, far beyond the technical aspects of buildings and numbers of people.