Scott Greene
China Digital Times
January 13, 2014
Tibetan courts heard 20 cases last year which involved allegations of endangering national security, according to the China Daily.
Sodar, Tibet’s top judge, released the figure as part of an annual work report to the regional people’s congress on Sunday. Comparison with previous years is not possible, as no such figures were made available in previous reports.
Sodar said judicial authorities last year dealt “a heavy blow” to separatist activities and those that sought to sabotage and threaten national security.
He said local authorities have established a leading team to handle criminal cases that relate to issues of stability, without disclosing details.
Zhang Peizhong, chief prosecutor of Tibet, also said during his work report to the legislature on Sunday that prosecution departments in the region have waged a war against crimes related with national security.
As Tibetans increasingly feel marginalized by Chinese policies, The Diplomat’s Kerry Brown asks whether the country’s central leadership has “the political imagination” to revise its approach in the region.
In Taming Tibet, a superb new study of Tibet’s economy by Emily Yeh of the University of Boulder, Yeh points out one of the fundamental challenges of any policy that looks to “normalize” the region using the new potential for decentralization. Her extensive and meticulous field research shows that central government subsidies to the region, which account for over 80 percent of Tibet’s revenue, are largely siphoned off by outsiders coming into Tibet to work. These workers, many of them from Sichuan province, end up sending much of the money back out of the area again. Construction workers and service sector workers, the sort of migrant laborers we see across China, are also present in Tibet, often seasonally. These workers have been the main recipients of the money generated by central government grants and projects, even if this is by accident rather than design.
With this sort of recycling of capital, central policy makers are looking not at a complex political or ethnic issue, but a much more functional one: how to deploy capital more efficiently in an area where, at the moment, investment is simply ending up elsewhere. GDP growth in Tibet, by Yeh’s account at least, is skin deep, because the growth largely benefits people who do not settle in the region. This should be a worry for the central government. Put bluntly, at the moment Beijing’s subsidies are being utilized in ways which do not fulfill their stated intention of bringing longer term sustainable growth (and less of a dependence on subsidies) to the region.
