Tibetan herders get used to their new lives as China tackles poverty
- Thousands of people have been relocated away from their Tibetan pastures and into villages as part of Xi Jinping’s poverty alleviation scheme
- They are provided with homes, jobs and health care, but are encouraged to leave their religious beliefs behind
Deji Baizhen cannot remember how many lunches she skipped in the first few months after more than 600 Tibetan herdsmen settled in her village in 2017.
Phone calls poured in, as she ran between houses to change light bulbs for her fellow Tibetans, who reported power outages. Unclogging toilets filled with daily garbage was not uncommon.
The herdsmen used to live in tents and followed the seasonal grass on the mountains, and had little knowledge of modern amenities and appliances.
The village is part of a social engineering project to relocate 266,000 people, or 8 per cent of the region’s population, away from their homes in impoverished areas to places with better jobs, education and health care.
“I’m also from an ordinary herdsmen family,” said Baiznen, 36, who is fluent in both Mandarin and Tibetan. “I’m not trying to force them to change their lifestyle, it’s just that we have to pursue better lives,” she said, insisting the programme was voluntary.