NORTHWEST YUNNAN'S DIQING PREFECTURE: SNAPSHOT OF A QUIETER

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 04 CHENGDU 000238

SIPDIS

DEPT FOR EAP/CM, DRL, G

E.O. 12958: DECL: 10/24/2033
TAGS: PGOV PHUM ECON SOCI CH
SUBJECT: NORTHWEST YUNNAN'S DIQING PREFECTURE: SNAPSHOT OF A QUIETER
TIBETAN BORDERLAND

REF: A. CHENGDU 197

B. CHENGDU 77

CHENGDU 00000238 001.2 OF 004


CLASSIFIED BY: James A. Boughner, Consul General, U.S. Consulate
General, Chengdu.
REASON: 1.4 (b),(d)




1. (C) Summary: Northwest Yunnan's Tibetan Diqing Autonomous
Prefecture (TAP) has been the calmest of all the ethnic Tibetan
areas in China during 2008, likely due to a large presence of
Han and other minorities (Tibetans only make up about a third of
the population),the influence of its ethnic Tibetan party
secretary, and a possibly less aggressive approach to patriotic
education. During a recent visit by ConGenOff to Diqing, the
local founder of an NGO to promote Tibetan culture vented his
frustration about what he referred to as the "rapid pace of
assimilation." Significant investments in road improvement, new
construction, large-scale tree planting, and grasslands
rehabilitation programs were evident throughout the Prefecture.
Security appeared to be relatively light, but public notices
suggested Diqing is trying to address problems related to
corruption, counterfeiting (currency and tobacco),and drugs.
End Summary.

Scenery Draws Tourists to Shangri-la
-------------- -


2. (U) Diqing lies at the junction of Yunnan Province with the
Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) and Sichuan Province's Ganzi
Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. The Diqing Prefecture capital of
Zhongdian is located in Shangri-la County to the south of Deqin
County. Diqing is a designated "Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture"
largely for historical reasons. Its population of 366,000
people is 85 percent minority but only one-third ethnic Tibetan.
The next largest among the 26 officially designated minority
groups in Diqing are the Lisu, Naxi, Bai and Yi. Deqin, the
seat of Deqin County, lies in a long, narrow valley and attracts
tourists who come to see the nearby mountains, especially the
famed Snow Mountain. Many tourist hotels lie near a viewpoint,
about 10 km outside of Deqin, where Snow Mountain can be seen on
clear days. Photos of the area are available online at URL
tinyurl.com/deqinzhongdianphotos.

Visit to the Tundrup Ling Monastery
--------------


3. (C) During a visit to Diqing in August, ConGenOff stopped at
the Tundrup Ling Monastery about two hours south of Deqin city
on the six hour bus trip north from Zhongdian. The leader of
one group of Han Chinese in the middle of a guided tour that
ConGenOff joined said to a monk, "there have been things in our
lives that have been very difficult for us, and particularly for
me. I would like to talk with some monks about them." The monk
leading the tour stopped and found two senior monks to talk with
the visitors. (Comment: This is one of numerous examples
ConGenOff has seen of the strong attraction Tibetan Buddhism
appears to have for Han Chinese Buddhists). Repairs were
underway in several parts of the monastery and there appeared to
be few monks present.


4. (SBU) Diqing TAP, and particularly Deqin County, is one of
the poorest areas of Yunnan. Shanghai Municipality, in a paring
of a wealthy province/municipality with a poor county,
contributed 113 million RMB (USD 14 million) to 190 poverty
alleviation projects in Diqing during 2004 - 2007 and plans to
contribute an additional 27 million RMB during 2008. Numerous
road upgrades and construction projects are bringing both
tourists and migrant workers to Deqin. Deqin city itself is in
the midst of a building boom with many buildings in town marked
with the character demolish (chai). New government and party
offices are being built just south of Deqin.


5. (U) In Deqin city, ConGenOff met a migrant worker from
Lijiang, ten hours by bus to the south, who was part of a group
of workers carrying seedlings up into the hills to plant as part
of a reforestation program. According to a July 14 Diqing Ribao
newspaper article, the Prefecture's forest cover has risen from
65.4% a decade ago to 73.9% today. Four hundred million RMB
(USD 60 million) have been invested in reforestation in Diqing
over the past decade. Many signs along the roads refer to a
program to restore farmlands and pastureland to trees or grass.

Assimilation and Mao on the Family Altar
-------------- --------------


6. (C) Diqing Prefecture remained largely quiet when widespread
protests broke out during March in the Tibetan Autonomous Region
and Tibetan areas in the provinces of Qinghai, Gansu and

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Sichuan. Although some of their elders took part in fighting
against government authorities after the establishment of the
PRC, Tibetans in northwestern Yunnan are today generally more
assimilated to the predominant Han culture than are Tibetans in
most other traditionally Tibetan areas (ref A). One indicator
of Tibetan assimilation in Diqing: the proportion of people
literate in Tibetan is much lower than in the TAR and in Qinghai
Province. Shangri-la County has a milder climate than most
other Tibetan areas that, as one Tibetan from Deqin told
ConGenOff, "made us much more subject to the onslaught of the
Chinese." This and the presence of more ethnic Han and other
minorities in Diqing than in other traditional Tibetan areas
likely helps explain why the Prefecture has been relatively
quiet this year, particularly in comparison with western
Sichuan's Ganzi Prefecture.


7. (C) At a rest stop in Deqin County on the road from
Zhongdian, ConGenOff visited the kitchen of a local Tibetan
family. Hung in the place of honor above the family stove was a
poster of China's leaders past and present. Later, invited into
a home in Deqin city by a junior high school student who has a
Tibetan mother and a father of a different minority, ConGenOff
saw a bust of Mao Zedong included on a family altar that
combined Tibetan and Chinese religious themes. Mentioning this
in a Tibetan home during a subsequent visit to Lhasa,
ConGenOff's host exclaimed, "Nobody here would do such a thing!"

Visit with the Founder of a Local Tibetan NGO
-------------- --------------


8. (C) ConGenOff visited Kawagebo, a ten-year-old local NGO
that promotes Tibetan language and culture in Deqin County and
met with its founder, Sonam Norbu (strictly protect),an ethnic
Tibetan who works at the Deqin County Cultural Bureau. Several
international NGOs have provided support to Kawagebo. The first
evening of ConGenOff's visit, Sonam Norbu invited him to a bar
where many of his acquaintances, including a journalist from the
prefecture party newspaper Diqing Ribao and an ethnic Han
Buddhist fluent in Tibetan who works for the Deqin County
Environmental Bureau, had gathered. After the journalist and
most of the others had left, Sonam Norbu, already drunk,
bemoaned the assimilation of Tibetans into the majority Han
culture. He asserted many Tibetans in Deqin no longer care
about their own culture. He also complained that his work as a
cultural bureau official, running the county library and
cataloguing county cultural relics, has not really accomplished
anything. Like most work in the local government, it is just a
matter of "going through the motions" (xingshizhuyi). He said
it is very hard to make progress in strengthening Tibetan
culture, adding, "you know the kind of regime this is." Sonam
Norbu stressed he hopes to make real achievements in promoting
Tibetan culture through his NGO.


9. (C) Sonam Norbu promised the next evening to further discuss
frankly the difficulties he faces. The next evening, before the
meeting, ConGenOff was invited by two Buddhist monks to visit
the office of the NGO. The environmental bureau official of the
previous night was already there and spoke with the monks in
fluent Tibetan. She told ConGenOff that she had studied Tibetan
in Qinghai after getting an engineering degree in Kunming. Sonam
Norbu and some of his friends later arrived but would not engage
with ConGenOff in a serious discussion. From what the ethnic
Han environmental official later said to ConGenOff, it was clear
that Sonam Norbu's friends had advised him that there was "no
benefit" to being overly frank.

Visit to the Deqin County Library
--------------


10. (C) A visit to the Deqin County Library fleshed out Sonam
Norbu's complaint about official cultural work being a matter of
just going through the motions. The library is located in a
two-story building that includes meeting rooms and a reading
room gets little traffic. During the two mornings that
ConGenOff visited, drying mushrooms were spread over the card
catalogue. A check of the card catalogue suggested that all the
books were at least ten years old. The only current magazines
in the reading room were Communist Party periodicals such as
Seeking Truth (Qiushi) and compilations of central and Yunnan
government notices.

Security Relatively Light
--------------


11. (C) On the six-hour bus ride from Zhongdian to Deqin,
ConGenOff ran into only one checkpoint located at the Deqin
County line at which his passport, along with the ID cards of
the local people he was riding with, were checked. Many buses
and trucks take the two-lane highway that climbs as high as 4200

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meters through the plateau country of Tibetan herders. A gas
station in Deqin city posted a sign that only one car or person
may enter the gas station at a time. ConGenOff observed a car
waiting outside a gas station with four pumps until the car
already in the station left.

Unrest Hurt Diqing Trade with TAR
--------------


12. (C) A Deqin city based long distance truck driver who used
to make the five-day 1400 kilometer trip from Deqin to Lhasa
five times a year told ConGenOff that trucking trips to the TAR
had dropped considerably since March. Daily bus service runs
from Deqin to Lhasa, Chamdo and other cities in the TAR.
According to Diqing TAP official statistics, both domestic and
foreign tourism in Diqing fell by a third during the first three
months of 2008 compared with the same months in 2007.

Fighting Crime and Corruption
--------------


13. (SBU) Bulletin boards and signs that ConGenOff saw around
Deqin city indicated some of the local concerns:

--Lists of minimum income public assistance recipients were
posted in downtown Deqin with the names, ID numbers, and notes
on their circumstances in an apparent effort to reduce
corruption. Similarly, the Diqing Ribao published the license
plate numbers of all the taxis and trucks in the prefecture that
get fuel subsidies.
-- Many posters warning against counterfeiting Chinese currency
and the identification points of Chinese paper money and coins.
In late June, the Diqing Ribao carried a story about party and
government cadres visiting a village to explain in Tibetan how
to identify Chinese currency. The front-page story mentioned
that the fight against counterfeiting is important for
maintaining social stability in Diqing Prefecture.
-- Drug seizures were up during the first half of 2008 in
Diqing. Ice and methamphetamines are a growing concern.
-- A large poster in downtown Deqin condemned sale of fake
tobacco products. According to the Diqing Ribao, production of
tobacco products in Deqin County has grown rapidly over the past
five years with tax income from the tobacco industry in Deqin
County rose from 2 million RMB in 2002 to 20 million in 2007.

What's in the Paper?
--------------


14. (SBU) The Diqing Ribao, the daily newspaper of the
Prefecture Communist Party, indicated on July 31 that a local
bank gave 900 MP3 players to public security, PAP and PLA
officers and soldiers stationed in Deqin city, thereby giving
perhaps a hint of the size of the police and military presence
there. Qu Yunfu, political commissar of the Chinese Communist
Party's Diqing Prefecture military sub-district, in a speech
published in Diqing Ribao on July 30, wrote that "unity of the
various nationalities of the prefecture, stability and economic
development are the pressing tasks for the Diqing military
sub-district, especially given the strategic position of Diqing
at the border of Yunnan, Sichuan and the Tibetan Autonomous
Region and the history of three armed revolts in Diqing. Diqing
has been fighting Tibetan independence for a long time.
Ideological work must take a high priority and we face a complex
difficult struggle in that area, especially with the
infiltration and disruptions created by the Dalai gang and
western anti-China forces."

Comments
--------------


15. (C) Why has Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture been
relatively quiet this year? Likely explanations include:
-- Diqing is the most assimilated to mainstream Han culture of
all the major Tibetan areas in China;
-- Diqing has a greater proportion of Han and other ethnic
minorities (65 percent) than most other major Tibetan areas;
-- Diqinq is the only major Tibetan ethnic Tibetan area to have
an ethnic Tibetan Party Secretary. (Note: Ref B discusses
Party Secretary Qi Zhala's influence).
-- To judge by the absence from the Diqing Ribao of hard-line
articles on patriotic education compared with counterpart party
papers in other Tibetan areas, Diqing authorities may not be
implementing the kind of intense "patriotic education campaign"
that has stirred up such intense resentment in Tibetan ethnic
areas in Sichuan since early 2007. A July edition of the Diqing
Ribao, however, did discuss three-day indoctrination sessions
required of any monks returning from monasteries in the TAR.


16. (C) The Diqing Ribao stands out from most Chinese communist

CHENGDU 00000238 004.2 OF 004


newspapers these days (but not from Party papers in other
Tibetan areas.) for the exceptional turgidity of the prose and
mix of stress of current and throwback catch phrases from three
or four years ago. Article after article discuss "liberating
thinking" (jiefang sixiang) which seems to come down to
promoting correct thinking and the Party line. This rigid
thinking in the press seems to mirror the rigidity in the Party
and government administration in the Tibetan areas
notwithstanding the call of the 17th Chinese Communist Party
Congress to "liberate thinking." While the Dalai Lama is
criticized occasionally, the long, strongly worded attacks on
the Dalai Lama typical of the media in the Tibetan Autonomous
Region and in Tibetan areas of Sichuan. Lengthy discussions of
patriotic education campaigns are remarkably absent. Diqing
Ribao is online at www.shangri-lanews.com
; Diqing Tibetan Autonomous
Prefecture government website: www.diqing.gov.cn
.
BOUGHNER