Financial Times
May 13, 1999

Among the ravines and abysses of the nearly barren mountains of Eastern Qinghai, China, live 57,775 impoverished farmers who have won the development lottery. (Excerpt)

From an estimated 60-BOrn other poor Chinese farmers, they have been selected for a new start in life under the World Bank’s Western Poverty Reduction Project. These volunteer pioneers will be resettled further west in Qinghai province, on what the Bank describes as “adequate farmland”, in Dulan, with the help of $81 m for resettlement and irrigation systems. According to bank documents, they are to move within one year, settle down in two, “eliminate the condition of inadequate food and clothing within three years and extricate themselves from poverty”. They will raise cashmere goats, sheep and chickens and produce enough wheat, barley, rape seed and sunflowers to feed themselves with a little to spare for sale in local markets. But the project, which is due to go to the Bank’s board on June 8, has generated so much controversy that even the US Treasury has expressed concern and says it is studying the details. In the forefront of the critics are Tibetan support groups, who say Dulan – which China has formally deemed to be in a Mongolian and Tibetan minority nationality autonomous area – was traditionally part of Tibet. And the transplant of Chinese settlers into land claimed as Tibetan has also alarmed the Dalai Lama who sees it as one more attempt to eradicate the Tibetan national identity. “No Chinese government in history has succeeded in colonising the Dulan oasis,” says Gabriel Lafitte, research officer for the Australia Tibet Council.