China Designating Landscape As 'National Park' In Tibet Doesn't Change Situation On Ground: Report

For China, the elaborate setting up of a national parks "system", particularly in Tibet is not an end in itself. The formal designation of a landscape as a national park in Tibet does not necessarily change the situation on the ground, at least in the short term, according to Tibet Rights Collective report.

What does change quickly is the transfer of legal power from local and provincial governments to the national party-state in Beijing, Gabriel Lafitte, who has spent years living with Tibetans, in exile and in Tibet wrote in the Tibet Rights Collective report. This nationalisation comes along with metropolitan investment, allocation of staff and recruitment of local people to be employed as park rangers out on patrol to enforce national policies.

The people should learn to look through Chinese eyes at Tibet before they join the rangers on their motorbikes. In today's China, everything is considered a security threat. Even the remotest landscape where Tibetan drogpa nomads reside must be secured. Allowing people to wander with their animals beyond surveillance in official eyes is a self-evident security risk.

The report said that the remotest peripheral frontier grasslands must be made orderly, scrutable, and legible in the eyes of the security state. It is not only because unsupervised land users are likely to degrade the commons but as security is a necessary precondition of development.

In these ways, development with Chinese characteristics implies urbanisation, sedentarisation, the housing of large numbers in demonstrating "moderate prosperity" xiaokang villages, with centralised education and health care to encourage the wanderers to settle where the services are located, like schools and hospitals, Tibet Rights Collective reported.

Earlier in May, Chinese President Xi Jinping directed the entire party-state to "deeply understand the complex and severe situation facing national security, correctly grasp major national security issues and accelerate the modernization of the national security system and capabilities, safeguard the new development pattern with the new security pattern, and strive to create a new situation in national security work. The Central National Security Commission has persisted in carrying forward the spirit of struggle, resolutely safeguarded national sovereignty, security and development interests, and comprehensively strengthened national security," Tibet Rights Collective reported.

Earlier this century, development, security and stability were defined as twin goals, particularly in central Tibet, where development was the long-term solution to all problems of Tibet. However, the short-term need to secure Tibet used to come first and it sparked tension between the two goals, Tibet Rights Collective reported. The tension is not resolved as there is nothing that is not a security threat in the entire Tibetan plateau.