(This is an essay from our March 2015 print quarterly 'Labour and its discontents'. See more from the issue here.)
Nineteen million people – a preliminary estimate – have lost their homes, their land and their property. Their only means of survival is to move into other regions; but there is no other region that can feed so many refugees. Hunger will probably drive them to violence. This is harvest time, already there has been plundering of crops and of course if the victims have nothing to eat themselves they will join the starving and seize crops elsewhere.
The excerpt above comes not from a report on climate change or the displacement of local people following the building of a dam, but from China Tidal Wave, a futuristic novel published in 1991 by the writer and activist Wang Lixiong. In the novel, as a result of the central government's relentless extracting of natural resources, the Yellow River bursts its banks, causing wide scale displacement and chaos. This event sets off a chain reaction in which several members of the ruling party make bids for power and plunge the country, and then the world, into war. In the nuclear winter that follows, those who have survived in China struggle on with what little natural resources remain, cultivating a vegetable called shugua and living in shelters that dot the ravaged land. At the end of the novel, Big Ox, a thuggish henchman of the Green Guards with a penchant for rape and torture is mauled to death by a Tibetan mastiff – the demise of the villain in the jaws of the dog symbolising the final and grisly triumph of a 'pure and unspoilt' remoteness over the brutal pursuit of power.
In parts of Tibet today, there is serious money to be made in breeding dogs to sell in China, where along with a sports car and a beautiful wife, a Tibetan mastiff is one of the three indispensable status symbols for a young man on the make. Six decades after the 'liberation', Tibet is being bottled and photographed, televised and sold to the mainland more than ever before, with the government undoubtedly hoping that the glossy packaging will help cover up the tricky cracks in the historical and political relationship with the motherland. The Open Up the West (Xibu da kaifa) campaign launched in 2000 aims to bring the resources of Tibet and Turkestan into more efficient sync with the industry and factories of the eastern seaboard. The showpiece of this drive, the Qinghai-Lhasa railway, was completed (ahead of schedule) six years later, enabling the more efficient transporting of Tibet's mineral resources to mainland China, and the arrival of workers from the mainland to supply the service industries which accompany the engineers, miners and surveyors.