Publications

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Racial Discrimination in Tibet (2000)

Discrimination in Housing

Eviction and Demolition

In 1988, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the UN Global Strategy to the Year 2000, a document designed to address the housing and development problems of the modern world. It states that

"All citizens of all States, poor as they may be, have a right to expect their governments to be concerned about their shelter needs, and to accept a fundamental obligation to protect and improve houses and neighbourhoods, rather than damage or destroy them."

In the case of Tibet, this directive has been completely ignored. To cope with ever increasing numbers of Chinese settlers arriving in the urban centres of Tibet, the local authorities found it necessary to instigate construction on an unprecedented scale. The Tibetan quarters of Lhasa, which in 1950 constituted the entire city, now cover a mere 2% of the built up urban area, and the city is expanding at a startling rate of between 1.3-2 km per year.

At the same time however, this "modernisation" scheme, known officially as "The Lhasa Development Plan", has variously resulted in the eviction of more than 5,000 Tibetan residents, and the demolition of over 470 historic buildings. In 1989 alone, no less than 40,000 Tibetans were expelled from Lhasa to their native villages to enable construction to accommodate the new settlers - a direct violation of Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that "No-one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property." Nor is this eviction confined to urban centres - in 1993, a dam construction project in northeastern Tibet resulted in the displacement of 6000 Tibetans. Yet Chinese White Papers continue to trumpet this cultural devastation as ‘successful development', and even assert that it has brought numerous benefits to the people:

"Municipal construction has been speeded up in major cities and towns" Since the 1980s more than 300,000 square metres of old residential houses have been rebuilt in Lhasa, and 5,226 households have been moved to new dwellings. All this has improved the living environment and quality of life of both urban and rural residents."

For the 700 ex-residents of the 17th-century Tibetan neighbourhood of Shol, completely demolished in 1993 to make way for a tourist market, an improvement in the quality of living was the last thing they received. As one eyewitness noted after a careful examination of the area,

"Those evicted [from Shol] are routinely relocated to concrete block apartments often half the size and up to ten times the monthly rent of their original homes. The apparent goal is to raise increased revenue for the State from what is considered Lhasa's prime real estate, and to provide housing for the dramatically increasing number of settlers from mainland China."

Numerous other refugees have also reported arbitrary evictions from their premises, and many received no compensation, which is a direct violation of Article 41 of China's Constitution. The reason given has invariably been because the building is "unsafe", or because it fails to meet the Chinese interpreted standards of "beauty". In an interview with Loga, Mayor of Lhasa Municipality in 1991, it was asserted that most of the residential houses in the old part of Lhasa were "on the verge of collapse" and thus in need of demolition and complete reconstruction Several independent surveys of the buildings prior to demolition found this to be completely untrue.

A 17 year-old boy from Lhasa escaped to India in late 1999, and reported the following to TCHRD. "In 1997, around 150 traditional Tibetan houses were demolished in the eastern part of Lhasa. The residents were told by the authorities that their houses were 'unsafe', and that they could no longer live there. Instead of providing them with alternative accommodation in Lhasa, the residents were expelled back to their native villages, and were not given any compensation. After the houses were demolished, apartment buildings for Chinese government officials and settlers were constructed on the site."

18 year-old Dadon arrived in Nepal in September 1998. "My mother formerly had a house in the Rabsel Tashi Khangsar (RTK) area of Lhasa, but due to some 'official reconstruction' of the RTK quarter, we were told to move. The authorities promised to allocate my family another house in the same area after the work was complete, but failed to actually fulfil their promise. In the end they simply told us it wasn't possible, and we were forced to buy a small house near the RTK quarter's management offices."

One girl from Lhasa told TCHRD in January 2000 that these evictions were becoming more and more common. "The housing authority in Lhasa is much feared - they often order Tibetans out of their houses, telling them their houses are unsafe. If this was really true, and if they really cared, they would simply repair the problem. But once the family has moved out, they simply demolish the house and build a new apartment block or office building on the site. Sometimes they don't even bother to lie. Some friends of my parents, a family of five, were told to leave their three-room apartment because a road and new houses were to be constructed. They were allocated a new two-room apartment in compensation that was much smaller than their previous home. However, because it was new, the authorities called it an 'upgrade', and made the family pay 50,000 yuan."

A similar case was reported by the Tibet Heritage Fund in Lhasa. In April 1998, the residents of Dakpo Trumpa House were told that the house was to be demolished to make way for a new block of apartments, and that they would have to move out. They were only given two days notice, but were told that they would receive an apartment equal in size to their old one once the construction was complete. They were given 40,000 yuan as compensation, only to then be charged 80,000 yuan for the "upgrade" of the new flat allocated to them.

Tibetans are helpless to fight or appeal decisions made concerning evictions or demolitions because there are simply no legal channels through which they can complain. According to Scott Leckie's survey of housing violations in Tibet,

"...tenants possess effectively no rights whatsoever to participate in the housing or urban development process, nor actively to oppose planned evictions and demolitions through legal or political means" Legal appeals against demolition orders in Tibet are unavailable."

In 1990, the Tibet Information Network conducted an extensive survey of some 400 new apartment blocks and construction projects in Lhasa built to replace Tibetan residences and found them to be inferior to traditional housing in numerous ways. The size of the apartments, water, drainage, sewage and electricity facilities, the physical design of the dwellings and the housing density were all subordinate to the conditions found in and around the traditional Tibetan dwellings these new structures replaced. Furthermore, the report noted that the new Chinese style apartment blocks being built all over Lhasa "tend to break up extended [Tibetan] families and other long-standing forms of social association." All of this makes Chinese assertions of an improvement in living standards difficult to support.