Abstract
This chapter sets out to investigate how China’s interprovincial economic (dis)integration has been determined in Tibet. Given the ethnic homogeneity within Tibet and the similar religious beliefs adopted by the Tibetans and Han Chinese (both of which belong to the Mongoloid group), the harmonious Han–Tibetan relations had once ever been achieved. It is found that Tibet’s spatial economic disparities are much smaller than Xinjiang’s, which could be responsible for its long-term economic progress and social stability. Finally, we also find that China’s development policies toward Tibet have been more successful than those toward Xinjiang. This may be witnessed not only by the Tibetan’s better social and economic performances than Xinjiang’s but also by the less tensed (at least compared to the Han–Uyghur relations in Xinjiang) Han–Tibetan relations in Tibet.
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Notes
- 1.
Source: http://baike.baidu.com/view/2580.htm#7. Accessed 2013-5-1.
- 2.
See Guo (2015, Chap. 3) for a more detailed analysis.
- 3.
Calculated by author based on the Fifth (2000) and the Sixth (2010) National Population Censuses of the PRC.
- 4.
This subsection is an excerpt of Guo (2013a pp. 310–315).
- 5.
Note that all the sectors defined here are according to China’s official categories.
- 6.
For example, as of 2010, the per capita GDP ratio of China’s top five to bottom five provinces was 3.98 (if Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin are included) or 3.16 (if Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin are excluded)—cited from Guo (2013, p. 157).
- 7.
The full text of this document can be found in Bulletins of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 1992.
- 8.
Note that since most of Xinjiang’s cross-border trade has been conducted with Kazakhstan in northern Xinjiang where the Han Chinese account for the majority of population, it is reasonable to say that the Han Chinese have been major player of cross-border trade in Xinjiang.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
See Chap. 3 for a more detailed account of the Han-Uyghur unrest during the past decades.
- 12.
This is due to the fact that both Xinjiang and Tibet are located behind most of the Chinese provinces (Yunnan and Zhejiang are the only exceptions) in all the 465 province pairs shown in Annex of Chap. 4.
- 13.
For example, the following was reported by Ben Hillman in 2008: “[W]hen I visited Lhasa's Potala Palace a few years ago, I was surprised to find a young Han Chinese man dressed in Tibetan costume selling tickets. When I queried him, he laughed and said, ‘tourists don't know the difference anyway'” (Hillman 2008, p. 10).
- 14.
One of the implications of this is that “many Han immigrants, possibly even most, do not stay in Tibet long. They may even stay too short a period to be counted in the census figures. That means that there are probably far more Han than the census shows” (Mackerras 2005, p. 21).
- 15.
Even though there have not been precise calculations of Xinjiang and Tibet’s income inequalities, it has been generally admitted that Xinjiang’s Gini coefficient (0.49) is much higher than Tibet’s (0.28) (see, for example, Lu and Xu 2004; Liu et al. 2009). Clearly, this conforms to the fact that the spatial economic disparities in Xinjiang are larger than those in Tibet (shown in Table 5.4).
- 16.
- 17.
See Guo (2015, Chap. 2) for a detailed description.
- 18.
As shown in the last row of Table 5.4, Xinjiang’s interregional economic gap has been much larger than Tibet’s.
- 19.
- 20.
Cited from Tibet Daily, August 5, 2014. Available at http://www.guoxue.org/index.php?s=/New/see/id/5931. Accessed on 2014-9-2.
- 21.
Translated by author based on Xie (14 June 2014)—the English version is slightly shortened in length.
- 22.
Cited from Wan and Xu (16 August 2014).
- 23.
For a detailed analysis of the intermarriages of Xinjiang, see Guo (2015, Sect. 5.4.4).
- 24.
See Guo (2015, Chap. 6) for a detailed analysis of Xinjiang.
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Annex
Annex
5.1.1 A.1 Regressions for Interprovincial Export and Import, 2000 and 2010
The following four tables report the estimated results using the data shown in Annex of Chap. 4 (Tables 5.7, 5.8, 5.9, 5.10).
5.1.2 A.2 Measuring Ethnic Diversity
There are several different methods for the measurement of ethnic diversity (Guo 2009, pp. 113–118). The simplest method is derived from the number of ethnic groups: thus, the ethnic diversity of a society is positively related to the number of ethnic groups involved. However, this method ignores the influence of population composition among all ethnic groups. For example, given two societies having the same number of ethnic groups, but that in which population is equally distributed among all ethnic groups might be more ethnically diverse than one in which population is unevenly distributed among an ethnic majority and much smaller ethnic minorities. To demonstrate this point, let us consider an extreme case in which the ethnic majority accounts for almost 100 % of the total population, while each of the minorities retains a tiny share. Such a society can only be defined as an ethnically homogeneous, no matter how many minority groups exist.
The second method defines ethnic diversity in relation to the population ratio of the largest ethnic group. In many cases, the lower the ratio of the largest ethnic group, the greater the ethnic diversity it implies. However, as it only takes account of one (that is, the largest) ethnic group, this method may miscalculate the ethnic diversity when two or more large ethnic groups exist simultaneously. Although the understanding of ethnic diversity may vary according to the perspective taken, the number of ethnic groups and their populations should be taken into account simultaneously.
In this research, we use the ethnic fractionalization index, which measures the probability that two individuals who meet at random will be from different ethnic groups (Mauro 1995; Easterly and Levine 1997; La Porta et al. 1999; Bluedorn 2001; Ottaviano and Peri 2004; Alesina and Ferrara 2005; and Montalvo and Reynal-Querol 2005). Specifically, the ethno diversity measure is defined as follows:
where s i is the share of group i over the total of the population. This index represents the probability that two randomly drawn individuals from the population belong to different ethnic groups. This index reaches a theoretical maximum of 1 when every individual belongs to a different group. This measure implies that a country composed of, say, 100 equally sized groups is more fractionalized than a country with two equally sized groups.
Using Eq. (6.1) and data shown in Table 5.11, we may calculate the ethnic diversity scores for Xinjiang and Tibet, which are shown in Table 5.12 in which the diversity scores of other Chinese provinces are also given.
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Guo, R. (2016). Going Back to Tibet: Analytic Narrative. In: China’s Regional Development and Tibet. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-958-5_5
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