![\"A](\"https:\/\/tibetnature.net\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/12NOMADS-articleLarge.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nA nomad in the Xinjiang region. China wants nomads settled to preserve grasslands.
GILLES SABRIE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
But Gere, who like many Tibetans uses a single name, is filled with regret. Like hundreds of thousands of pastoralists across China who have been relocated into bleak townships over the past decade, he is jobless, deeply indebted and dependent on shrinking government subsidies to buy the milk, meat and wool he once obtained from his flocks.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t go hungry, but we have lost the life that our ancestors practiced for thousands of years,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u00a0In what amounts to one of the most ambitious attempts made at social engineering, the Chinese government is in the final stages of a 15-year-old campaign to settle the millions of pastoralists who once roamed China\u2019s vast borderlands. By year\u2019s end, Beijing claims it will have moved the remaining 1.2 million herders into towns that provide access to schools, electricity and modern health care.<\/p>\n
Official news accounts of the relocation rapturously depict former nomads as grateful for salvation from primitive lives. \u201cIn merely five years, herders in Qinghai who for generations roved in search of water and grass, have transcended a millennium\u2019s distance and taken enormous strides toward modernity,\u201d said a front-page article in the state-run Farmers\u2019 Daily. \u201cThe Communist Party\u2019s preferential policies for herders are like the warm spring breeze that brightens the grassland in green and reaches into the herders\u2019 hearts.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the policies, based partly on the official view that grazing harms grasslands, are increasingly contentious. Ecologists in China and abroad say the scientific foundations of nomad resettlement are dubious. Anthropologists who have studied government-built relocation centers have documented chronic unemployment, alcoholism and the fraying of millenniums-old traditions.<\/p>\n
Chinese economists, citing a yawning income gap between the booming eastern provinces and impoverished far west, say government planners have yet to achieve their stated goal of boosting incomes among former pastoralists.<\/p>\n
The government has spent $3.45 billion on the most recent relocation, but most of the newly settled nomads have not fared well. Residents of cities like Beijing and Shanghai on average earn twice as much as counterparts in Tibet and Xinjiang, the western expanse that abuts Central Asia. Government figures show that the disparities have widened in recent years.<\/p>\n
Rights advocates say the relocations are often accomplished through coercion, leaving former nomads adrift in grim, isolated hamlets. In Inner Mongolia and Tibet, protests by displaced herders occur almost weekly, prompting increasingly harsh crackdowns by security forces.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe idea that herders destroy the grasslands is just an excuse to displace people that the Chinese government thinks have a backward way of life,\u201d said Enghebatu Togochog, the director of the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center, based in New York. \u201cThey promise good jobs and nice houses, but only later do the herders discover these things are untrue.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Xilinhot, a coal-rich swath of Inner Mongolia, resettled nomads, many illiterate, say they were deceived into signing contracts they barely understood. Among them is Tsokhochir, 63, whose wife and three daughters were among the first 100 families to move into Xin Kang village, a collection of forlorn brick houses in the shadow of two power plants and a belching steel factory that blankets them in soot.<\/p>\n