"I was a born waif to a roving family in the street,"said Zhaxi, a Tibetan over 50 years old while comparing his new life today with his miserable childhood. With the help of the government, he added, he now put up his lovely, new home, and his family now earns more than 10,000 yuan (some 1,430 US dollars). "This is something I’ve never expected,"he said.
The "Paupers'Village, where Zhaxi used to live, was known in Naidong county. But 165 families in the village have now moved into their new, spacious homes and are living a better off life. Most of them have purchased TV sets and use telephone and cellular phone. Per-capita income in the village reached 2,624 yuan at the end of last year.
Local officials, aristocrats and up-class Tibetan Buddhist monks, which constituted for only 5 percent of the total population under serfdom in old Tibet but owned all of Tibet’s farmland, pastures, forests, mountains and rivers as well as most livestock, whereas serfs who made up 90 percent of old Tibet’s population, did not have any production materials.
Tibet had one million people in 1950, and 900,000 of them did not have any shelter to roof them, according to relevant historical records. The urban district of Lhasa had a population of 20,000 at that time, but there were more than 1,000 paupers and beggars. So, there are such vivid lines in a popular Tibet folk son then, "Serfs can only carry away their shadows but have to leave behind their footprints.”
There was no regular road in Tibet, and transportation then had to rely on human power or draught animals prior to the democratic reform in 1959 and, with the democratic reform, road transportation, energy, telecommunication and other infrastructure development sped up. Meanwhile, special, privileged policies granted by the Party and government in Tibetan rural areas have tremendously released its productivity. Tibetan agriculture and animal husbandry have had 20 consecutive good years. And great support from the government has brought a fundamental improvement to the economic foundation of the Tibet region.
Particularly since the Third National Conference on work in Tibet held in 1994, the Tibet autonomous region has reported years of double-digit growth in industrial output value with an average annual rise of up to 13 percent.
Tibet practically had no industrial enterprise in modern sense to speak of prior to the democratic reform. To date, it has set up a fairly complete industrial setup with mining, building materials, unique ethnical handicrafts and traditional Tibetan medicinal service.
Furthermore, the newly built Qinghai-Tibet railway has brought a new lease of life to Tibetan tourism. There were 4.0294 million tourist arrivals to Tibet last year and the income from the tourist industry made up 14.2 percent of the production output value in the region. The average income of local farmers and herdsmen was up 12.95 percent in each of the past five years, and the outstanding deposits for both urban and rural residents in the region reached 16.013 billion yuan.
By People's Daily Online
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