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INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGN FOR TIBET
Former Director of the State Ethnic
Affairs Commission, Li Dezhu
Li Dezhu led the State Ethnic Affairs Commission (SEAC)
from 1998 to 2007, and had served as Deputy Director since
the early 1990s as well as being a Deputy Director of the
United Front Work Department (UFWD) (see below). Ethnically
Korean, Li provided much of the background theory
and advice on the PRC’s minority peoples including
Tibetans and Uyghurs in order to guide implementation of
the Western Development Strategy (WDS), a massive centrally
planned economic strategy with political objectives
critical to the leadership’s plan for China’s rise. 19
Former Director of the
SEAC, Li Dezhu
The purported aim of the WDS, initiated in 2000, is to
accelerate economic development in the PRC’s impoverished
western regions — where most of the country’s non-Chinese peoples live — to
levels comparable with China’s wealthier eastern seaboard. However, so far at least,
projects being carried out under the rubric of the WDS appear to be aimed at drawing
on the western region’s natural resources for the benefit of distant markets in eastern
China, as well as consolidating political control over the PRC’s vast western
regions, which include all of Tibet. China’s continued economic growth is highly
dependent upon fully utilizing the mineral deposits in China’s western regions, everything
from the vast reserves of oil, gas, gold and copper through to the increasingly precious
water resources found primarily on the Tibetan plateau.
The WDS has also been one of the primary motivating factors for increased migration
into Tibet and elsewhere in the western regions of the PRC by many of China’s hundreds
of millions of migrant workers. Li Dezhu was one of the main champions of
migration to Tibet, what he described in 2000 as a “two-way population flow”; and
predicted a large flow of “talent” to head west in search of opportunities arising from
the enormous investments there. In 2001, China’s national legislature even amended
the Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law (REAL) — a major piece of legislation which
defines the legal terms and conditions of “autonomy” in Tibet — to encourage local
authorities to offer “preferential treatment and encouragement” to “specialized personnel
joining in the various kinds of construction” in Tibet and elsewhere. 20
However, Li Dezhu also warned of the potential for “conflicts and clashes” between
local ethnic peoples and Chinese migrants as a result of the WDS, according to an
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