Pastoralism and Rangeland Management on the Tibetan Plateau in ...

5.3 Socio-economic Changes in Pastoral
Systems on the Tibetan Plateau
Long Rui Jun, Liu Xingyuan, Cui Guangxin <strong>and</strong>
Zhang Weimin 54
Abstract
The Tibetan Plateau covers 1.22 million km2, 68.1 % of which is covered by
natural rangel<strong>and</strong>s. This makes it one of the five largest pastoral areas in China.
The livestock sector plays the key role in maintaining herders’ livelihoods in
the vast Tibetan Plateau, as no other agricultural activities can be supported at
such high elevations – over 4,000 m. This therefore leads to the existence of a
less complex socio-economic situation in the remote alpine pastoral system as
compared to the cropping-livestock integrated farming systems in the lowl<strong>and</strong>
areas of Central China.
There have been three changes in the socio-economic situation that can be
categorized into distinct phases: Phase-I from 1959 to1969, Phase-II from 1965
to 1984 <strong>and</strong> Phase-III from 1984 to the present. Social institutional changes
occurred mainly between 1951 <strong>and</strong> 1984, including the shift from the feudal 55
serfdom system to a democratic system in 1959, <strong>and</strong> the shift from the People‘s
Commune System to the Household Contract Responsibility System in 1984.
These adjustments resulted in great changes in the context of livestock <strong>and</strong>
human population, culture <strong>and</strong> education, <strong>and</strong> herders’ lifestyles <strong>and</strong> living
st<strong>and</strong>ards.
With these social changes, the economic situation also changed dramatically in
Tibet. This can be reflected by changes in the composition of the GDP in terms
of the primary, secondary <strong>and</strong> tertiary industries in different periods. In 1959,
the GDP from the primary industry (73.6 %) formed the main component of the
total GDP of Tibet, which means that Tibet was a typical pastoral-agricultural
society before 1959. Afterward, this proportion declined significantly. At the
same time, the other industries increased greatly. By 2008, the percentage of
the GDP contributed by the livestock-framing sector was only 15.3 %, but the
tertiary (service) industry accounted for 55.0 % of the TAR’s GDP.
54 All authors are affiliated with the International Centre for Tibetan Plateau Ecosystem
<strong>Management</strong>, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu Province, PR China.
55 The feudal upper class refers to aristocrats, government officials <strong>and</strong> upper class monks
before the democratic reform in 1959.
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