Asian Studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne argues that the Chinese state, as part of its arsenal of responses, has intensiied urbanization, hoping that economic development and cultural contact will lead to assimilation and stability. 39

The policy is already taking effect, as seen in the growth of Tibetan cities. As of 2016, , , Lhoka, Nyingtri, Tsoshar, Siling, and were recognized as prefecture-level cities in . According to recent reports from , two more will soon join that list: Nagchu and Ngari are to be upgraded from county-level cities to prefecture-level cities.

The late Bawa Phuntsok Wangyal, a high-ranking communist cadre in Tibet, pointed out in his book that cities should be centres of China’s regional autonomous areas. Cities and towns of regional and national autonomous areas should have cultural, economic and political characteristics of people living in these areas. As a result of reforms and changes in these areas, in reality gradually these characteristics have disappeared and national and regional autonomy remains in name only. Majority of people living in these cities and town in Tibetan areas are Chinese migrants. This issue needs to be thought carefully and rectiied.40

Hukou Reform: An Inlux of Chinese Migrants in Tibet Apart from government oficials and military personnel who are transferred to Tibet, there has been a huge inlux of ethnically Chinese migrants due to highly subsidized aid and investment in infrastructural development in Tibet. Chinese migrants, many of whom are facing a lack of employment opportunities in their home regions, are attracted to jobs and opportunities to start a business in Tibet. The population transfer from China to Tibet is following the same policy implemented in China-occupied Mongolia (today’s Inner Mongolia) during the Qing Dynasty, where Mongolians were already a minority in the end of the 19th century. The agrarian focus of such policies meant that Chinese migrants settled in the countryside and they became dominant in rural as well as urban

109