At the beginning of the new millennium, the Chinese government launched the Great Opening of the West, a development strategy targeted at remote areas inhabited mainly by indigenous ethnic groups. Intended to modernize infrastructure and halt environmental degradation, its tactics in western China have resulted in the displacement of pastoral Tibetans to urban residence and sedentary livelihoods, causing massive social and economic shifts and uncertainty and eventually leading to signs of discontent in ethnically Tibetan regions.

Based on more than a decade of fieldwork, Exile from the Grasslands documents the viewpoints of both the people affected--Tibetan pastoralists in Qinghai Province--and the Chinese officials charged with relocating and settling them in newly constructed housing projects. As China's international influence expands, the welfare of its ethnic minorities and its handling of environmental issues are receiving close media scrutiny. Jarmila Ptackova's study documents a politically and ecologically significant process that is happening--unlike events in Lhasa or Xinjiang--largely outside the view of the wider world.
Exile from the Grasslands: Tibetan Herders and Chinese Development Projects, Jarmila Ptackova, University of Washington Press, Paperback, 188 pp, $30.00

Jarmila Ptackova is a researcher at the Oriental Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.

CONTENTS: Exile from the Grasslands
Foreword by Stevan Harrell	ix
Preface	xi
Acknowledgments	xiii
Note about Translation	xv
Introduction	3
CHAPTER ONE: Civilizing China's Western Peripheries	16
CHAPTER TWO: The Gift of Development in Pastoral Areas	27
CHAPTER THREE: Sedentarization in Qinghai	46
CHAPTER FOUR: Development in Zeku County	68
CHAPTER FIVE: Sedentarization of Pastoralists in Zeku County	82
CHAPTER SIX: Ambivalent Outcomes and Adaptation Strategies	109
Glossary of Chinese and Tibetan Terms	121
Notes	127
Bibliography	149
Index	163