March 19, 2025
Executive Summary
China’s strategy for Tibet through 2049 reveals a comprehensive, multi-faceted approach aimed at assimilation of Tibet into the Chinese nation-state, a major shift from the framework of nominal autonomy which allowed for some protections in preservation of language and culture.
Young Chinese and Tibetans are compelled to learn a simplified caricature of China’s history that portrays Tibet as part of China since ‘ancient times’. As part of a long-term strategy to urbanise most Tibetans, reducing them to merely one of many ethnic groups mingling in municipalities where no nationality retains special rights, Tibetans face displacement and resettlement into frontier villages and concrete apartment blocks. The Tibetan landscape, now a premier destination for high-end tourism and an escape from urban pressures for young Chinese, presents a jarring juxtaposition of designer shopping malls alongside the omnipresent apparatus of total surveillance and securitisation.
This policy brief analyses China’s policies in Tibet, which involve as aspects of a coherent plan the ruthless suppression of even moderate criticism of Party policy; the imposition of a ‘Sinicisation’ campaign in education and mainstreaming of Chinese language; infrastructure construction on a massive scale for dual civilian-military use; dramatic expansion in tourism which will increase with the completion of the Chengdu-Lhasa railway; mass removal of Tibetan rural population from their land including the displacement of pastoralists from areas designated as national parks; border village construction and resettlement; big data centres; extraction of minerals including important reserves of lithium and copper; construction of hydro dams in some of the most seismically unstable areas of the planet risking dangerous consequences downstream.
While there may be regional variations in implementation, policies from education reform to urbanisation work toward China’s milestone years of 2035 (‘socialist modernisation’) and 2049 (‘great modern socialist country’).
Key Findings:
- Xi Jinping has placed national security above all other objectives, and Tibet is of high strategic significance to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for factors including its important border areas, water, mineral and natural resources.
- China employs a suite of interconnected strategies including education reform, rural depopulation, tourism development, resource extraction, and urbanisation to achieve its strategic goals in Tibet.
- By 2035, Tibet is targeted to be fully integrated as a resource provider and tourism destination.
- By 2049, projections indicate most Tibetans will be urbanised with diminished cultural identity.
- China aims to transform Tibet from a ‘cost centre’ to a ‘profit centre’ while solving the ‘Tibetan problem’ through identity reconstruction.
