Source: Xinhua

04-21-2008 16:08

By Ashis Chakrabarti, The Telegraph, India

"Go tell the world that we want investment to come and we offer them all facilities. Our party will do everything for development." Familiar stuff for someone from Buddhiadeb Bhattacharjee's Bengal.

The scene is in the remote corner of eastern Tibet, some 400 km from Lhasa. For hundreds of centuries, Nyingchi has lived in its splendid isolation, its earth watered by Yarlung Zangbu-Tibet's largest river, which becomes the Brahmaputra when it flows into India-and surrounded by three ranges of snow-capped mountains, the highest of the peaks rising to 7,780 meters. But all that matters now for its people is development-and that at a great speed.

Baimalang Jie, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party's unit in the Nyingchi prefecture, said that to his comrades at the party meeting. The picturesque town has a few billboards put up for the party meeting, but only the development agenda rings loud and clear.

"We want the party cadre as well as the people to be rich," he says. Even for this far corner of China, Deng Xiaoping's dictum-"to get rich is glorious"-has captured the party's-and the people's-imagination.

And to get rich quickly, the prefecture government and the party are following policies that are not very different from what Bhattacharjee has been trying in Calcutta.

In 2003, the local government adopted two new policies to develop the prefecture's economy. It opened up the place to foreign investment and to private investment.

But Nyingchi's development drive had begun earlier, prompted by the guidelines of the Chinese Community Party's third working group on Tibet in 1994. "Today, we have the highest per capita income among the six prefectures in Tibet. Our GDP growth last year was 17 percent," Jie smiles.

And for an area where transportation has meant horse-rides and walks across mountains for centuries, it now has 3,276 km of asphalted road. That has made it possible for Nyingchi to make 73 million yuan from tourism.

The party's development message seems to have been taken seriously by comrades even in villages, where private enterprises and making money set the political rules.

Gongzhong on the outskirts of Nyingchi town has thus become a model village. All its 21 households have telephones, which they put to all kinds of commercial use.

And the success story of the village has reached far and wide. The result is that most of the tourists who came here make it a point to visit the village. And last year, the village raised 80,000 yuan from the tickets for tourists.

 

Editor:Liu Fang