27 JAN 2026 (TUE) 15:35 - 16:05

Governance through Urbanisation and Resettlement: Poverty-Alleviation Resettlement and the State Project of Urban Civilisation in Lhasa, Tibet  

Mr LIU Langjie    

( Supervisor: Prof Junxi Qian )

Abstract:

As a key component of the “poverty alleviation” strategy within the Tibet Autonomous Region’s 13th Five-Year Plan, between 2016 and 2020, 28,900 Tibetan farmers and herders identified as “impoverished households” were relocated to Lhasa. To facilitate the integration of these migrants into urban environments, the urban state invested nearly 1.5 billion yuan in developing 44 resettlement communities, with comprehensive support measures made for schooling, vocational training and employment opportunities. Two dynamics interwove in this vigorous poverty-alleviation resettlement project: while the state orchestrates relocation and civilisation to enhance governance over ethnic frontier regions through the urbanising initiatives, Tibetan settlers tactically negotiate with the state and market under an asymmetrical power structure to coordinate the state directive with their ethnic identity, socio-cultural life and economic interests, thereby generating new special urban lifestyle. 

In this context, the project will undertake a comprehensive examination of relevant government agencies, communities, and enterprises across dimensions of state, space, and society, developing research around following questions: (1) How does the state govern the resettlement and civilisation through specific political manoeuvres and market tools, and how does this interaction, in turn, affect the processes of urbanisation and state-building? (2) How does the resettlement shape and is shaped by Lhasa’s urban landscape and linkages between urbanised zones and rural hinterlands? How is the tension among policy directives, planning initiatives, and grassroots spatial practices manifested in Tibetan settlers’ mobility patterns? (3) In what ways do resettled Tibetans negotiate ethnic, cultural, and economic life vis-à-vis state and market forces in the process of resettlement and urban integration? A wide array of methods will be employed to address these inquiries, including archival research, multi-sited ethnography, qualitative GIS, and textual analysis. 

This project is expected to contribute at both theoretical and empirical level. Theoretically, the project situates China’s poverty-alleviation resettlement in the vision of frontier urban study paradigms including ordinary city concept and Global South urbanisms, rethinking the resettlement through the lens of the contextuality, situatedness and heterogeneity of urban dynamics, thus offering insights into fields like statecraft and governance, urban-rural dynamics, land development, and everyday urbanism. Empirically, it adds novel materials to China’s peripheral resettlement/urbanisation corpuses, filling gaps in the intersection between state-directed urban transformation and migration dynamics.