The Japanese may be obsessed with cowboy movies, but the Chinese have their own Wild West. Qinghai Province—located in Western China on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau—is known as one of the poorest, most rugged, and least hospitable of the Chinese provinces and it is where we will be concentrating our efforts this summer.

Nomads herd yaks across high-altitude pastures, photo: Scot Frank.

Across much of Qinghai, the air is well endowed with the fine soil particles that the howling wind lifts so easily off the mountainsides. In the winter, the land is a watercolor of frosted blue and orange. Bitterly cold and dry, there is little snow to cover the frozen patches of high-altitude grass and iron-rich soil that crunch beneath human feet and crackle in the wake of the horse and yak herds. In the summers, the earth is pure gold. The land is covered with a bright yellow carpet of canola flowers interrupted only by the naked red mountains forcing their way into the sky.

Qinghai’s inhospitable terrain, its occasional ethnic conflicts, and its low rates of literacy and industry have led many Chinese to label it the ‘wild west’ where only the intrepid will venture.

Friendship and Conflict in Diversity

Always a land of diversity, modern Qinghai is home to the Zangzu, Hui, Salar, Monguor, and Han. These diverse ethnic groups have lived together and depended on one another for decades. Although there are conflicts from time to time, in the villages, we often find ourselves singing and telling stories around the hearth with people from all these groups, present as equal members of their community.

Traditional Pumi Song (video), recording: Plateau Music Project

Yet, media continues to publicize Qinghai as a violent land of ethnic conflict and governments still maintain a wary eye. Past development work has often focused on improving living standards for a single ethnic group alone, exacerbating this tense climate.

Does Education Yield Progress or Disparity?

Although UNESCO has recognized the government’s admirable efforts to increase literacy, Qinghai’s literacy rate remains one of the lowest in China due to the linguistic diversity of its population and its mountainous geography. Finding teachers that speak all of Qinghai’s major languages is a rarity and it is much more common for schools to give instruction in Mandarin only. This puts children from the other language groups at a disadvantage and often deters them from further study.

Nomadic winter school in Qinghai Province, photo: Scot Frank

The rural mountain populations are also highly dispersed, meaning that children often travel long distances to attend school. Some families cannot afford to have their children take so much time out of household chores and so keep them out of school. Others decide to board their children (very expensive). Because the education is only in Mandarin, these children forget how to speak their native tongue and cannot communicate with their families when they return. While learning book knowledge, these children forget knowledge relevant to rural life such as how to herd, farm, and do important household chores. When other villagers see this, they are afraid to send their children to school. Thus, education—although a potentially powerful tool for increasing living standards—often contributes to a sense of inferiority and disparity among Qinghai’s rural population.

Industry

Unlike much of eastern China, Qinghai is not an industrial powerhouse. Its cash economy instead depends on mineral extracts: petroleum, natural gas, coal, and nonferrous metals (e.g. gold). Most of its inhabitants are small-scale farmers or nomads who contract out as miners during the summer to earn what is often their family’s only cash income.

Coal shovelers, photo: Scot Frank

Qinghai is only slowly tamed by the tremendous global forces of industrialization and urbanization. For the time being, it remains the ‘Wild Wild West’ and little confidence is placed in its people’s ability to innovate their way into the future in peace and with dignity. By offering people a way to channel their energies into improving local living standards through applied science and engineering, we hope that our work can build friendship and peace while improving the well-being of humans and nature.

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank (OED website; OED facebook page; Twitter @OneEarthDesigns). Catlin will post on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find her on Twitter @catlinpowers.

Crowds exit Beijing’s Temple of Heaven, photo: Shreyans Bhansali

The 25 hour train ride from Beijing to Xining (W. China) is a welcome reprieve from the hot, hustle and bustle of China’s capital city. It is not like the next leg of the train, the additional day-long ride to Lhasa with its shimmering trails of altitude sickness tracing the way to the bathrooms. Nor is it like the 70 hour bus route from Leh (the northernmost city in India) to Kathmandu (the capital of Nepal) where your tires freeze into the glacial ice and you spend hours breaking them out only to repeat the process a few hundred meters down the road.

So much of traveling is taken up by transportation. It is during these times that one sees the raw veins of nations: the flow of people and the flow of goods, the places that are connected and those that are notably left unconnected. The symbolism of this particular train, which connects Beijing to Lhasa, brings me to ponder the history of transportation and the potential of well-done development to replace transportation systems as a more benevolent tool for governments to meet their agendas.

Qinghai-Tibet Railway, photo: Reurinkjan.

Historically, transportation has enjoyed a powerful role as a tool either to unite populations or to divide and conquer them. Railways united continents but were also used to overthrow Native American nations in the United States. Roads and automobiles made transportation available to the masses, but have also been used to control the flow of goods and cash during regional conflicts like the Ghorka uprisings (1980’s, 2008) in India. Finally, the airplane has increased global awareness and cross-cultural friendships while also enabling large-scale bombings.

Perhaps the largest impact of increased transportation has been the migration of people to form ‘melting pots’ which governments often leverage to their own benefit. Putting one ethnic group in charge of a region where a different ethnic group comprises the majority ensures that these groups fight amongst each other rather than uniting against central powers.

Governments use these political and transportation-based tactics because they, along with the people they govern, want to build strong, healthy nations that can grow and thrive peacefully. Rebellions, however, arise when people feel that their basic living standards are not met by their governments, the very same feeling of neglect that has arisen from divide and conquer tactics. Building strong, healthy nations, thus, might be more efficiently accomplished by both governments and citizens turning their efforts towards sustainable development as a method of improving living standards.

In Beijing, we met with many people working towards improving the living standards of the Chinese people. Dr. Gwen Zahner, a professor of epidemiology at Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, is working relentlessly to increase rural access to books and health education. Dr. Yang Xudong at Tsinghua University has dedicated himself to improving rural energy and Brendan Acord at AES is working to expand China’s large-scale renewable energy capacity.

The journey from Beijing to Xining has given us time to reflect on these inspiring individuals and on the role of development in peace building. Now in the western Chinese province of Qinghai, the ‘we’ of former posts has expanded to the we that incorporates our local staff and the villagers with whom we work. Thus, we hope that, through our work to improve living standards, we can contribute to peace both between people and their governments and between people and the environment.

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank (OED website; OED facebook page; Twitter @OneEarthDesigns). Catlin will post on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find her on Twitter @catlinpowers.