| Ten years after the adoption of the strategy of China's large-scale western region development, the Tibetan economy has kept growing above 10 percent for 10 years. Farmers and herders' incomes have grown at a double-digit rate for seven years.
Tibetan ecology and traditional culture is meanwhile being well protected, greatly pushing forward rapid economic and social development.
In the past 10 years, the Central Government has increasingly input finance and materials into infrastructure construction in Tibet, greatly improving transportation and energy facilities. Statistics show that from 1999 to 2009, fixed asset investment in Tibet increased from 5.6 billion yuan to 37 billion yuan, up more than six times. The Central Government has implemented a series of key projects to improve people's living standard. In 2007, the state invested 70 billion yuan in 180 key projects in Tibet. By the end of 2009, 100 projects had been completed and were put into use.
Tibet has now raised eight time the fee levels for the policy of the government paying for students' food, housing and tuition, which aims to help impoverished middle and primary school students in backward agricultural areas with education. Now, the annual per-capita allocation for students covering these areas has reached 1,800 yuan, benefiting 270,000. In terms of housing, health care and other matters closely connected to people's lives, Tibet's residents, especially the farmers and herders who account for the majority, are widely enjoying the tangible benefits of "free of charge " services.
Since 2006, the regional government has been working hard to improve farmers and herders' house conditions. In this project, the government offers every household a subsidy of 10,000 yuan or marginally more. By the end of 2009, some 23,000 households involving 1.2 million herdsmen had moved into comfortable new houses. By 2020, the local government plans to move the remaining 40,000 households living in poor conditions into new homes, so all residents previously in poor housing conditions will be placed in new houses.
In the past 10 years of the western development process, living conditions for all Tibetan ethnic groups have improved.
Farmers and herders' per-capita net income has increased from 1,258 yuan in 1999 to 3,589 yuan by 2009; urban residents' per-capita income rose from 5,998 yuan in 1999 to 13,544 yuan in 2009.
In recent years, with the operation of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, a processing industry of special farm and husbandry products, tourism, the Tibetan medicine industry and a green food industry on the plateau among other development has risen swiftly, becoming the backbone of the rapid and sound development of Tibetan economy. In 2009, Tibet received 5.56 million visits from home and abroad, with a profit of 5.24 billion yuan, twice the amount of 2008. |
