(TibetanReview.net, Mar04’22) – A three-person township in Tibet near India’s border state of Arunachal Pradesh is now home to over 200 people and it oversees two villages, reported China’s official Xinhua news agency Mar 4 as a deputy representing it arrived in Beijing for the country’s annual “two sessions” which start on Mar 4.
The “two sessions” refer to China’s rubber stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), and its so-called political advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, which is a central part of the United Front system of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
To make a point of underlining the importance of its focus on this border area, called Yumai (Tibetan: Yulmey), China got Zhoigar (Dolkar) “elected” as a deputy to the NPC in 2018.
Zhoigar, now 60, her younger sister Yangzom and their father were stated to be the only residents of Yumai, a “township” of 1,976 sq km, until 1996, with the father serving as the township head. With the building of a new road, the township’s residents previously grew only slightly, to 20 in 1999 and 30 in 2009.
Upon arriving in Beijing in 2018, Zhoigar had greeted Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, at the Great Hall of the People.
“When the deputy next to me told the general secretary that I was from Yumai, he asked if I was Zhoigar,” she was stated to have recalled. Zhoigar responded with “Tashi Delek,” the Tibetan greeting for good luck and best wishes, the report said.
Xi supposedly remembered her because she and her sister had received a letter of praise from him in response to what the two had written to him in Oct 2017, when the CPC was holding its 19th National Congress, about their family of three’s patriotic efforts to protect the nation’s border.
Now Zhoigar, herself a former head of Yumai Township (1988-2011), has arrived in Beijing to take part in this year’s annual NPC session.
Being instilled with the attitude that “protecting the land beneath your feet is to protect your country,” Zhoigar was stated to have braved wind and snow, and persisted in her career. And so, in 2021, she was awarded the Jul 1 Medal — the highest honor in the CPC, the report said.
As a result of the blueprint Zhoigar presented at the 2018 session, Yumai is now a bustling township of two villages and 200 residents, with her eldest daughter having returned after university graduation to devote herself to rural vitalization and her nephew having become a local civil servant, the report said.
More and more young people were stated to be returning home to pursue their career on the snowy Tibetan Plateau.
Zhoigar has said that at the upcoming NPC session, she would make suggestions about subsidies for border people, road construction and tourism development, which is exactly the Chinese government’s policy, as was the case when she supposedly presented the blueprint for building the new villages in 2018.
Yumai township in Lhünzê County of Shannan (Lhokha) City is on the bank of Yulmey Chu or river, a tributary of the Subansiri River, which it joins near Tibet’s border with India’s Arunachal Pradesh. It is in the western section of the holy ground Tsari, which is centred at the Dakpa Sheri mountain.
Villagers now take turns patrolling the border, China’s official chinadailyhk.com earlier reported Aug 16, 2021.