(TibetanReview.net, May23’24) — China will strive to establish the world’s largest national park system by 2035, reported the official Xinhua news agency May 22. However, 70% of the candidate areas for achieving this goal are on the Tibetan Plateau, raising serious concerns about the plan’s brutal implications for Tibetan farmers and nomads who are bound to be forced to relocate from their ancestral land.
The report said that in 2021, China established its first batch of national parks, spanning a protected land area of 230,000 square km. These included the Sanjiangyuan National Park, the Giant Panda National Park, the NCTLNP, Hainan Tropical Rainforest National Park and Wuyishan National Park.
Of them, the Sanjiangyuan National Park in Qinghai Province is fully within a Tibetan populated territory. Besides, a significant portion of the Giant Panda National Park is located in the historically Tibetan populated regions in Sichuan and Gansu provinces. These have entailed large-scale forced relocation and impoverishment of Tibetan farmers and nomads.
And now, in order to achieve its 2035 goal, China has designated 49 candidate areas, covering around 1.1 million square km, as national park space, the report said, citing a spatial layout plan made public in 2022.
Notably, the Tibetan Plateau, which is the highest plateau in the world, has 13 candidate areas. They cover an area of about 770,000 square km and account for 70% of the total area of national park candidate areas, the report said.
One of these candidate areas is the Qiangtang Nature Reserve in Nagchu City, northern Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). A section of the relocation of Tibetans from this area to southern TAR has been covered recently by China’s official media.