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LinasDidvalis (Lithuania)
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update:July 23,2019
On the Sustainable Development of Tibet
(Lithuania) LinasDidvalis
 
Many countries around the world are facing numerous development issues while seeking to improve the welfare of their citizens, preserve the natural environment and ensure social equality while maintaining stability and peace. For the past 30 years these attempts are known as a struggle to achieve sustainable development, which consists of complicated but very important balancing of three main components: country’s economy, society and environment.

Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) is not an exception in this struggle to ensure both prosperity for the people and preservation of region’s precious environment. When we consider TAR in terms of each component of sustainable development, we can find both positive trends and things to be concerned about.

When considering economy, TAR stands out as a rapidly growing region due to expanding production industries and service sector, such as tourism. This gives TAR an opportunity to improve the standards of living for its people and develop such areas as education, health care or infrastructure. While these are arguably positive trends, uncontrolled economic development creates risks for unequal distribution of wealth, social stratification and other issues that are visible in many countries around the world that went through rapid economic transformations. In addition, economic growth creates changes in people’s lifestyles, customs and values that may lead to disappearance of traditional culture and history that was preserved for centuries. This would be a sad loss for the whole humanity.

When considering environment, it is well known that the Tibetan Plateau is of high importance to millions of people due to the fact the TAR ecosystem is connected through rivers and nutrient flow to large territories downstream. Therefore, environmental degradation in TAR, such as diminishing glacers because of climate change, desertification of productive land or extinction of species would create negative impact not only to China, but also to neighboring countries. The positive trend is that China is expressing its eagerness to deal with environmental issues. On the grand scale, the concept of “ecological civilization” can be mentioned as it was presented in the recent years by the current president Xi Jinping. On a smaller scale, there are numerous activities taken by the government or initiated by local communities to reduce the level of pollution, to replant forests, to preserve biodiversity, etc. All this gives hope that environment will not suffer due to human activities and environmental protection will become the main guiding principle to evaluate development policies.

Sustainable development is a useful concept to approach the diversity of issues that all countries encounter in their paths of development. I would like to keep thinking about it while participating in the 2019 China Tibet Development Forum and believe that the event will provide excellent opportunity for me to extend my knowledge, share my insights with other participants and gather more information on how development is proceeding in TAR. As a professor at a university, I teach numerous courses that discuss development issues in East Asia, including China. Until now, I have been relying on information provided by other researchers or national reports, because I never had a chance to spend time in TAR myself. Therefore, I am sure that the 2019 China Tibet Development Forum will be a valuable experience that will allow me to grow as a specialist in the fields of East Asia, China and development studies.

LinasDidvalis, Lithuania
Chief Coordinator at the Centre for Asian
Studies, and Assistant Professor at the Department
of Cultural Studies in Faculty of Humanities
of Vytautas Magnus University
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