Geography Reference
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of macro-level national policy? Acknowledging that large-scale, government-sponsored
human migration is much more easily accepted in China than in the West, even China
had not yet engaged in population transfers in which the migrants were tasked not only
with changing their home but also with changing their fundamental lifestyle and culture.
Was this a realistic proposition?
Thus, as pastoralists entered the twenty-first century, they encountered rival programs,
some of which encouraged household responsibility via settling down into permanent
houses and investing in long-term improvements such as winter fodder and fencing, while
others weakened certainty over property rights by forcing herders off their traditional
lands entirely (and subsidizing their hoped-for transition to settled life in towns). Grazing
contracts under the 1985 Grassland Law have continually been lengthened in an attempt
to bolster confidence and security in land tenure (as of 2004, the term of most contracts
was fifty years), but one can sympathize with the uncertainty a pastoralist must feel
when, encouraged by one policy to invest and sacrifice on the basis of long-term benefit,
he sees a neighbor torn from his land and resettled in a town, his livelihood and lifestyle
unceremoniously altered by government fiat. Both programs may be intended to protect
grasslands from overuse and to bring some modernity to pastoralists, but the arrows of
the underlying incentive systems point in opposite directions, and thus the programs tend
to undercut each other. By 2006, one did not need be a foreigner to feel confused about
the future trajectory of China's western grasslands. Uncertainty ruled the day.
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