Regionalization and urbanization in eastern Tibet

Local societies in the Tibetan Highlands are experiencing challenging transformations, recently expressed by a new and unprecedented scope of urbanization. State-driven economic liberalization combined with large-scale infrastructural upgrading of roads, railways and telecommunication systems are fostering new processes of labour mobility, migration and social differentiation among the peasant communities and nomadic peoples of the highlands. With local subsistence economies based on animal husbandry losing ground, the collection and marketing of a natural resource, the caterpillar fungus, is contributing to booming cash incomes in local societies, at least in the Tibetan autonomous prefecture of Yushu in Qinghai province. Against this background the paper argues that the conjunction of different regionalization processes, reflecting the local appropriation of the global, is structuring the conditions of lively-hood security - and their territorial manifestations - in one of the most remote landscapes in China.