LHASA, Tibet — A thousand miles separate this Tibetan city from the Chinese village where Fan Zhangbing was born. But you wouldn't know it during a stroll through his neighborhood.
There are restaurants where Fan eats the spicy food of his native Sichuan province, and shops where he and the owners bargain in Sichuan-accented Chinese. He hangs out in bars frequented by other Chinese settlers and sings to karaoke machines blaring the latest Chinese pop tunes.
When he wants company, Fan can look up one of his four siblings, who also live in Lhasa, or any of the 200 others from his hometown who have climbed to the roof of the world and established their own little enclave.
In fact, perhaps the most noticeable thing about Fan's neighborhood in this ancient Tibetan capital is that there's hardly anything Tibetan about it. "The Chinese and the Tibetans keep to themselves," said Fan, 27, a cabdriver struggling to make ends meet.
Fan and his fellow villagers are among tens of thousands of Chinese residents who have migrated here during the past 40 years, exacerbating tensions between Tibetans and the Beijing regime.
Like Fan, most come in search of greater economic opportunity, squeezed out of their native towns by a grim combination of too many people and too few jobs. But such settlers also lie at the center of a heated international debate resounding from Lhasa to Hollywood to Washington.
Are these migrants agents of a plan by Beijing to swamp and destroy indigenous Tibetan culture, as critics contend? Or are they welcome bearers of much-needed economic development to what remains a desperately poor region, as the Chinese government insists?
Such questions erupted noisily in June when the World Bank approved a $160-million loan, over U.S. objections, that included money to help move mostly Chinese farmers onto land in Qinghai province, which borders present-day Tibet. Opponents charged that the resettlement would dilute the local Tibetan population, contributing to the "cultural genocide" that activists warn is already taking place in Tibet.
"The very survival of Tibetans as a distinct people is under constant threat," the exiled Dalai Lama, the Tibetans' spiritual and temporal leader, declared in an interview published two years ago.
Beyond headlines, however, the realities are more complicated, made up of many interwoven strands like the colorful rugs hawked by vendors throughout Lhasa's old Tibetan quarter.
