Ethnic wealth gap feeds Tibet discontent

By Lindsay Beck

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's leaders have long feared the impact of the country's yawning wealth gap on social stability. When protests in Tibet, its poorest region, flared into riots, their nightmare looked very real.

The March 14 riot in Lhasa, the capital of the region Communist troops entered in 1950, was over issues of autonomy and ethnic identity, not the price of bread.

But analysts say the two are intertwined as Tibetans feel marginalized by a Beijing-led development drive that Tibet scholar Andrew Fischer calls "ethnically exclusionary".

"They're pouring in an enormous amount of subsidies so it's no surprise that they're creating growth," said Fischer, a development economist at the London School of Economics.

"It's just that this massive amount of economic growth and wealth is creating a huge gap and a very strong ethnic bias in the development in the sense that it privileges those with Chinese fluency or Chinese connections," he said.

The economy of Tibet, a remote region of mountains and grasslands dubbed the "roof of the world", has been growing at more than 12 percent annually over the past five years.

But the urban-rural wealth gap, already a worry across China is even more pronounced in Tibet.

Inflation, at 11-year highs in China, is also most acute in the country's low income regions, economists say.