Tibetan identity runs deep even as China keeps tabs

By John Ruwitch

KANGDING, China (Reuters) - As Qingcuo Duoji and his friends lounge on a football pitch smoking, little beyond their crimson cheeks and high noses mark them out as Tibetan.

The youth banter in the Mandarin twang distinctive to Sichuan province in southwest China. Their clothes are no different from those worn by Han Chinese kids in this area where Tibetan and Chinese populations overlap.

"Enter a village, follow its customs," Qingcuo Duoji, 25, says, using the Chinese equivalent of: "When in Rome, do as the Romans".

The biggest protests by Tibetans in almost two decades turned violent in the historical heart of Tibetan culture, Lhasa, earlier this month and spread to other areas. The government has flooded the region with troops and suppressed spreading unrest.

There have been no protests in Kangding, a trade outpost turned tourism hub where the Himalayan highlands and the Chinese plains meet. Yet the recent anti-Chinese unrest elsewhere has exposed rifts that could set Qingcuo Duoji and his friends apart from their Han Chinese mates for a long time to come.

Tibetans and Chinese, particularly from the Han ethnic group which accounts for 90 percent of the population, have mingled here for centuries, but ethnic Tibetan identity still runs deep.

For most, that means a desire to preserve distinct linguistic and religious traditions that some fear are being diluted through government policy and assimilation.

Qingcuo Duoji grew up tending yaks and horses, like many of the 5 million or so ethnic Tibetans in China who live as high-altitude herders.

From the time he was small, however, he wanted more.

"It's very simple. The living conditions are bad, the roads are bad. Everybody wants something better," he said.

He said he studied hard and went to college near the provincial capital of Chengdu where for the first time in his life he was a minority. He and his ethnic Tibetan classmates got together when they could to sing Tibetan songs and dance.

"We couldn't sacrifice our culture. It's in our hearts no matter where we go and that won't change," he said.

TIBETAN ROOTS

Nearby, in a one-storey house, a Tibetan woman who declined to divulge her name, sat by a burning stove. Her three-year-old son, like all children in the area, is taught Chinese in a school on the outskirts of Kangding.

But his mother has no worries about him losing touch with his roots. "It wouldn't happen," she said, laughing at the question.