In the wild and isolated Diqing region of China's Yunnan province, the lives of ethnic Tibetan mountain farmers are pretty much the same as they have been for centuries.

But now the region is coming face-to-face with China's economic juggernaut.

Tibet is normally out of bounds for foreign correspondents in China - if reporters are allowed in, they are accompanied at all times by a government minder.

That is also true of other ethnic Tibetan areas beyond what is officially called the Tibetan Autonomous Region.

But for tonight's Foreign Correspondent, a team from the ABC's Beijing bureau gained extensive access to Tibetan Yunnan.

Pigs, chickens, corn and barley have been the key to a subsistence life in the region which goes on for the most part without any cash.

Since ancient times this has been the gateway to the upper reaches of the Tibetan Plateau.

Tibetans from here have long interacted with other ethnic groups like the Naxi and Lisu, yet until recently, China's economic miracle had barely touched what remains a mysterious, beautiful and quite poor place.

Huge money is being thrown into the development of transport infrastructure. With highways and airports, the tourists come.

Australian National University lecturer Ben Hillman has spent years studying Diqing.

"From the mid-1990s where there would have been visitors and numbers of arrivals in the tens of thousands, now in 2011 we're talking about millions," he said.

Sorry, this audio has expired Ethnic Tibetan areas face China's economic juggernaut ( Stephen McDonell )

Dr Hillman has developed a unique experiment to catapult young Tibetans out of poverty, and he is in search of recruits.

While doing his PhD he realised locals were by and large being left out of the mini-boom here which tourism has created - not because Han Chinese employers do not like them, but because Tibetans who drop out of high school simply lack the training they need to get work.

"What's most important to local business people and certainly the business people that I talk to regularly is that they find the people with the skills that they need and, if they can't find these skills in the local labour market, then they will hire people from other areas," he said.

"I think there was a real danger, and a danger that still exists, that local ethnic groups become marginalised in their own economy unless they can learn the skills to participate in the emerging tourism industry and in the changing economy."

Local tensions

Dr Hillman's answer has been to set up the Eastern Tibet Training Institute, a school which runs four-month intensive courses.

Because it is funded by international donors, it is free for the Tibetan students who are chosen from the most disadvantaged areas.

Dr Hillman says this type of training could possibly take some of the heat out of the most tense parts of the wider Tibetan region which have seen violent conflict over recent years.

"One of the key reasons for the tensions - especially in urban areas where we've seen in recent years a lot of violence, a lot of demonstrations - has been this sudden economic change," he said.

"There are a lot of new jobs in construction, in services which are attracting migrants from other parts of China, and these jobs often pay high wages.

"So Tibetans - especially young men - are looking for work and they see people who are often not from that area who they might think don't belong there are getting these jobs and who are making more money.

"I think that that is certainly one of the factors that's driving the social tensions in Tibetan areas."

As for Dr Hillman's training school, the proof of the pudding is in the jobs. He says 95 per cent of graduates are getting work, in many cases providing their families with the first regular source of money that they have ever had.

You can see more of this story on Foreign Correspondent here.